Bot-to-human handover: when it happens, and what travels with it

What triggers a handover

Four triggers, and all of them should be set before publishing rather than after:

• An explicit request from the customer — "I want to speak to someone" and anything like it.
• A question the bot finds no answer to in your sources — the most important trigger of the four.
• A topic you always route to people: a complaint, a return, a medical question.
• Repetition without progress — the customer rephrasing while the conversation circles.

What travels with the conversation

A handover is not passing a phone number across. What reaches the agent is the whole conversation: what the customer asked, what the bot answered, and what it collected inside the flow — the name, the order, any field you defined.

Which is why your agent’s first sentence is a continuation rather than an opening. What the customer feels is simply not being asked about something they said a minute ago.

The order that makes it work

1. 1.Train the bot on your sources first

   Your files, documents and links. What is not in its sources it will not know, and that is deliberate rather than a gap.
2. 2.Define the topics it never takes

   Write them explicitly instead of relying on its judgement: complaints, returns, sensitive cases.
3. 3.Test in the simulator before publishing

   Try a scenario it deliberately does not know, and confirm it hands over rather than guesses.
4. 4.Hand over into the inbox, not into an email

   A conversation leaving the platform loses its context and comes back with no record.
5. 5.Decide when it returns to the bot

   After the agent closes, or on a new topic — never in the middle of a live human exchange.

What spoils a handover

Three repeated mistakes, all of them in the setup rather than the technology:

• A bot with no explicit handover trigger — it guesses because it was given no exit.
• Handing over to a channel outside the platform — the context is lost at the boundary.
• Returning to the bot in the middle of a live human exchange — the worst thing a customer can feel.

And who picks it up?

A handed-over conversation needs an owner rather than a queue. Assignment, the response target and what follows from them are in the team roles and response times guide.

Frequently asked questions