The Handoff Problem

Here's a moment you've almost certainly lived through.

You're in a chat with a bot and it's been fine, answered a couple of questions, saved you a phone call, but now you've hit something it can't handle.

So it offers to connect you with a human.

relief there's a little wait a new agent appears and the very first thing that agent types is hi can you tell me what your issue is and something inside you just deflates because you just explained it you explained it to the bot in detail two minutes ago and now you're explaining the whole thing again from scratch to a person who's acting as though the last 10 minutes of your life simply never happened.

The technology worked, the human showed up, and the experience still failed right at the seam between them.

In my work, that seam has a name.

It's called the handoff.

And I've become convinced it's the single most under-designed, over-blamed moment in all of modern customer experience.

We obsess over making the bot smarter and the agents friendlier and we leave the transition between them the exact place where the customer is most frustrated and most ready to walk almost entirely to chance.

Let me be precise about the problem because the diagnosis really matters here.