What is Agent Escalation?

Agent Escalation is the stage where the conversation between the user and the bot is transferred to an agent, and the agent takes over the conversation from thereon. It is also called an Agent Handover, as the user’s conversation is handed over to the agent. 

You need to navigate to your bot on Conversation Studio, and you would see the Agent Escalation option, as shown - 

A chat can be handed over to an agent in two situations - 

• Automatically on Bot Breaks - When a user asks a complex query to the bot, and the bot is not able to understand it, it is a Bot Break situation. In this, the chat will be handed over to an agent automatically. 
• By Design - In this scenario, a chat is handed over to an agent when the user explicitly requests to chat with an agent.

Why do we need Agent Escalation?

When the user is having a conversation with the bot, he might get favorable responses that work for him, but it might happen that after a certain point of time the bot is unable to respond to the user. The main reason for this is because the users might have a detailed query, which the bot is unable to comprehend or the query is out of context for the bot. 

At such times, human intervention is necessary to get a deeper understanding of the user’s query so as to provide a resolution to it. In this scenario, the agent proactively helped the user with the resolution that saved the user’s time. 

This is when agent escalation works, where a human agent takes over the chat and understands the user’s issue, and provides a response to it. 

Also, when the chat is handed over to an agent, he also can see the conversation that the user had with the bot, so the agent would get a complete picture of what the user is requesting and he can accordingly send a resolution to the user, that works for him. This saves both users’ as well as agents’ time. 

In some scenarios, the user himself chooses to chat with an agent, rather than chatting with the bot. 

How to add Agent Escalation for your bot?

You can add Agent Escalation for your bot in two ways - 

1. Haptik Smart Agent chat tool
2. External chat tools

Haptik Smart Agent Chat tool is a tool from Haptik and it provides great functionality for agent handovers, with a good and easy-to-understand user interface for the agents. You can read more about it here. Remember one thing, while using Haptik’s Smart Agent Chat tool, you can add at the most 20 agents in your team.

External chat tools - Haptik also provides integration with the external chat tools for agent handover. Tools like Freshchat, Salesforce, Zendesk, and so on. You can learn to configure them for your Bot over here.