When Karas declines to answer

Karas would rather say nothing than guess. There are four different ways a conversation can end without a straight answer, and they mean different things.

It asks a clarifying question

The question was too broad or too ambiguous to search usefully, so it asks for more. "Which plan are you on?" is a better response to an ambiguous billing question than an answer about the wrong plan.

It says the question needs a person

Nothing in your documentation supported an answer well enough to give one. The visitor is told:

I can't verify enough information in the knowledge base to answer this safely. This one needs a human support agent.

This states a fact and promises nothing. It does not open a ticket on its own — see below.

It says it could not finish

The request took longer than its time budget allows. The visitor is told the request could not be completed and that a person can help. This is rare and usually transient; asking again often works.

It replaces an answer that broke a rule

An answer was written but made a forbidden claim, so it was discarded. See What Karas is not allowed to say.

Declining does not create a ticket

This is worth being clear about, because it surprises people. None of the four outcomes above files anything in your helpdesk. A handoff is something the visitor chooses: the Talk to a human control sits beside the message, and pressing it is what creates a ticket.

The reasoning is that a customer who has been told "this needs a person" may well go and read the article instead, or ask a different question, or leave. A ticket created for them regardless would fill your queue with conversations nobody asked you to continue.

How often this happens

On our own benchmark, the rate at which answers are withheld sits at or near one in a hundred, and varies between runs. It depends much more on your documentation than on anything we control: a help centre that covers your common questions well produces very few. The list of questions your documentation cannot answer is part of the report we send you at setup.