What is call deflection?

The idea comes from large contact centers, where the cost per call made avoiding calls a strategy in itself.

For a small business the framing is different. You are not trying to avoid your customers, you are trying to stop simple questions interrupting skilled work.

The questions worth deflecting are the repetitive ones: opening hours, parking, whether you cover a ZIP code, whether you take a particular insurer.

Say a physical therapy clinic keeps a paper tally by the front desk phone for one week and logs 120 calls by reason. It finds 31 about hours, directions or parking. Another 18 ask whether the clinic takes a particular insurance plan, and 9 ask what to wear or bring to a first visit. That's 58 calls, nearly half the week, with answers that never change.

Each one takes the front desk about two minutes once you count the greeting and the goodbye. So the clinic spends close to two hours a week telling people it's behind the pharmacy and to park on the left. That time comes from a desk that's also checking patients in. The other 62 calls are bookings, reschedules and clinical questions, and those are what the front desk is there for. A tally like this costs nothing to run, and it tells you what's worth writing into an assistant's instructions.

The risk with answering questions automatically is that you feel efficient while callers quietly fail to get what they needed. One number catches this: repeat calls. If the same phone number calls twice within a day, the first call probably didn't finish the job.

Check it monthly. Export your call log, sort by caller number, and count the numbers that appear more than once inside 24 hours. Then read what the first call in each pair was about. You'll often find one question being answered in a way that's technically correct and practically useless, like giving the street address when people really wanted to know which entrance to use.

Expect some repeats, since people forget things and call back. What you're watching is the trend after a change. If repeat calls about insurance double in the week after you rewrote the insurance answer, you've learned that the new wording is worse, and you can put the old one back.

GreetKeeper answers the repetitive questions from the brief you wrote, so a caller asking about parking gets an answer rather than a callback.

Anything outside the brief hands over instead of being deflected into a dead end, which is the difference between answering and stonewalling.

Read the transcripts to find your own deflection candidates. Three or four questions usually account for a large share of calls.