AI Agent Customer Support Readiness Scorecard: Most support agents fail in the handoff, not in the greeting. The demo answers a tidy question, then production users ask about refunds, missing shipments, account changes, angry edge cases, and policies that contradict each other.
Score the workflow, not the model
Do not score only answer quality. Score whether the workflow can identify account risk, cite the right policy, ask for missing information, avoid unauthorized actions, and hand off before the conversation becomes expensive. A cheaper model with a good handoff design can beat a stronger model with no control points.
The five areas I would score
Use five areas: answer correctness, policy grounding, tool permission boundaries, escalation behavior, and observability. A support agent with weak observability should not be trusted with refunds, account changes, or outbound messages, even if the answers sound polished.
A simple score band
85-100 means launch with normal monitoring. 70-84 means launch only for narrow workflows. 50-69 means keep it in assisted mode. Below 50 means the agent should stay internal until the team fixes the control gaps.
What counts as a blocker
Treat missing human handoff, no audit trail, prompt-only authorization, cross-account data exposure, and uncontrolled refund or cancellation tools as blockers. These are not copy issues. They are launch risks.
Use failures as training material
Every failed support conversation should become either a policy clarification, a regression test, a tool permission change, or an escalation rule. If failures only become prompt tweaks, the system will keep drifting.
I would use this when reviewing an AI agent before launch: AI Agent Customer Support Readiness Scorecard. It is practical, specific, and focused on the controls that break in production.Related resources
Next step
If this topic already affects real users or customer data, run a self-assessment first and turn the blockers into a launch checklist. The AI Agent Readiness Self-Assessment is a useful first step.