Handover and inbox. When a person is needed, your team takes over.
The agent hands a conversation to your team when the customer asks for a person, complains, raises a billing or legal issue, or it cannot help. Your team is alerted and replies from the inbox, Slack or the API.
On this page
When the agent hands over
- The customer clearly asks for a person ("talk to a human", "real person").
- A formal complaint, a refund or billing dispute, a cancellation request, a legal or data-protection demand, or a security incident ("my account was hacked").
- The customer is angry or distressed and the issue is not solved.
- One of your custom escalation triggers appears (Optimize → Safety net).
- The agent could not answer twice in a row.
- The customer says yes after the agent offered to put them in touch with your team.
A question about a topic is answered, not handed over: "Are you GDPR compliant?" gets an answer. When lead capture is on and the agent still needs contact details, it asks for them first so your team can reply.
With Autonomous mode on (Optimize → Safety net), the agent never hands over: it tells the customer their question has been passed on and emails your team.
What the customer sees
- Website chat: "Connecting you to a human agent" with the typical response time, then "Sanne joined the chat" when your team replies. Your team's messages show their first name.
- WhatsApp and Instagram: a short message that the team has it, and a request for contact details when needed.
- Until a person replies, the agent keeps answering. Once someone replies or takes over, the agent goes quiet.
How your team is alerted
- Email to the escalation email (or the billing email for billing issues), with the customer's details, the reason, the conversation and an Open conversation button. Replying to the email does not reach the customer.
- WhatsApp to the alerts number for urgent cases, when you set one.
- Slack: the conversation opens as a thread in your channel (see Slack).
- Webhook:
conversation.escalatedto your own systems (see the API reference).
| Category | Response target |
|---|---|
| Security, distressed customer | 5 minutes |
| Billing, legal | 15 minutes |
| Complaint | 30 minutes |
| Technical, sales | 60 minutes |
| General | 120 minutes |
If a handover is still open at its target, your team gets an "SLA overdue" email and the conversation is marked breached in the inbox.
Work in the inbox
- 1Open Analyze → Conversations. Escalated conversations are listed first. Filter by All, Open, Escalated or Resolved, by channel and by date, or search by name, email or first message.
- 2Open a conversation. For a handover, the Escalation report shows the urgency, category, sentiment and reason, and whether someone has claimed it.
- 3Choose Take over to stop the agent, or simply reply: "Reply as agent". Your first reply claims the handover, so two people never answer at once.
- 4Choose Resolve when it is done, or Resume bot to hand it back to the agent. Reopen opens a resolved conversation again.
Replies reach the customer where they started: live in the website chat, or through your connected WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger account. A handed-over conversation that goes quiet returns to the agent after the Auto-resume time (24 hours by default).
Close a finished handover with Resolve in its Escalation report. This stops the response-target clock.
When your plan has paused replies
If the trial has ended, a payment failed or the month's replies are used up, the agent stops answering. A customer who asks for a person is still handed over as usual, and a conversation already with your team keeps working. Everyone else sees: "Sorry, I can't reply right now. Please try again later or contact us another way."