The automation-rate trap
Vendors love to advertise automation rates — "we handle 95% of calls end to end." It's the wrong scoreboard. Chasing a higher rate pushes an agent to avoid transferring, which means it improvises exactly where improvisation is most expensive.
Flip the metric. The right question is: of the calls that should have reached a human, how many did — and how fast? A 75% rate with instant, correct handoffs beats a 95% rate that traps edge cases in a loop.
Five calls that always reach a person
Allergies and dietary risk, complaints, anything touching money already spent, emotionally loaded calls, and requests outside the menu. The cost of a wrong answer on an allergy call is not a refund — Nomly treats allergy language as an immediate transfer trigger.
Everything else — orders, hours, directions, reservation basics, catering intake — is well inside what a grounded agent handles cleanly, 24/7.
What a good handoff looks like
Fast: a few seconds from trigger to transfer, so the guest feels routed, not deflected. Warm: the person picking up sees caller, intent and transcript, so nobody repeats their story. Honest: the agent says what's happening.
When nobody can pick up — 2am, or mid-rush — the agent takes a structured message, tags it by urgency, and texts the right person. The handoff still happens, just asynchronously.
You decide where the line sits
A taqueria might let the agent run catering intake end to end; a fine-dining room might route every reservation change to a person. Handoff rules follow the same permission model as everything else: report only, ask first, or run automatically.
The agent earns scope — it doesn't assume it. That's why every automation we ship shows its permission level before you turn it on.
