This was part of an article on CallCentreHelper.com
Bot-to-agent handovers may feel new, but the problem they create is not. Contact centres have been dealing with broken handovers for decades and every cold transfer between departments carries the same risk: lost context, repeated explanations, and a customer who feels they are starting again[1].
AI has not introduced this problem. But it has made it more visible and offered an easy way to apportion blame on the technology.
This matters, because if we misdiagnose the issue as “a bot problem”, we default to predictable solutions: improve the technology, refine the scripting, train the bot harder. All of which help, but none of which fully solve the experience.
The more interesting opportunity sits with the receiving adviser.
When a handover lands badly, something subtle happens psychologically. The previous interaction becomes “other”. Whether that is another department or an AI, it is easy to dismiss it as flawed, incomplete, or irrelevant. This is a form of outgroup bias in action[2].
Outgroup homogeneity bias is the idea that people who are ‘like us’ are nuanced and complex. Whereas people that are not ‘like us’ are similar. The bias encourages us to create stereotypes for these groups: “sales people don’t care about the customer”; “customers are all the same”; “management don’t know what this job is like”.
The result is AI-bashing, or internal blaming, rather than ownership.
Skilled advisers do the opposite. They actively bridge the gap.
They acknowledge the prior interaction (“I can see what’s been covered”), reduce customer effort (“you won’t need to repeat everything”), and take responsibility for moving things forward (“let me pick this up from here”). In doing so, they turn a fragmented journey into a coherent one.
Technology should improve. But the real differentiator is human: the ability to absorb a broken handover and still create a seamless experience, whilst resisting the instinct to treat what came before as someone else’s problem.
References:
[1] Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1988). SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. Journal of Retailing, 64(1), 12–40.
[2] Quattrone, G. A., & Jones, E. E. (1980). The perception of variability within in-groups and out-groups: Implications for the law of small numbers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(1), 141–152. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.38.1.141
