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How to build a seamless chatbot to human...

How to build a seamless chatbot to human handoff experience in customer support

Trending and new

9 min read

9th Sep 2024

Lewis Henderson

Gen AI explorer | Riddle master | Intent on bettering customer experience + reducing costs

As customers are increasingly connected, they expect near-instant responses to their queries, complaints, and suggestions. As such, exceptional customer support is becoming more essential than ever for organisations hoping to maintain a competitive edge. Thankfully, tools like AI chatbots can help to meet customer demands and augment customer support.

Chatbots excel at handling routine queries and tasks, yet there are moments when a human touch is necessary. We’ll explore when and how to use chatbot to human handoff, and some of the best practices for a seamless transition.

Whether you’re a customer support leader, product manager, or company executive, understanding how to bring this process into your customer support strategy can lead to improved customer satisfaction and business outcomes.

Jump to section

Why is the chatbot to human handoff important? When should you trigger a chatbot to human handoff? Best practices for the chatbot to human handoff Conclusion Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

TL;DR

A smooth chatbot to human handoff enhances customer satisfaction, resolution speed, and personalisation, all crucial for maintaining customer trust and loyalty.
Scenarios for chatbot to human include complex queries, emotional customers, high-value clients, technical issues, and complaints.
Put in place clear triggers, make sure you have real-time availability, train your staff, personalise interactions, and listen to feedback.
Set up your chatbot, train on customer interactions, define triggers, integrate systems, and continuously monitor and optimise.
Assign someone to regularly review the AI assistant’s interactions to make sure they match your brand’s tone and style and produce the desired results.

Why is the chatbot to human handoff important?

Chatbots can be an invaluable tool when it comes to your business’ conversational marketing and automation. However, deploying your conversational AI needs to be a considered process, as poor implementation can cause more headaches than it solves.

Successfully guiding customers to a satisfactory solution, though, can bring a host of benefits to your business:

Improved customer experience

In our guide on chatbot stats, we saw that 63% of customers said they would leave a company after just one poor chatbot experience, and 43% said their experience could be improved. Clearly, it’s important to work on getting this process right.

Other stats back up these findings. According to a report from CPD, only 34% of adults in the US found customer chatbots useful. A further 43% of respondents felt they could be improved, with 23% of users finding them actively annoying.

These sentiments highlight the necessity of perfecting your chatbot experience and a seamless transition from chatbot to human agent makes sure your customers receive the personalised attention and assistance they deserve.

Increased customer satisfaction

As explored in our article on chatbot stats, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions. For those who need a complex query solving, a seamless chatbot to human handoff can help to meet those needs, increasing your customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

Faster issue resolution

Customers are only likely to dedicate limited time to chatbot interaction. Instead of getting stuck in an endless, frustrating loop, having the right triggers in place for human handoff can help resolve issues promptly, improving your average response time and first contact resolution rates.

Cost savings

As you can see from our chatbot ROI calculator, efficient processes can decrease operational and time costs.

Calculate your savings

Calculate the cost savings that will be achieved by adding an AI assistant to your website

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Move the slider above to match your total customer service load per month (including calls, emails and live chats).
To calculate accurate savings for your business, put your real figures in the boxes below to replace these benchmarks.

$ your current average cost per enquiry (calls, emails, and live chats)

% of enquiries you wish to be handled by your AI assistant (without the need for a call, email or live chat)

$ your average hourly rate for customer service rep / agent (including costs such as training, equipment, recruitment)

By optimising chatbot handoff, you can further make sure that human intervention mainly only needs to be applied to sensitive, challenging, and unusual queries, freeing up time for other tasks.

When should you trigger a chatbot to human handoff?

So, we’ve seen some of the benefits that a streamlined handoff process can bring, but one of the crucial questions is when to trigger this human input. We can identify five main use cases for chatbot to human handoff:

Complex or unusual queries
Emotional or upset customers
High-value clients
Technical issues
Complaints and escalations

1. Complex or unusual queries

Perhaps the most common case for chatbot to human handoff is when a customer has a query or issue that is so complex or unique that the chatbot cannot effectively solve it. In such instances, some older AI chatbots can become confused or repeat answers, which leads to customer agitation.

When this happens, it’s helpful to transfer the conversation to the next available human agent. Examples of this interaction can include:

Questions involving multiple variables or deep product knowledge
Unique or uncommon issues not covered in the chatbot’s training data

2. Emotional or upset customers

Remember the stat above about almost two-thirds of customers quitting a company because of a bad interaction? You don’t want to be part of that statistic, and there are few customers as primed to feel negative towards an interaction than those who are frustrated, angry, or distressed. All human agents can learn to achieve empathy and have an emotional intelligence AI chatbots can’t offer.

It’s far better for both the customer and their perception of your business that you hand over to a human customer service rep for those who need it.

3. High-value clients

Depending on the nature of your organisation, there will be some customer profiles that have the potential to bring significant value if they’re connected with the right person. For such high-profile customers, the personal touch can go a long way in securing their business. It’s likely that you’ll want the person with the soft skills to build longstanding relationships to nurture these hot leads, and while chatbots can certainly capture key information and intent, you’ll likely want to then trigger a handoff.

4. Technical issues

Your services and accounts are likely highly unique to your business. This means that for anything that’s out of the ordinary or highly complex, a human agent is going to be the best problem-solver for the customers’ needs. Chatbots can certainly help with many standard issues, but for more nuanced difficulties, it’s best to handover to your support team.

In a recent podcast on the Verge, Head of Bookings Holding, Glenn Fogel, references the difference between positive AI intervention and times when humans are needed. When there’s a dramatic technical issue, we need humans, he says:

“Where things go down, people are upset, and customer service numbers go off the charts. Then you have to try and figure out, “Okay, how are we going to fix this?” and it requires a lot of humans to do it as opposed to the AI.”

5. Complaints and escalations

Although hopefully rare, a customer with a complaint always needs to be treated with care and respect. It’s here where having a human rep take on the emotional aspect of the query for a swift resolution can reduce the heat and bring a better outcome for the customer.

Best practices for the chatbot to human handoff

Now that you know when to implement a handoff from chatbots to human agents and the benefits it brings, let’s explore some best practices that will make this process smoother for you. These can make the difference between a successful strategy and one that experiences difficulties.

Define clear triggers for your handoff

While we’ve outlined these triggers broadly, imagine the possibilities when you fine-tune the exact moments your chatbot hands over to a human. This can unlock new levels of customer satisfaction and efficiency. You have the power to establish explicit criteria for your triggers, and these can be based on keywords, customer sentiment analysis, or specific types of inquiries.

Make sure you have real-time agent availability

For a handoff to be effective, those people who will be dealing with the conversation need to be readily available, and customers need to be aware of how long they’ll be waiting (or if it’s outside standard business hours). You can utilise tools that monitor agent availability and route inquiries to the most appropriate team member.

Train your people

Perhaps the most crucial part of the chatbot to human handoff is making sure your team members have the necessary skills and knowledge to handle escalated interactions effectively. Training should focus on communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and product knowledge. It helps to keep a customer service mindset across the organisation and nurture empathy.

View this handoff as an opportunity for the business. As Connor Cirillo, senior conversational marketing manager at HubSpot discusses on the HubSpot podcast: “You can have customer service reps pick up where bots start. At that point, it’s not really marketing. It’s just a better way to extend the capabilities and the reach of the business and the humans inside it.”

Show your personality

It’s crucial that the experience given by the chatbot and the person who takes over is reflective of your brand and value. Give human agents access to the chat history and customer data so they can provide a seamless, personalised experience. This information can help them quickly understand the context to offer relevant solutions.

Gather and listen to feedback

As with many aspects of the customer-business interaction, after the handoff process, solicit customer feedback to identify areas for improvement. Use this feedback to refine your chatbot’s capabilities and optimise the handoff experience.

How to implement chatbot to human handoff

Let’s turn our attention to the pivotal part of how to implement this handoff process. We’ve outlined each step to do this on our platform:

1. Create your first AI assistant

There are several ways you can do this, either by sharing your website URL so we can auto-generate your chatbot and create a new AI assistant from scratch in 10 minutes, or have one of our expert team members do it for you.

2. Training and supervising your AI assistant

With your new chatbot set up, it’s time to train and supervise its performance, making sure it’s performing as expected.

Step 1: Configure live chat

On our platform, live chat is already included with your AI assistant ― for free, and it’s easy to set up. All you need to do is set the hours that your teams are online, then individual agents can quickly move on- and offline. They can also transfer chats to each other, and leave notes.

Step 2: Continuous learning

Ensure your AI assistant receives consistent and targeted training. Our platform uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand everyday conversations and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to focus on company-specific practices. This means your AI assistant will continually improve and adapt to your customers’ needs.

Step 3: Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) integration

HITL is crucial for maintaining the quality and reliability of your AI assistant. When using EBI.AI, the HITL doesn’t require technical expertise. Anyone from your team with knowledge of your business can supervise the AI assistant, the system generates training suggestions automatically, and the HITL’s role is to approve or reject these to keep the AI updated.

Step 4: Regular updates

You (or someone from your team) should allocate about 30 minutes a week to review and update the AI assistant’s training. This ensures that the assistant remains current and effective in resolving queries. Alternatively, you can hire one of our team to manage this process for you.

3. Setting up the handoff process

With your AI assistant up and running, you can now think about how to secure the chatbot to human handoff process. There are several steps to this:

Step 1: Define your escalation triggers

We’ve discussed this already, but you clearly need to identify the types of queries or scenarios that should trigger a handoff to a human agent. The exact triggers will depend on various intricacies of your organisation, but they could be based on the complexity of the query, customer frustration signals, or specific keywords indicating the need for human intervention.

Step 2: Integrate with business tools

Our platform can integrate with your existing business tools (e.g., CRM systems like HubSpot) to automate routine tasks. This integration also helps to ensure a smooth transition from chatbot to human agent, as all relevant customer information can be passed seamlessly and automatically, so your customer reps are equipped to handle the inquiry.

Step 3: Set up communication channels

With your triggers defined and your integrations set up, you’ll want to make sure that your AI assistant can operate across all communication channels your customers use (e.g., web chat, social media, messaging apps). This improves omnichannel capability, allowing for a consistent customer experience and easy handoff when necessary.

4. Ensuring quality and consistency

Once you have your chatbot to human handoff in place, you’ll need to make sure you have the correct monitoring and feedback mechanisms in place.

First, assign someone to regularly review the AI assistant’s interactions to make sure they match up with your brand’s tone and style and are producing the desired results. You can then make adjustments to responses, add multimedia elements, or integrate new tools as needed.

You’ll also want to implement feedback systems to collect customer input on their experience with the AI assistant, giving you valuable insight into how it’s performing overall.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, we’ve seen that putting in place a seamless chatbot to human handoff experience can help you deliver exceptional customer support. By understanding when and how to transition interactions from chatbots to human agents, you can enhance customer satisfaction, improve efficiency, and achieve better business outcomes.

While the most advanced AI assistants are certainly improving and evolving at a rapid pace, the need for human intervention and supervision is always evident. With chatbot to human handoff, you make sure both your customers and your customer service agents can confidently use your chatbot to resolve any queries.

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FAQs

How do I know when to transfer a customer to a human agent?: You should look for triggers such as complex inquiries, emotional responses, or requests from high-value clients. Additionally, you can monitor sentiment analysis results to detect negative emotions that may require human intervention.

How can I ensure that my support agents are prepared for handoffs?: Your support staff will need comprehensive training that covers communication skills, product knowledge, and technical expertise. Although chatbots are intuitive to use, continuous education and feedback loops will also help agents stay up-to-date with best practices.

What are the benefits of integrating chatbot and human support?: Integration allows for a seamless transition between chatbots and human agents, leading to faster issue resolution, increased customer satisfaction, and personalised interactions.

How can I measure the success of my chatbot-to-human handoff process?: You can track metrics like customer satisfaction score and resolution rate to gauge the effectiveness of your handoff strategy. You can then use this data to make informed improvements and optimisations.