A practical guide to Fin AI escalation paths (and their limitations)

Let's be honest, the moment an AI hands a conversation over to a human can make or break a customer's day. If it's smooth, they feel heard and supported. If it's clunky, you're staring down the barrel of a bad review and a frustrated customer who might just leave for good. It’s one of those moments that really count.

Intercom's Fin AI is a pretty powerful tool for handling those first-line support questions. But getting its escalation logic right? That's where a lot of teams get stuck. It's easy to accidentally build rigid rules that don't quite work as expected or, even worse, get a nasty surprise on your bill at the end of the month.

So, in this guide, we’re going to walk through how Fin AI escalation paths actually work. We'll cover how to set them up, poke at their biggest limitations, and look at how a different approach can give you the control and predictable costs you’re probably looking for.

What are Fin AI escalation paths?

In AI support, an "escalation path" is basically the playbook that tells the AI when to throw in the towel and pass the conversation to a human. It’s the bot’s way of raising its hand and saying, "My turn's over, I need an adult."

According to Intercom, Fin has two main ways of deciding when to call for backup:

• Default conversational escalation: This is Fin’s auto-pilot. It uses natural language understanding to sense when a customer is getting frustrated ("this is taking forever"), directly asks for a person ("let me talk to someone"), or just keeps asking the same question. It works right away, but you don't have much say in how it behaves.

• Configured escalation: This is the manual route. You can set your own rules using either simple text instructions ("Guidance") or the more visual, in-depth "Workflows." This is how you start to take the reins and really dictate when and how Fin passes conversations to your team.

How to set up and configure Fin AI escalation paths

While Fin gives you a few options for managing handovers, they boil down to two main types: simple text-based rules and more complex, visual workflows that are tied to the Intercom platform. Here’s a quick look at how you set up each one.

Using guidance for basic Fin AI escalation paths

"Guidance" is what Fin calls its feature for giving it specific instructions in plain text. You can think of it as a simple cheat sheet. For example, you can write a rule like, "If a customer brings up 'refund' or 'cancellation,' send the chat straight to the support team."

This method is great for clear-cut scenarios where a specific word always requires a human. But here's the catch: it's brittle. It banks on you knowing exactly how a customer will phrase their problem. If your rule is looking for "refund" but the customer asks to get their "money back," the rule might not fire. It quickly turns into a never-ending game of cat and mouse as you try to keep up with every new phrase. A different approach, which you'll find in tools like eesel AI, is to use a visual, no-code engine. It lets you build more flexible rules without wrestling with exact text prompts, giving you more reliable control right from the get-go.

Using workflows for advanced Fin AI escalation paths

Intercom Workflows are the more robust way to build out your Fin AI escalation paths. This feature provides a visual builder for creating logic with different branches. For instance, you could design a workflow that spots a VIP customer and routes them to a priority queue, while sending a free user to your help center.

The "Let Fin answer" block is how you plug Fin into these flows. You can drop it into any workflow, and Fin will jump in to handle that part of the conversation.

But there’s a huge catch: this power locks you into the Intercom ecosystem. If your team lives in Zendesk, Freshdesk, or another helpdesk, you’re out of luck. A tool like eesel AI is built differently. It’s made to plug right into the helpdesk you already use, letting you build out smart workflows without needing to uproot your entire team and switch platforms.

Monitoring performance

Fin gives you a few stats to see how it's performing, like the "Fin AI Agent routed to team rate," which shows the percentage of conversations that a human had to take over.

The downside is that this reporting is all about looking in the rearview mirror. You can only review what’s already happened, which makes it tough to predict how any changes you make will play out. You're basically forced to test new rules on live customers and just hope it doesn't blow up. This is a pretty big gamble. It’s a huge contrast to the simulation mode in eesel AI, which lets you test-drive your new rules on thousands of your past tickets before they ever see a real customer.

Key limitations of Fin AI escalation paths

While Fin gives you the basic tools for escalation, support leaders often bump up against three major challenges that curb its flexibility, predictability, and ultimately, its usefulness.

Rigid control and vendor lock-in

As we touched on, Fin's best routing features are tied exclusively to Intercom Workflows. This puts you in a tough spot: either settle for basic escalation rules or move your entire support team and operation over to Intercom.

This kind of "rip and replace" project is a huge headache. We’re talking months of planning, migrating data, and retraining everyone. A tool like eesel AI takes a much simpler approach by plugging into the helpdesk you’re already using, whether that’s Zendesk, Freshdesk, or even Intercom itself. This lets you add powerful workflows without throwing your team's current setup into chaos.

Unpredictable pricing

Fin’s pricing is simple on the surface, but it can really sting: $0.99 for every resolution.

The issue here is that your costs become totally unpredictable. Your support bill could shoot up during a new product launch, a big marketing push, or even a small site outage. This model can even make you hesitant to automate more queries because you're worried about the bill, which is kind of the opposite of why you got an AI in the a first place, right?

eesel AI was designed with exactly this problem in mind. We use transparent, predictable pricing with flat monthly plans and zero per-resolution fees. You can automate to your heart's content and know exactly what your bill will be, letting you scale your support without scaling your anxiety.

Lack of proactive testing

With Fin, changing your escalation rules feels a lot like a "launch and pray" situation. You push the update, cross your fingers, and watch the reports to see if anything broke. This puts your customer experience on the line every single time you want to tweak something.

This is completely different from the simulation mode in eesel AI. You can safely test your entire AI setup, new escalation rules and all, on thousands of your real, historical tickets. It swaps guesswork for actual data, so you know exactly what to expect. You can roll out changes with confidence, not just hope.

Feature	Fin AI	eesel AI
Control & Flexibility	Advanced logic is tied to Intercom Workflows, creating platform lock-in.	Helpdesk-agnostic. Plugs into your current tools (Zendesk, Freshdesk, etc.).
Pricing Model	$0.99 per resolution leads to unpredictable monthly costs.	Flat, predictable monthly plans with no per-resolution fees.
Testing & Rollout	Reactive monitoring. You have to test rules on live customers.	Proactive simulation mode. You can test on historical tickets before going live.

Building better Fin AI escalation paths with eesel AI

A solid AI escalation strategy shouldn't make you switch tools or guess your monthly spend. It should give you full control, easy integration, and the confidence to automate. Here’s how eesel AI makes that happen.

Start with one-click integration, not migration

Getting started with eesel AI is refreshingly simple. It’s a self-serve platform, meaning you can connect your helpdesk and be up and running in minutes, not months. You can handle the whole setup on your own without ever needing to talk to a salesperson (unless you want to). This helps you avoid the cost and chaos of a full platform switch and start seeing results almost right away.

Use selective automation with a visual workflow engine

With eesel AI, you have fine-grained control over your automation. You can start small, maybe just automating "password reset" tickets, and have the AI pass everything else to your team. Once you're comfortable, you can start giving it more to do.

Our easy-to-use prompt editor lets you shape the AI's personality and tone, while our custom actions feature lets it do more than just talk. You can build flows where the AI checks an order status in Shopify or creates a new ticket in Jira, all without needing to write any code.

Test with confidence and report on what matters

The simulation mode is a huge advantage. Before a single customer interacts with your AI, you can run a test on last month’s support tickets. You'll get a clear report showing exactly how many conversations could have been handled automatically.

And it doesn't stop there. The reporting in eesel AI gives you insights you can actually use. It won't just tell you what the AI did; it will point out gaps in your knowledge base. Filling those gaps will directly improve your AI's resolution rate.

Pricing for Fin AI escalation paths

For a full picture, here's a quick look at Fin's pricing. The main thing to keep in mind is that the per-resolution model is at the heart of every plan.

• Fin with your current helpdesk: $0.99 per resolution (with a 50 resolution/month minimum).

• Fin with Intercom’s helpdesk: $0.99 per resolution, plus the cost for the helpdesk seats (which start at $29 per seat/month).

• Add-ons: Fin also has a Copilot feature for human agents, which costs an extra $35 per user/month.

Move beyond basic Fin AI escalation paths

So, while Fin AI escalation paths give you the basics for managing AI-to-human handovers, they come with some serious strings attached: platform lock-in, unpredictable bills, and no way to safely test your changes.

If your team needs more control, flexibility, and a budget that doesn’t change every month, a tool designed to work with your existing setup is probably a much better fit.

eesel AI offers a powerful, self-serve platform that helps you design, test, and launch a smart and reliable escalation strategy. You get full control over your workflows, predictable pricing that you can plan around, and the ability to make changes without risking your customer experience.

Tired of surprise bills and crossing your fingers on every update? See how eesel AI puts you back in control. You can start a free trial or book a quick demo to see the simulation mode for yourself.