Most companies make people work through layers of help before they reach anyone who can fix the problem, so those with the hardest problems try the hardest. Job Thomas, Automattic’s interim Chief Customer Experience Officer, says AI didn’t create that pattern, it made it easier to see, and that a deflection rate is “a measure of how good we are at not talking to customers.” I run response reviews for the WordPress.com support bot. What I check isn’t the number, it’s whether someone got the right help quickly.

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