# Does your chatbot have to let customers reach a human? **Summary:** EU consumer law requires customers to reach you quickly. The Court of Justice says a chatbot can satisfy that, on one condition most support teams never test. **In short:** The condition your deflection target can quietly break. **Published:** 2026-10-12 ## The number on the dashboard Most support teams have a deflection rate, and most of them want it to go up. It is the cleanest figure in the department. Tickets that did not arrive, costs that were not incurred, a line on a slide that only ever points one way. That same number goes up when a customer gives up and leaves. Automation is fine. The hard part is knowing which of those two things your number counts, and EU law has an opinion about the difference. By the end of this piece you will know what the duty actually is, what the Court of Justice decided about it, and how to test your own site in about five minutes. ## The duty that already applies Before a customer buys anything from you online, you owe them information. Article 6(1)(c) of the [Consumer Rights Directive](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX%3A32011L0083 "Directive 2011/83/EU on consumer rights") lists what: the place where you are established, plus your telephone, fax and email, "where available". Read the purpose clause at the end of that sentence, because it is the part that matters. The information is there "to enable the consumer to contact the trader quickly and communicate with him efficiently." So the obligation turns on whether the customer gets to you fast and can have a useful exchange once they do, rather than on which channels you publish. These duties sit on top of the [eCommerce Directive](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32000L0031 "Directive 2000/31/EC on electronic commerce") rather than replacing it, so an online trader owes both sets at once. That reading is not a stretch, and it is the one the Court of Justice took when somebody finally asked. ## What the Court actually decided In 2019 a German consumer association took Amazon to court, arguing it had not given customers a proper way to make contact because it did not display a telephone number. The case reached the Court of Justice as [C-649/17](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62017CJ0649 "Bundesverband der Verbraucherzentralen und Verbraucherverbände v Amazon EU Sàrl"). The Court said a telephone number is not required in all circumstances. The words "where available" mean what they say, and a trader does not have to publish a phone or fax line, or create an email address, just to satisfy the rule. Other channels can do the job instead, and the Court named online chat and call-back specifically. Most summaries stop there, which is why the case is remembered as the one that let traders drop the phone line. The interesting half is what the Court attached to it. ## The condition nobody tests Those channels count only if the customer can contact you quickly and communicate efficiently, and only if they are presented clearly enough to be found and understood. Three tests, then, and none of them is about which channels exist: - Can the customer reach you **quickly**? - Once connected, can they **communicate efficiently** and actually resolve the thing? - Are the available routes **clear and comprehensible**, rather than technically present? A chatbot satisfies all three or it does not, and nothing about the technology decides which. A well-built one is genuinely faster than a phone queue. The Advocate General in that same case noted that Amazon's automated call-back was more efficient than a call center, which is worth sitting with if your instinct is that automation is the risk here. The risk is narrower than that. It is a chatbot with no way past it. ## Why the deflection number hides this Here is the mistake, and it is an easy one to make with good intentions. A deflection rate counts interactions that did not become tickets. It does not ask why. A customer whose question was answered and a customer who could not find a way through both leave the same trace, and both make the number go up. So a team optimizing hard for deflection can improve the metric by making the route to a person harder to find, and nothing in the dashboard will say so. The number is not lying. It was never measuring what you were using it for. ## Where the Digital Fairness Act fits, and where it does not You may have seen discussion of a right to talk to a human arriving in EU law. The Commission's Digital Fairness Act is expected to address consumer protection online, and its own fitness check flagged that shoppers have no cross-sectoral right to demand a person today. Two things are worth being precise about. The proposal has not been published at the time of writing, and the Commission has indicated a date late in 2026. And whatever it eventually says, it does not change the duty described above, which has applied since the Consumer Rights Directive took effect and was settled by the Court in 2019. In other words, this is not a thing to prepare for. It is a thing to check. ## What a working handoff looks like The practical answer is to design the way through to a person, rather than leaving it as whatever is left over. On [Unless](https://unless.com/en/agent/support/ "Customer Agent: Support"), that way through is a product feature. Where the Customer Agent cannot resolve something, it drafts a response with the full context attached and hands it to a person, who approves, edits and sends. The customer does not restate their problem, and the colleague does not start from a blank screen. That shape matters for the legal test as much as the experience one. "Quickly" is easier to satisfy when the handoff carries the history. "Efficiently" is easier to satisfy when the person picking it up already knows what was asked. ## Run the test on your own site Open your own product the way a customer would, without logging into anything internal, and count. 1. From a typical help page, how many clicks reach a form, a chat queue or an address that puts you in front of a person? 2. Is that route described anywhere a customer would look, in words they would use? 3. Once you take it, how long until a human replies? Measure it, do not estimate it. 4. Does the person who answers see what you already said, or do you repeat yourself? If any of those makes you wince, you have found something worth fixing, and you got there before a regulator or a customer did. Start with the one that costs the most clicks.