Transfer-to-Human Triggers: When a Voice Agent Must Escalate on Insurance Calls

Most insurance deployments of voice agents treat human handoff as a fallback — something that happens when the system errors out or the caller explicitly asks for a person. What is missing is a deliberate taxonomy of escalation triggers tuned to the specifics of insurance conversations: member distress, coverage ambiguity, repeated confirmation failures, and multi-policy complexity. The studies below do not address insurance voice agents directly. Their findings about how people respond to AI authority, where agent competence hits walls, and how natural-language task execution scales (or does not) are the basis for the trigger framework proposed here. The insurance-specific implications are the author's inferences, not findings of the cited work, and should be tested against real call data before deployment.