Escalation

Escalation is the mechanism by which a request moves up a competence level: the IVR transfers to the receptionist, the AI agent to the owner, the level-1 technician to level 2. In AI telephony it typically triggers on explicit rules: model confidence below a threshold, an urgency keyword, an explicit request to speak to a human, a topic outside the knowledge base.

The quality of an escalation is judged by continuity: the customer doesn't repeat their story, the context follows the call — conversation summary, name, reason, urgency level. An escalation that resets the caller to square one is worse than no automation at all. For a tradesperson, this is the heart of the deal with an AI agent: the simple stuff is handled alone, what deserves you reaches you, with the context already laid out.