Handoffs
Enable your Operator to handoff cases to your human agents.
Operators are capable of handling support cases from start to end. However, most teams find that balancing workloads between Operators and human agents produces the best outcomes. Additionally, teams often find it easier to incrementally introduce Operators into their teams instead of all at once.
Handoffs teach your Operator to delegate the remainder of a support case to a human agent. Your Operator will summarize the support case thus far and context-share with the downstream human agent. Your Operator will include a link to the conversation transcript and analysis available in the Operator web application.
Operators support three types of handoffs:
- Phone: Your Operator will perform a live transfer to another phone number in your telephony stack. Both IVRs and human agents are supported.
- Email: Your Operator will send an email message to the email address you specify. The email message will contain the context of the support case thus far and can be customized.
- CRM: Your Operator will create a ticket in your CRM that contains the context of the support case thus far and can be customized.
Use case: Escalations
A popular use case for the phone handoff is for escalating a deeply unhappy customer. Your Operator can be configured to escalate a deeply unhappy customer to a human agent through a phone handoff.
To implement an escalation, create a scenario that
activates upon detecting a deeply unhappy customer, and in its instructions
tell your Operator to perform the phone handoff. Use the @ character to
reference the phone handoff.
Use case: Triage
A popular use case for the email and CRM handoffs is to implement a triage Operator. Your Operator can be configured to collect all relevant information about a customer’s problem and then file an email or CRM ticket. This allows your human agents to immediately solve the underlying problem without an extended back and forth to collect missing information.
This is especially useful for customer problems that your Operator is not trained to solve.
Pushing back on live phone transfers
Many customers, upon detecting that your Operator is not a human, habitually request to immediately speak to a human agent. We are all tired of IVRs that misinterpret our words and waste our time. However, Operators actually reduce your customers’ time to resolution.
By default, your Operator will respect the customer’s intentions and immediately perform the transfer, assuming one exists. However, Your Operator can also be configured to push back (weakly or strongly) on a request to transfer to a human agent and explain that they are capable of solving the customer’s problem.
Restricting to operating hours
Handoffs can be restricted to certain times of the day. A common use case is to restrict live phone transfers to business hours only.
When your Operator is instructed to invoke a disabled handoff, it will instead perform a fallback.