Most of the work on a good support agent goes into the conversations it doesn’t finish. For Juniper Dental, we wrote the handoff rules before we wrote a single answer.
The stop list
Anything clinical: pain, swelling, bleeding or medication.
Any complaint, even a mild one.
Anything about a bill that has already been sent.
Any patient who asks for a person, the first time they ask.
How the handoff works
When a rule fires, the agent tells the patient who will pick it up and when, and posts the whole conversation to the front desk channel with a one-line summary on top. Nobody has to ask the patient to repeat themselves.
What we measure
We track how often a handoff was needed and how often a person would have handled it the same way. After four weeks, the front desk agreed with 97% of the agent’s decisions to stop.
