Understanding Escalations from Help Agent to Service Rep

Escalation Path in the Conversation Lifecycle

This section describes the full lifecycle of a customer conversation, from the moment a contact is made, through the Help Agent, through escalation to a service rep, to resolution.

This diagram illustrates the full lifecycle of a customer conversation.

1. Customer initiates contact. The customer contacts your organization through a supported channel, such as voice or web chat.
2. Omni-Channel routes contact to the Help Agent. Omni-Channel routes the inbound contact to the Help Agent via a queue.
3. The Help Agent handles the request. The Help Agent accepts the conversation and begins handling the customer's request. The Help Agent interacts with the customer to understand and resolve their issue. To help the customer, the agent draws on its configured knowledge sources, subagent instructions, and available actions. Depending on configuration, it may retrieve knowledge articles, look up account details, create or update cases, or perform other actions.
4. Escalation decision point. After the Help Agent handles the request, one of these paths follows.
   1. The Help Agent resolves the customer issue. The Help Agent resolves the customer issue and the conversation ends. Escalation isn't triggered.
   2. Escalation triggers. When escalation triggers, the Escalation with Feedback subagent activates. This subagent contains the instructions that govern both the initial escalation attempt and any fallback behavior.
5. Capture Feedback. Before transferring the conversation to a rep, the Escalation with Feedback subagent prompts the customer for a satisfaction rating. This feedback is recorded against the conversation for resolution-based billing purposes.
6. Conversation transfers to the service rep. The escalation flow assigned to the Help Agent routes the conversation to the specified queue. The queue determines which service reps are eligible to receive the work item. Before attempting to transfer the work to a rep, the Check Queue Availability element in the Omni-Channel flow determines if the rep is available.
   

   Important Before you can route escalated conversations to a rep, you must manually assign reps to the queue. By default, no reps are assigned to the default queue. Until at least one rep is assigned to the queue and available, no escalation requests can be routed to a rep.
   1. The service rep takes over the conversation. If a service rep is available, the conversation transfers to them. The Help Agent exits the session. The service rep takes over and handles the customer directly.
   2. Create a case. When an escalation request can't be routed to a service rep, the conversation reverts to the Escalation with Feedback subagent, which contains the fallback instructions. During fallback, the Help Agent remains in the session, informs the customer that the escalation was unsuccessful, and offers to create a support case. Full context from the prior conversation is maintained throughout the fallback. After fallback occurs, to prevent customers from repeatedly triggering escalation, the escalation action is blocked for the rest of the session.

      An escalation request can't be routed for the following reasons.

      • No agent is available.
      • The business is closed.
      • The queue is full.
      • The Help Agent isn't assigned an active escalation flow.
      • The LLM times out.
      

      Important To create a case for the customer, the customer must exist as a contact. If no contact record exists, the case isn't created.
7. Interaction ends. The customer's issue is resolved by the Help Agent, handed off to and resolved by a service rep, or captured as a support case for follow-up.

For the default settings, like the default escalation flow and queue, see Customize Help Agent Default Settings.