The bot answers but never hands over
A bot with no way out is the worst failure mode available, because the customer cannot escape and you cannot see it happening.
This failure is worse than a bot that does not answer, because it is invisible. A silent bot generates complaints. A bot that cheerfully fails to help while refusing to fetch anybody generates customers who quietly leave.
The list below is ordered by how often each is the cause. The first one — no conditions at all — is extremely common in bots built quickly.
Steps
Check the bot has handover conditions at all
A bot with none will keep trying forever. Open the handover card and count them.
Add "customer asks for a person" first
Non-negotiable. If you write only one condition, write this one — then test it by asking for a person.
Check every condition names a destination
Each one should name somewhere specific for the conversation to go. A condition that fires with nowhere to send it simply ends the exchange.
Check somebody is actually watching where it lands
A handover assigns the chat. If it assigns to somebody who is not there — or into a queue nobody monitors — the handover worked perfectly and the customer is still waiting.
This is the failure people miss, because the bot side is functioning correctly.
Add a confidence-threshold condition
"AI confidence below 60%" is the safety net under everything you did not predict.
Read a week of transcripts
Find where customers gave up or repeated themselves. That is your list of missing conditions, written by your actual customers rather than guessed.
Trigger every condition deliberately
One at a time, as a customer would. A condition never fired in testing has not been tested.
Check it worked
Check the bot-versus-agent split on Home. A very high proportion handled without an agent, alongside customers who are not converting, is the signature of this exact problem.
The parts people get wrong
- Conditions are cheap to add — one field and a button. This list should grow every month as you read transcripts.
- A handover into an unwatched queue is still a customer waiting. Check both halves.