How a chatbot should hand a conversation to a person

When the bot should hand over

Write these down before you launch, so the decision is not left to how the bot happens to phrase things on the day.

• The customer asks for a person, in any wording. Never make them argue with the bot to get one.
• The bot cannot find the answer in what it has been given. A guess costs more than a short wait.
• Money is involved: refunds, payment failures, disputed charges, custom quotes.
• Something has gone wrong: a damaged order, a missed appointment, a complaint.
• The conversation is worth a person's time: a large order, a bulk enquiry, a buyer ready to visit or book.
• Anything health, legal or financial that needs a qualified answer.

A bot that never hands over is not saving you work. It is moving the work to your reviews and your refund queue.

Three ways to hand over

Live takeover: someone on your team joins the same chat and replies there. It is the best experience, and it only works while someone is watching for conversations that need them.

Callback or ticket: the bot takes the customer's details and the request, and your team gets back to them by phone or email. It works around the clock, but only if the request reliably reaches a person and someone actually follows up.

Scheduled: the bot books a call or a visit with a person. It suits sales conversations better than support ones.

Most businesses need live takeover during working hours and a callback outside them. Whichever you use, never promise more than you will deliver. "Someone will reply in a few minutes" at 2 am does more damage than an honest "We will get back to you tomorrow morning."

What your team needs at the moment of handover

The full transcript, not a summary. The person picking up should see exactly what the customer asked and exactly what the bot said, including anything it got wrong.

A clear sign of who is in charge. Once a person has taken over, the bot must stop replying. A bot that keeps answering underneath a human contradicts them, and the customer stops trusting both.

A way to hand the chat back. Many takeovers last a single message, such as approving a refund or answering one awkward question. After that the bot can carry on with routine questions.

Handoff mistakes that lose customers

Most failed handoffs come down to one of these.

• Hiding the option of reaching a person until the customer is already angry
• Saying a person will reply when nobody is watching the chats
• Making the customer explain everything again because the agent cannot see the history
• Letting the bot keep replying after a person has taken over
• Never handing the chat back, so the bot does less and less over time
• Not checking which conversations got handed over, so the gaps in the bot's knowledge never get filled

Read your handed-over conversations every week. Each one marks either a gap in what the bot was given or a case it should never have tried to answer.

Measuring whether handoff is working

Three numbers tell you most of what you need. The share of chats handed to a person: if it is very high, the bot is missing information it should have; if it is close to zero, check that customers can actually reach a person. The time from handover to the first human reply. And how many handed-over chats ended with the customer's problem solved.

Keep the threshold for handing over low at first and raise it as the bot's knowledge improves. A bot that hands over too often is a cheaper problem than one that should have handed over and did not.

How handoff works in Talktaro today

Talktaro's website chatbot sends every conversation to the Inbox in your Studio account. From there you can open any chat and take it over, which stops the AI from replying. Your message reaches the visitor labelled as coming from your team, and the visitor sees "A team member will reply here." When you are done, you hand the chat back to the AI.

Some things it does not do yet, and it is better you hear them here than find out later.

• Handover is done by a person from the Inbox. The bot does not decide on its own to pass a chat across.
• There are no alerts yet. Someone needs to keep an eye on the Inbox during working hours.
• Replies reach the visitor while they still have the chat open on your site.
• WhatsApp conversations show in the same Inbox, but you reply to them from the WhatsApp Business app on your phone for now.