Bot handoff

Escalation is moving a contact to a more senior agent, a specialist team, or a human when automation stalls. Escalation paths are defined by business rules, and the rate at which contacts escalate is a direct measure of whether the first line is equipped to resolve them.

A fallback is the safe response an AI agent gives when its confidence is too low to act, typically an offer to hand the conversation to a human. Well-designed fallbacks fail early rather than guessing, because a confidently wrong answer costs far more than an admitted gap.

An AI agent is software that resolves a customer request end to end, taking actions in connected systems rather than only answering questions. Unlike a scripted chatbot, an AI agent can look up an order, issue a refund, or update a record, then confirm the completed outcome back to the customer.

Human in the loop describes a review step where a person approves or corrects AI output before it reaches the customer. Teams typically apply it to high-risk intents such as refunds, cancellations, and complaints, then relax it selectively as measured accuracy on those intents proves out.