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The agent handles most calls end to end. Transfer rules cover the ones it shouldn’t — emergencies, escalations, and anything where a person needs to be on the line. Getting these right is what makes the system safe to leave running unattended.

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What to transfer

Always transfer

Genuine emergencies — gas smell, flooding, no heat in freezing weather, anything with a safety dimension. An angry customer. Anything legal or insurance-related.

Usually don't

Price questions, availability, booking, rescheduling, general enquiries. The agent handles these better than a transfer to a voicemail box would.
Define your emergency triggers explicitly, in the words customers actually use — “I smell gas”, “water everywhere”, “no heat and there’s a baby in the house”. Don’t rely on the agent inferring urgency from tone.

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Where transfers go

Configure the destination and the fallback chain:
1

Primary destination

Whoever should take the call — an on-call mobile, a dispatcher, a shared line.
2

Fallback

What happens when the primary doesn’t pick up. A second number, or back to the agent to take a detailed message.
3

Last resort

Never a dead end. The caller should always finish the call having been told what happens next and when.
Test the whole chain, including the fallback, by calling in and triggering an emergency yourself. An untested transfer rule is a promise you haven’t checked you can keep — and it fails on the worst possible call.

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Hours matter

An emergency at 2pm and one at 2am should route differently. Set destinations per time period so the after-hours calls reach whoever is genuinely on call, rather than ringing an empty office.

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Cost

Each human escalation bills at $3 on every plan — see Plans. It’s deliberately cheap relative to the value of catching an emergency; don’t tune your rules around it. If your escalation count is high, the fix is usually a gap in the knowledge base, not a stricter rule.

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Reviewing transfers

Transferred calls are flagged in your call logs, and fire the call.human_escalation webhook. Review them regularly:
  • Transfers that shouldn’t have happened — the agent didn’t know something it should. Add it to the knowledge base.
  • Calls that should have transferred and didn’t — a missing trigger. Add the phrasing the caller actually used.