I am helping our bot team with an error handling problem. We are seeing cases where our bot flow fails because of a timeout with an external Data Action. When this happens, the call is just disconnected and the customer is left frustrated. I want to implement a ‘Failover’ logic where the customer is automatically transferred to a human agent if the bot encounters any technical error. How can I capture these bot flow errors and trigger a transfer in Architect?
I maintain over fifty flows and I have seen these bot failures cause a lot of customer dissatisfaction. You should wrap your bot flow block in an ‘Error Handling’ container within your main Architect flow. If the bot flow returns an ‘Error’ outcome, you can catch it and route the call to a specific ‘Emergency Support’ queue. Also, make sure your bot flow itself has ‘Timeout’ paths for every Data Action. If the action fails, the bot should say something like ‘I am sorry, I am having trouble’ before it triggers the transfer.
I want to add that you should also log these bot errors for your audit reports. When the failover happens, you should use the ‘Set Participant Data’ action to store the specific error message and the bot state at the time of failure. This will help your reporting team identify which Data Actions are causing the most issues so you can fix them. We use these logs to ensure our banking interactions stay within our strict uptime requirements.