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Human Handoff

Some questions fall beyond your AI Assistant's ability, for instance questions outside the scope of the Knowledge Base. The Human Handoff feature recognizes those cases and automatically passes them onto your Human Agents. The AI Assistant gets paused for these conversations, and a person can answer within the Inbox. We will describe the Human Handoff feature using the example of Helpful Macintosh, a helpful AI Assistant from MacShop, an online Apple-products reseller.

The flow of Human Handoff​

User's perspective​

  1. User talks to the AI Assistant.
  2. User's request in the conversation is either beyond the AI Assistant's capability, or the user has explicitly requested to talk to a human.
  3. The AI Assistant unassigns itself from the conversation, and notifies the Human Agents of the request.
  4. The Human Agent joins and handles the query.
  5. The conversation is resolved and closed, or the AI Assistant is assigned again.

Your perspective as the Human Agent​

  1. An unassigned conversation appears in the inbox.
  2. You go into the conversation, and read the AI Summary to quickly catch up on the exchange between the Assistant and the user.
  3. You 'Take over' and start handling user's query.
  4. You either mark the conversation as resolved and close it, or re-assign the AI Assistant to the conversation to talk to the user again.

The below demo showcases this flow in a side-by-side view. The user's perspective is on the left, while the Human Agents view is on the right.

Setting it up​

Navigate to the settings tab and scroll down to Human Handoff. The first thing you need to do is to turn the toggle button to "on" and enable Handoff. Then, you can specify the exact settings of the Handoff.

Human Agent's availablity​

Human Handoff shouldn't be initialised, when there are no Human Agents available to take over. Here, you can specify your Agents' working hours and what information should be provided to the user who cannot be handed off to a Human Agent outside working hours.

The below demo showcases an example of how an AI Assistant will handle a Handoff request outside Agents' working hours. How will Helpful Macintosh handle John and his refund request?

Question and confirmation​

These two settings let you specify the specific question the AI Assistant will ask the user before initiating Handoff and the confirmation message when Handoff has successfully been initiated.

AI Summary​

Enabling the AI Summary means that each conversation which ended in Human Handoff will be annotated with a short note summarising what happened in the conversation so far. That will give the Human Agent all the right context and help them jump right in. The AI Summary is showcased in the demo above.

Keywords​

Here, you can specify any keywords which should initialise Human Handoff immediately. For instance, invoice and refund were two keywords which the MacShop staff decided should trigger Handoff when talking to Helpful Macintosh.

Email notifications​

Optionally, you can provide one or more email addresses to send notifications to when a new conversation needs handling.

Demo​

The below demo shows all the different Human Handoff settings.

Taking it a step further — Integrations​

If your current customer support is done through Zendesk or Intercom, you can integrate your Quickchat AI Assistant with these applications and handle Human Handoff through there. See more about how to integrate with Intercom and Zendesk here.