Resources / Glossary / Voice agents
Human handoff
The moment an AI agent stops and passes the customer to a person, along with everything said so far.
A handoff has two halves. The first is knowing when: the customer asked for a person, the conversation moved to price or credit, somebody is upset, or the agent has run out of things it is allowed to do. The second is what travels with the customer, which should be the whole conversation rather than a name and a phone number.
A handoff that makes the customer start over is worse than no agent at all, because they already explained themselves once and now have evidence that the store was not listening.
Why it matters for a sales manager
Handoffs are where automated answering either earns trust or destroys it, and they are easy to test: call your own line, ask for a person and see what happens. Set the rules generously at first. A handoff that was not strictly necessary costs a few minutes of someone’s time, while a missed one costs a customer who decides your store is hard to deal with.