Designing the hand-over: when your AI assistant should pass the customer to a person

Most of the work in setting up an AI assistant goes into what it should answer. The other half, what it should pass on, gets less attention. Yet the hand-over is where a lot of customers are won or lost: the person with a damaged order, the one asking for an exception, the business buyer with a large quote. Get it right and the assistant makes your team faster. Get it wrong and the customer meets a wall.

This note covers what to hand over, how, and the mistakes to avoid. The examples come from a made-up furniture store, but the rules apply to any store or service business.

What to hand over

Some questions shouldn’t be answered by an assistant even when it could produce a fluent reply. A useful test: would you let a new employee in their first week answer this without asking anyone?

Hand over	Why
Anything about a specific order: where it is, a change, a cancellation	Needs live data and often a decision
Damaged, wrong or missing items	A judgement call, usually involving money
Requests outside the published policy	Only a person can make an exception
Complaints and angry customers	Tone matters more than speed
Large or business orders, custom quotes	A sales conversation
Anything involving health, safety or legal claims	Liability
Questions the assistant answered twice without the customer being satisfied	The answer isn’t working

Everything else, the questions answered by your published pages, the assistant should answer. A hand-over for “how much is delivery to Lyon?” is a missed answer, not a careful one.

How to hand over well

Collect what the person will need, once. For an order question: order number and email. For a damaged item: order number and a photo. The customer gives it to the assistant, and the person receives it with the conversation. Nobody asks twice.

Say what happens next, with a time. “I’ve passed this to our customer team with your order number. They reply within four working hours, by email.” A vague “someone will be in touch” makes people write again, through another channel.

Say who they’re talking to. When a person takes over the live chat, the customer should see it: “You’re now chatting with Léa from our team.” It also makes clear which answers came from whom.

Keep the context. Most platforms pass the full conversation to the agent. Make sure your team reads it before replying; there’s nothing more irritating than “How can I help you today?” after explaining the problem.

Out of hours

Most store chat happens in the evening and at weekends. An assistant that says “an agent will be with you shortly” at 23:00 on a Saturday is promising something you can’t deliver.

Out of hours, the honest pattern is:

1. answer what the pages answer, as usual;
2. for hand-over questions, say plainly when the team is back: “Our team replies on weekdays from 9:00. Leave your email and order number and we’ll write to you on Monday morning.”;
3. ask for the email only at this point, not at the start of every chat.

Two hand-over mistakes that cost more than wrong answers

The email wall. Some setups ask every visitor for a name and email before answering anything. Shoppers asking about delivery costs rarely want to give an address to find out, and many close the chat. Collect contact details when there’s a reason: a hand-over, a quote, an order problem. We list this as a common problem in its own right: asking for data before answering.

The loop. The customer asks for a person; the assistant replies with another article. The customer asks again; another article. Some assistants are configured to avoid hand-overs to save cost, and some are just poorly set up. Either way, two requests for a person should reach a person or a clear form. Our page on loops and silence shows other versions of this.

A made-up example

A furniture store’s assistant is asked: “My sofa arrived with a tear in the fabric. What do I do?”

A poor reply: “We’re sorry to hear that. Our returns policy allows returns within 14 days. You can start a return from your account.” The customer doesn’t want to return the sofa; they want it fixed, and they’re about to post a photo on social media.

A good reply: “I’m sorry about that. Damage on delivery is handled by our customer team, who can arrange a repair or a replacement. Could you send your order number and a photo of the tear? I’ll pass it on now; they reply within four working hours.” Then a real hand-over, with the photo attached.

Setting it up

Every major platform supports hand-over rules: Intercom lets you set when Fin passes to the team, Zendesk lets you define escalation paths for its AI agents, Tidio can route Lyro’s unanswered questions to live chat or tickets.¹² Write your rules in plain words first, using the table above, then configure them.

And test them, like the answers. Ask the assistant for a person, describe a damaged item, ask for something outside the policy, and do it once in office hours and once at night. Check where each one lands.

If you’re setting up an assistant, Assistant Setup includes the hand-over rules and the out-of-hours messages. For the questions the assistant should answer, see what to put in the knowledge base.

Footnotes

1. Intercom Help, “Fin AI Agent explained”, intercom.com/help. ↩

2. Zendesk, “About AI agents”, support.zendesk.com. ↩