The Handoff Problem

The bot was fine. The agent was great. The customer was still left furious — because of the handoff between them. In this episode, Joseph Michelli makes the case that AI-to-human escalation, not the bot itself, is the real failure point in customer service. Drawing on the Corporate Executive Board’s customer-effort research, he explains why making people repeat themselves is so costly — and offers four principles for designing a seam customers never feel.