Transfers & escalation

When and where to hand a call to a human.

Open AI Receptionist → Transfers & Escalation.

Every assistant needs a way out. This is it.

Where to transfer

Transfer to sets the destination — a team member, a team, or an external number such as a mobile.

You can set more than one for different situations: general enquiries to the office, emergencies to an on-call phone.

What the caller hears

What the AI says before transferring is the line spoken before the handover.

Say what is happening and set an expectation:

"I'll put you through to Mark now — one moment."

Silence during a transfer makes callers think they have been cut off, and they hang up.

What the colleague hears

What the assistant says before connecting is a whisper played to the person receiving the call, before the two sides are joined.

This is valuable and often skipped. A whisper like "Callback for a boiler repair, existing customer, urgent" means your colleague starts the conversation already informed instead of saying "hello, how can I help?" to someone who has just explained everything.

When to transfer

Configure the triggers:

On request. The caller asks for a person. Always honour this — refusing is the fastest way to make someone angry. Never make a caller ask three times.

On emergency. A call matching your emergency definition. Set the on-call number under Scenarios & call types.

On frustration. Escalate frustrated callers automatically watches sentiment and hands over when a caller is getting annoyed. Worth enabling — the cost of an unnecessary transfer is far lower than the cost of a furious customer stuck with a machine.

When out of its depth. When the assistant cannot answer from its knowledge. Better than inventing something.

If nobody answers the transfer

Set the fallback. Options are voicemail, taking a message, or offering a callback.

An unanswered transfer with no fallback drops the call. Configure this — it is the most damaging failure mode the assistant has, because it happens to the callers who most wanted a human.

Transfers and business hours

Transfers respect availability. Outside your business hours there may be nobody to transfer to, so set what the assistant should do instead — usually take a detailed message and flag it for the morning.

Warm versus cold

A warm transfer plays the whisper and lets your colleague accept before connecting. A cold transfer connects immediately.

Warm is better for anything sales-related or sensitive. Cold is faster and fine for a simple redirect.

Test it

Call your assistant, ask for a human, and check: the line is spoken, the right phone rings, the whisper plays, and both sides can hear each other. Then test the unanswered case.