Chatbot escalation: How and When to do it
So you've created an AI chatbot that is trained on your business content, pdfs, and documents - Great. Now, the question is, what to do with your warm or hot leads that are ready to buy, or how to manage complex customer questions? Some types of chats are just better handled by human agents still. That's where chatbot escalations to your human agents because important. With Social Intents, we manage those escalations seamlessly with keyword triggering, ChatGPT instructions, or manual intervention using the live chat console. Any of these methods will work, and it's typically a combination of each of these methods that provides the best results.
In this article we'll discuss how you can escalation your AI chatbots to your human agents either in the web dashboard or in any of our integrations - to agents in Microsoft Teams, to Slack Channels, or to your Google Chats.
Let's start by showing you how to escalate to your human agents using keyword triggers that you can configure in your chatbot settings.
Prerequisites
We assume that you've set up your Social Intents account and ChatGPT integration as in this article:
3 Types of Chatbot Escalations we'll show you how to configure
- AI Chatbot Keyword Triggers for Chatbot Escalation
- ChatGPT Instructions to trigger escalations
- Manual chat intervention in the live chat console by an agent
AI Chatbot Keyword Triggers for Chatbot Escalation
The first option and typically most used is to set up keyword triggers for escalation to your agents.
First login to Social Intents or sign up for a free trial if you haven't yet started one. Then click on Chat Apps and the Edit Settings icon to customize your chat settings.
Then select the AI Chatbot tab.
Scroll down to the 'Human Escalation Trigger Phrases' field. This is the text that you will update with any phrases you'd like to trigger your human agent escalations. In this example we have a wildcard '*talk to an agent*', as well as the words 'representative', 'agent' and 'human'.
So when the chatbot conversation starts with ChatGPT, if a user types in any of these phrases, then your agents will be notified that there is a live chat waiting for them.
Also notice that in the Chatbot Quick Replies field, we have 'Talk to an Agent' as an option button right when the chat starts. So in this case, if the visitor clicks on that button, then the chat will be transferred to an agent.
At this point, the chat conversation is transferred to your live chat queue for a human agent to answer. This can be in in the website, in Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, or Google Chat.
Once the agent responds to the chat, then ChatGPT drops out of the conversation and the visitor is chatting only with your agent.
ChatGPT Instructions to Trigger Escalations
The second option to transfer or escalation AI chatbot conversations from ChatGPT or AI to your human agents, is to tell ChatGPT to respond with a special format in the chatbot instructions. In our case, we have a special button format that if ChatGPT is told to respond with HTML similar to the button below, then Social Intents will be smart enough to trigger the human escalation:
<button class='si-button' id='quick-reply-006' data-text-reply='Talk to an Agent' data-reply='invite_agent'>Talk to an Agent</button>
This format has a data-text-reply field which is the text sent to the chat, and an optional data-reply='invite_agent' - this tells our service to trigger an escalation.
Similarly, you can add a specific channel id to the data-reply to send to a particular channel in Teams, Slack, or Zoom:
<button class='si-button' id='quick-reply-006' data-text-reply='Talk to an Agent' data-reply='invite_agent:19:fsadee2eij74626bf13b37642d162b1@thread.tacv2'>Talk to an Agent</button>
In this example, we are sending to a particular Microsoft Teams channel where we've already added the integration.
So to add these options in the ChatGPT instructions, go back to the AI Chatbot tab as in step 1 above, and add these special instructions. You can even give ChatGPT a specific menu tree flow if you like.
Now if a visitor clicks on the Support button in the chat response, they will be transferred to a human live chat agent.
Manual Chat Intervention in the Live Chat Console
The final way that you can escalate a chatbot conversation on your website to a live chat agent, is by an agent monitoring the live chat console, then simply responding to an active chat. Agents can always monitor active AI chats as they are happening and by simply responding in the chat console to a chat, the chat will be transferred to them, and the AI will drop out of the conversation. In this way, you can actively monitor your chats and use your judgement on when and if the chat needs human intervention.
That's it. Now you have 3 advanced options for escalating AI chats to your human agents to provide superior hybrid AI + Live Chat customer service.