Your agent is built to give up early rather than waste a visitor's time. When it isn't confident and the visitor is clearly still stuck, it offers a human.
What triggers it
Two conditions together:
- The agent's confidence in its retrieved sources is low, and
- The visitor has sent three or more messages in the conversation.
Both matter. Low confidence on a first message often just means an oddly-worded question that the next message clarifies. Three messages in with nothing landing means the answer genuinely isn't there.
When both hold, the widget shows a banner: Not finding what you need? Talk to a human →.
Where it sends them
To whatever you've set up in contact options — your email form, phone number, or live chat provider. If you've connected live chat, the visitor's page and question travel with them.
If you haven't configured any contact option, the agent has nowhere to send people. Worth setting up even if you hide it by default.
Tickets
In support mode the agent can also open a ticket recording the escalation, so an unanswered question isn't lost when the visitor leaves.
Escalations are a signal, not a failure
Watch escalations on your Analytics page alongside your knowledge gaps. A cluster of escalations on one topic is the clearest possible instruction about what to write next.
An escalation rate of zero isn't necessarily good news — it can mean visitors are giving up before the third message rather than getting answers.
Reducing them
- Fill the gaps behind the most frequent escalations first
- Check AI search coverage on your readiness score — content without embeddings is much harder to retrieve, which shows up as low confidence
- Make sure your articles use your customers' vocabulary, not your internal terminology