Escalation

Bot handoff is the transfer of a live conversation from an automated agent to a human, ideally with the full transcript and any collected context attached. A clean handoff prevents the customer from repeating information, which is the most common complaint recorded about automated support experiences.

Business rules are the conditions that decide how a contact is prioritised, routed, or escalated. Typical rules combine customer tier, channel, detected intent, and elapsed time to determine where a conversation goes and how quickly it must be answered under the applicable service level agreement.

Containment rate is the share of automated conversations that end without escalation to a human. It is the primary efficiency measure for AI support, but a high rate only indicates success when paired with satisfaction and repeat-contact data confirming customers actually got their issue resolved.

A knowledge gap is a recurring customer question the knowledge base cannot answer, usually visible as repeat escalations or low-confidence fallbacks on the same intent. Systematically closing gaps is the highest-return maintenance activity available to any team running automated support at scale.