How should a website AI assistant hand an enquiry to a person?
A useful assistant needs a clear next step when a visitor needs a person. Before building, write a short handoff plan: when to stop, what to summarise and how the visitor contacts you. The fictional bicycle repair example below is an original planning worksheet, not a report of customer results.
1. Define what handing over actually means
For a small workshop, the first version might help visitors describe a repair before they email the business. That is enquiry preparation. A website presents information and contact routes; a retrieval-based chatbot uses an approved collection to help answer questions; an agent with actual tool permissions may perform specified actions. A conversation alone does not establish those permissions. Write the boundary plainly: “Prepare a repair enquiry; a person confirms whether the workshop can help.”
2. Choose clear reasons to stop
In this fictional workshop, a visitor asking “Can you definitely repair this by Friday?” needs a person to confirm feasibility and timing. Other handoff triggers could include missing approved information, contradictory requirements or a direct request to speak to someone. Record the trigger and the next step together. Avoid making visitors complete an entire questionnaire before showing the contact route when they have already asked for human help.
3. Prepare a short, editable summary
An example summary could read: “Request: assess a bicycle with gears that skip. Visitor reports: skipping began yesterday. Preferred timing: before Friday, if possible. Still unknown: bicycle model and repair availability.” Keep the visitor's description separate from anything the business has confirmed. Do not turn “gears skip” into a diagnosis. Ask the visitor to correct the summary before sharing it. This adapts the review-before-submission principle in the GOV.UK check answers pattern to an enquiry prepared in conversation.
4. Show a contact route the business supports
Use an existing, monitored channel and explain what the visitor needs to do next. For example: “Copy this summary into an email to the workshop. The workshop will need to confirm whether it can help.” Publish response expectations only when the business has approved them and can maintain them. The GOV.UK contact pattern recommends consistent contact information and explaining waiting times. Applied here, that means giving a usable route without inventing a response deadline.
5. Make the sending status unmistakable
If the assistant only prepares text, finish with “Your summary is ready to copy; it has not been sent.” Opening an email app does not establish that the visitor sent the message or that the business received it. On Your Temp Agent, the contact form queues an enquiry for private email delivery to Fran. An optional brief download saves a local copy; downloading alone does not send it. SousChef is a real build for the founder's catering business: it helps prepare an enquiry, but the visitor chooses to send it through their email app. It cannot reserve a date or confirm a booking.
6. Rehearse the whole handoff
Try a fictional conversation where the visitor changes their preferred day, asks for a person and then requests a summary. Check that the correction survives, the contact route is visible and nothing implies a message was delivered. Use our reply-testing guide for the wider checklist. To discuss your own version, include the handoff trigger, summary fields and existing contact route in your project brief.
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