Escalation & hand-off
What happens when your bot does not know — and why that is the feature, not the failure.
Why a bot that refuses is worth more
Before answering, the bot checks whether what it retrieved from your pages actually supports an answer. If it does not, it says so and offers a person instead of writing something plausible.
This is the whole reason it is safe to point at a public website. A support bot that guesses does not fail quietly — it fails in front of your customer, in writing, with your name on it. A refusal costs you one hand-off; a confident invention about your refund policy costs you the argument that follows.
Tip
So a bot saying it is not sure is telling you something true and useful: the answer to that question is not on any page you have given it. That is a content gap, and the inbox is where you close it.
What the visitor sees
The hand-off is one exchange, in the visitor's own language, without leaving the chat.
The bot says it is not sure
It does not pretend, and it does not dead-end. It says it will get a person on it and asks for an email address.
They leave an email
A single field, in the conversation. Nothing is emailed to them, and there is no form to fill in or ticket portal to sign into.
It is attached to their conversation
The email is recorded against the conversation they are already in, so you get the question and the context together rather than an address with no story attached.
What reaches you
As soon as a hand-off happens:
- An email lands at the address set for that bot, with the question and a link to the full transcript.
- If you have connected a Slack incoming webhook, it is posted there too.
- The conversation shows up under recent hand-offs in that bot's inbox.
- The unanswered question is recorded so that it can be fixed once and answered forever.
Teaching it the answer by replying
The fastest way to close a gap does not involve opening the dashboard at all. We email you the question; you answer it the way you would answer a customer.
We email you one question
Not a digest, not a dashboard link with a task list — one question your bot could not answer.
You reply normally
Write the answer in your own words, as an ordinary email reply. There is no syntax and no form.
We draft it in your bot's voice
Your reply is rewritten into the voice your bot already uses, so an answer typed on a phone in thirty seconds does not read differently from the rest.
You approve with one click
We send back a single link. Clicking it publishes the answer, and every visitor who asks that question from then on gets it.
Note
The approve link is signed and expires after seven days. It works without signing in, which is the point — it is clicked from a phone, days later, by someone who is not at their desk.
Reducing hand-offs
Hand-offs are not a number to drive to zero — some questions genuinely need a person. But if you are getting more than you expect:
- Check the questions in your inbox. Most of the time they cluster around one topic you have not written a page about.
- Check that the pages that DO answer them were actually read. A page behind a login, blocked in robots.txt, or excluded from a source is invisible to the bot no matter how clearly it is written.
- Add the answer as pasted text if there is no page to point at. A paragraph is enough, and it does not have to be published anywhere.