It is helpful to offer a takeover for a request to a service team via email, live chat or ticket if the chatbot cannot provide conclusive help.
An AI chatbot can answer many repetitive queries from users automatically. However, since some queries concern specific issues that cannot be answered conclusively by the AI chatbot, it is recommended to provide an option to contact the service team. Handing over the request to a live chat agent is usually the most user-friendly option, because users are already in the chat and receive a personal response promptly via live chat. Similarly user-friendly is the option of leaving the already formulated request in the chat for the service team, which can then give the user personal feedback via e-mail or telephone. For companies, the advantage is that inquiries are transmitted in a pre-qualified form.
On the other hand, referring users to contact options such as telephone, website form or composing a separate e-mail to a service address is associated with a media disruption and effort for users. Often, these requests to companies are not pre-qualified and require queries by the service team.
Description "The human takeover"
A human takeover, also known as a handover, leads the AI chatbot to escalate the user's request to human employees of the company, who then take over further processing of the request. For example, the offer to forward a request can be played out,
- if a request was not understood by the chatbot (not understood message).
- if an evaluation question ("Was this answer able to answer your question satisfactorily?") at the end of an intent is answered negatively and the chatbot offers further assistance (Unhappy Path).
- when selected intents have been requested and further processing of the request by a service-team member is wished for by the company (Follow-Up).
In addition to the original request from users, a takeover can be suitably prequalified by further queries in the chat. Normally, personal data such as name, e-mail address, telephone number or customer number is requested and transmitted to enable or simplify processing the query by the service team.
The request can be transferred to a live chat agent for processing in real time or it can be sent to a service team's e-mail address or ticket system for delayed processing.
Data security
The transmission of a request only takes place at the request of the user. An inquiry from users may contain personal data if provided in their text inquiry.
The request for personal data to enable additional prequalification is determined by the company. In the case of a live chat, the request for personal data is optional. In the case of deferred processing of a request, however, contact data (e-mail address or telephone number) of the user is required in order to be able to provide feedback. A takeover forwarded to the service team only contains the text request and, if necessary, other requested information. No IP addresses, user IDs, etc. are collected and forwarded.
Before a takeover starts, a note and/or consent to the privacy policy can be displayed or obtained in the moinAI chat for users. Information regarding this topic is provided in our knowledge-base. Conversations between users and AI chatbots as well as live chat agents can be automatically deleted after a defined period of time.
Without conclusively assessing this, it should be noted that a chatbot takeover is usually no different from a user request via website form, email request or phone call in terms of data protection.