Handoff and fallback: How to handoff the bot to human

Handoff helps the agents seamlessly take over the bot conversations when the script is broken, the request is unidentified, or resolutions are not found. The handoff mechanism broadens the bot scope by enabling the businesses to provide human intervention alongside the automated responses.

Implement conversation Handoff

You can set up a Handoff for the conversational bot using the following steps:

1. Triggering the Handoff procedure
2. Setting up a Handoff procedure
3. Handing off from bot to human

Triggering a handoff procedure

A bot is built by flows or pieces of conversation. These can be reused in different parts of the conversation. The concept of reusing flows in different places is also recommended when working towards a handoff.

Handoff using multiple triggers

The following triggers can be used based on the handoff requests:

• Text - When a user indicates to talk to an agent instead of the bot.
• Unknown - If the user input is unknown to the bot. Read more about how do you Handle the Unknown
• Feedback - When the user indicates that the bot didn’t answer the question. Read more about The Feedback Flow.

Setting up a handoff procedure

The handoff procedure enables the agent to answer questions efficiently with the highest satisfaction rate. At this stage, the bot gathers more information and redirects the question to the applicable department or workflow. To do that, you can add the following components to your bot.

• Required information - To answer a question you need the user's email address, date, a specific order number, or any other piece of information. When all the information is gathered, your agent can solve the issue.

• Channels - WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger allow you to send messages back to the user within 24 hours, allowing asynchronous messaging during a live chat, helps to provide resolution faster. In general live chat has higher priority over asynchronous messaging.

• Business processes - If you have agents available, you can incorporate live chat. If there is a handoff during business hours a live agent can follow up directly however, when it’s outside of business hours you can create a ticket in your CRM system to follow up at a later.

  To set up these rules and business processes in Flow, use the concepts of conditionsconditions.

Handing over from bot to human

The final step is to hand the conversation over to a human. Using Flow, we always support working from a single customer service tool where requests, tickets, and chatbot handoffs will be picked up. To hand a conversation over to a customer service tool, you can use the Handoff Reply. When creating tickets you could use Zapier integration or create custom tickets and integration by using APIs.

Ensure that the conversation is handed back from agent to bot. After the question is solved an agent can use a Start Survey event within the bot design.