When a chatbot should hand the chat to a person
AI-to-human handoff for small businesses: which questions an AI should answer, which should reach you, and how a handover works on a Keepp page.
A chatbot that tries to answer everything eventually gets something important wrong. A chatbot that hands everything to you saves no time. The useful setup sits in between: the AI answers what it can, and the conversation reaches you the moment it needs a person.
On a Keepp page that setup is called AI, then hand over to me.
What the AI should keep
The AI is good at questions whose answers are already written down somewhere:
- opening hours, location, parking
- prices, sizes, what’s included
- delivery areas and times
- how booking or ordering works
These make up most of what small businesses get asked, and the visitor gets an answer in seconds, at any hour.
What should reach you
Some questions need judgement, and a wrong answer costs a customer:
- a custom order or an exception to a policy
- a complaint, or anything where the customer is upset
- a group or corporate booking
- a question about something that isn’t on the page at all
How the handover happens
A chat is handed to you in two cases: the visitor asks for a person, or the AI can’t help with the question. When that happens:
- The AI tells the visitor it’s passing the question on.
- The conversation opens in your Telegram group as its own topic, named after the visitor’s email, with their answers to your pre-chat questions and everything said so far at the top.
- You reply in the topic, and your reply appears on the page.
From then on that conversation is yours, and the AI doesn’t answer in it again. That’s deliberate: a visitor who asked for a person shouldn’t find a bot back in the conversation halfway through.
If the visitor has left the page by the time you reply, they get your reply by email with a link back into the chat.
Choosing the setup
There are three ways to run chat on a Keepp page, and the right one depends on how much of your day you want to spend answering:
- AI only suits a business whose questions are mostly answered on the page. Anything the AI can’t answer is flagged for you to look at later.
- AI, then hand over to me suits most small businesses: fast answers for routine questions, and a person for everything else.
- Only me suits businesses where every conversation is a sale in progress, like a coach or a photographer, and the owner wants to answer each one personally.
You can change the setup any time in Chat → Settings.
Setting it up
The two setups where you answer need a Telegram group connected once from your dashboard. Set up chat covers the steps, and answering from Telegram explains how the topics work day to day.