Bot versus agent load
How much the bots absorb before a person is needed — and why there is no correct number, only a trend worth watching.
One bar, two numbers: handled without an agent, and handed to an agent. The card states the question it answers — how much the bots absorb before a person is needed.
There is no correct value, and chasing a high number is a mistake. A bot handling 95% of conversations may be excellent, or may be refusing to hand over when it should — and those two situations look identical on this chart. What matters is the trend, and what the handovers look like when you read them.
Steps
Read the split
Handled without an agent versus handed to an agent, as counts and percentages.
Resist optimising for a high number
A bot with no handover conditions will score beautifully here while trapping every difficult customer. The metric alone cannot tell you which you have.
Read the handovers to interpret it
Filter the Inbox to conversations that were handed over and read ten. If they are all things a bot should not have handled, your split is healthy at whatever number it is.
Watch for a sudden climb in bot-handled
That usually means handovers stopped working rather than that the bot got better — a broken condition, or a destination nobody is watching.
Watch for a climb in handovers
Either the bot has got worse, or your traffic has changed. Read the transcripts of the most recent handovers and you will usually see which.
Pair it with the unreplied count
High bot-handled with high unreplied is the dangerous combination: the bot is accepting conversations it cannot finish and nobody is catching them.
Check it worked
Read ten handed-over conversations. If most of them are things the bot should have been able to answer, that is a knowledge base gap. If most are genuinely human, your split is right whatever the percentage says.
The parts people get wrong
- A bot with no handover conditions will keep trying forever, which produces a flattering number and a terrible experience.
- This is the single most useful number for deciding whether to expand your bot's scope or improve its knowledge.