The Right Way, and the Wrong Way, to Hand Bot Conversations to Humans

Let’s face it, everyone agrees that bots are not as smart as humans and there are certain conversations that need to be escalated to human agents. However, not everyone agrees on what’s the best way to handle this and the “conventional wisdom” often favors immediate human handoff using live chat. Not so fast, read on to see the major pitfalls of this approach.
Problem #1: If a prospect is given the option to talk to a human when using a bot, the entire conversation is doomed for failure. Why? Because instead of trying to solve the reason a prospect might want to talk to a human, the bot developer elected to take the easy route and provide an instant human-handoff option. Also, bots can solve a lot of issues if given the chance and people can navigate good bots with relative ease. But if a giant detour sign is thrown in the middle of the conversation called “talk to a human,” many consumers will elect to take that route vs. seeing the bot through.
Problem #2: Bots are fast.  Really fast.  The average response time for a bot is less than 2 seconds.  So when a consumer using a bot clicks on “talk to a human,” they go from a 2-second response time to:

Waiting for the bot to find a human to connect with (anywhere from 60 seconds to as long as 5+ minutes).

Waiting for the human to review the conversation up to that point (if they even do that).

An average 1 minute 16-second interaction tim……