Guardrails And Safety medium
You are designing a banking support bot. Leadership tracks containment rate, the percentage of conversations resolved without a human, and wants it as high as possible. Users bring up card disputes and account closures, and some express distress. How should escalation work?
- A Let the bot attempt every request and escalate only after three consecutive failed answers, maximizing the containment rate.
- B Escalate only when the output classifier flags a response, and treat each handoff as a failure to be driven toward zero.
- C Have the bot answer everything but append a disclaimer telling users to call support for high-stakes account matters.
- D Define triggers (high-stakes intents, low confidence, explicit request), hand off with context, and track resolution quality.
Answer: D. Define triggers (high-stakes intents, low confidence, explicit request), hand off with context, and track resolution quality.
**Escalation to a human is a product feature, not a failure**. Defined triggers with a context handoff send high-stakes or uncertain cases to people, at the cost of lower containment and higher staffing spend. Escalating only after repeated failures (A) is tempting because it maximizes the metric, but by then a frustrated or harmed user has already been let down. Aggressive containment fits low-stakes FAQ bots, not financial disputes.
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