As AI agents take on a growing share of customer interactions, the moment when automation hands a customer over to a human advisor is becoming a critical test of trust.
In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Craig Cotton, Global VP of Product Management at Concentrix, about why broken AI-to-human handoffs can quickly turn a frustrating experience into a loyalty risk.
While much of the AI conversation still centers on containment rates and cost reduction, Cotton argues that organizations need to pay closer attention to what happens when a customer reaches the edge of what automation can solve.
That moment matters because AI is no longer handling a small pool of low-risk interactions. As voice bots, chatbots and AI agents scale from thousands of conversations to millions, tens of millions, and potentially billions, even a tiny failure rate can create a significant customer experience problem.
Cotton explains that if just 1 percent of AI-led interactions fail, brands could still be dealing with millions of unhappy customers. For customers, the frustration is often simple: they spend several minutes authenticating, explaining their issue and trying to get help from a bot, only to be transferred to a human advisor who asks them to start again.
“The ability to do that might be the difference of retaining or losing a customer. So we all know that sometimes your best customers come out of negative situations where you handle it quite well and you recover and you treat them well and you move on.”
According to Cotton, a better handoff starts with real-time sentiment detection. When AI identifies that a customer is frustrated or not getting what they need, it should offer a human advisor, set expectations around wait times, and pass a concise AI-generated summary to the agent.
That summary should tell the advisor what happened, what the customer needs, and what they should say first. Instead of asking the customer to repeat themselves, the advisor can acknowledge the journey so far and reassure them that they are ready to help.
Watch the full interview above for more insights on fixing AI-to-human handoffs and protecting customer trust.
