Human handoff

Human handoff lets an AI agent pass a customer to a real person on web chat, WhatsApp, or a phone call, in the same conversation. The request arrives in Live support with an AI-written summary, so the customer does not have to repeat the problem.

Tickets remain the fallback. A live handoff is for help now; a ticket is for follow-up when the team is closed, nobody is online, or nobody picks the customer up in time.

Who can do what:

Set it up #

An owner or admin opens Live support → Settings, which opens Human handoff settings.

Hand each customer to one person at a time #

When everybody sees the same queue, everybody can assume somebody else will take the next customer. Auto-assign removes that: each waiting customer is reserved for one person for a short window, then offered to the next.

Who is offered a customer, in order:

1. Only responders who are available right now, have that channel turned on under Receiving, are in Eligible responders, and are under their Most conversations at once.
2. The least busy first: fewest conversations they are handling now.
3. Then whoever has taken the fewest customers in the last 12 hours.
4. Then whoever has gone longest since their last one.

Some rules keep it fair:

• One offer per person at a time. Nobody is asked to take two customers at once.
• One call at a time. Someone already on a call is never offered another call, whatever Most conversations at once says. They can still be offered a chat.
• One offer per customer. Each person is offered a given customer once; if their window runs out, that customer moves on and does not come back to them.
• Two misses and you are skipped. A person who lets two offers in a row run out is left out of the offers until they next accept a customer, or turn availability off and on again. They can still take customers from the queue themselves.
• Running out of time opens it to everyone. When there is no longer room for a full window before the request would expire, the customer is opened to everyone.

In the queue, a customer reserved for you shows ⚡ Yours to take · 42s, highlighted, with a countdown. A customer reserved for someone else shows With Priya · 18s, dimmed. Members cannot accept a customer reserved for someone else; they are told Priya Nair has this one for a few more seconds. It opens to everyone if they don't start. An admin can accept it anyway, so somebody can step in when a shift goes wrong. If Eligible responders has anyone ticked, that admin must be one of them.

When you are offered a customer, the console alert reads Your turn · chat (or call) with the customer's name: Start within a moment or it moves to someone else.

What the customer hears #

During live hours, with at least one eligible responder available on that channel, the agent offers a person once the conversation reaches the transfer threshold. After the customer agrees, the agent queues the request and stops working the issue itself.

Outside live hours the agent does not volunteer the schedule. If it cannot solve the issue it uses the ticket fallback. If the customer insists on a person now, it tells them when the team next opens and creates the same single fallback ticket. The customer gets the ticket reference in the conversation.

If nobody accepts within Maximum live wait, the request becomes a ticket (when the fallback is on).

If human handoff is off for the workspace or for that channel, the agent is not given the ability. It cannot promise a transfer you have turned off.

Go available #

The switch at the top right of Live support is your status: Available with a green dot, or Offline. Next to it is your shift:

Receiving, on the right above the queue, has a chip for Web chat, WhatsApp and Phone. Turn off a channel you cannot handle this session, for example Phone when you have no headset. The chips only work while you are available.

How availability behaves:

• It only holds inside live hours. You can turn it on only during a scheduled window, and at the end of a window everyone still available is signed off. A toast says You are outside your organisation's live hours, so you have been signed off. You can go available again from … with the day and time the next window opens. It does not carry over to the next window; turn it on again when your next shift starts.
• It needs an open console. The console confirms you are still there about every 45 seconds. If the tab is closed or loses its connection, you drop out of the queue.
• It works anywhere in the console. You do not have to sit on the Live support page. Alerts reach you on any page, and Open brings you back.
• Turn it off before you step away. Otherwise customers can be offered to you while you are gone, and with auto-assign they wait out your window first.

Make the queue audible #

A responder watching another tab will miss a customer unless the browser makes a noise. While you are available, every new request:

• rings;
• shows a toast with the customer's name, the AI summary, and Open;
• shows a desktop notification, if you allowed it.

The toast title is Your turn · chat or Your turn · call when the customer is reserved for you, New live handoff for a chat in the shared queue, and Incoming call handoff for a phone call. The ring stops as soon as anyone takes the customer, on any device, or when you dismiss the toast.

Settings → Notifications → Live support alerts on this device controls how this browser alerts you:

Use Hear it once: the ring is meant to be loud enough to work from across the room.

The queue #

The buttons above the queue filter it:

Each row shows the channel, the customer's name or id, their phone number, the AI summary, the channel and when they asked. Badges show the state (queued, assigned, active) and away when a customer in an active chat has gone quiet. View contact under a row opens the customer in Contacts.

Select a row to open it. The header shows the customer's phone, email and View contact, the channel, when they asked, when they were last seen if they are away, and who owns it. AI context opens the full summary the agent wrote when it handed over.

Work a live handoff #

Every staff message also appears in Inbox with a Human label and your name, images included, so the transcript stays complete.

Phone handoffs #

When the agent transfers a call, it leaves the call and the caller hears hold music. When you accept, a call panel opens in the browser. Allow microphone access. Your audio replaces the hold music on the same call: the customer is not called again and does not have to dial anything.

The panel shows the state: Joining the customer…, then Live human handoff with a timer. Controls:

• Mute silences your microphone only.
• Hold silences your microphone and plays hold music to the caller; the panel shows Customer on hold. Resume reconnects you.
• End call hangs up.

If the caller hangs up, the panel stays open and says Customer hung up, so a normal hang-up is not mistaken for a browser problem. Other end states are Call ended by support, Connection failed and Call ended. Choose Close once you have read it, then Resolve the handoff.

Browser calling has to be enabled for your workspace. If it is not, phone calls cannot be joined from the console; keep Phone off under Receiving.

Refresh, reconnect, and away status #

Refreshing the website restores the visitor's chat from the server and reconnects the same live handoff, including human names, Human labels, join and end notices, and images. The browser stores only anonymous ids, not message text.

If the customer goes quiet for Show visitor as away after, the queue shows away and the header shows Customer away with when they were last seen. On web chat, that means the chat widget is hidden or closed. Away never ends the handoff: when they come back, it carries on.

After End inactive live chat after passes with no message from either side, an accepted web or WhatsApp chat ends with a notice. A later message from the customer can start help again. Maximum live wait is separate: it applies only before anyone accepts.

For each website deployment, Appearance → Remember conversations controls whether ordinary AI chats resume after a refresh: for 24 hours, 7 days (default) or 30 days from the last message. An active human handoff always resumes, whatever that setting says. Start over is not available to the visitor while a person is helping them.

Take over from the Inbox #

You do not have to wait for the agent to hand over. On a WhatsApp conversation in Inbox, Take over opens a live-support session that is already yours: no queue, no offer. The customer is told you have joined, the agent holds back while the session is open, and you are taken to Live support to reply.

• Members can take over if they are an eligible responder (or the list is empty). Admins can take over a conversation that is not already in the queue even when they are not in the list.
• Take over is on WhatsApp conversations only. Calls cannot be taken over from the Inbox; a live call reaches you as a phone handoff.
• If the customer is already waiting in the queue, Take over accepts that request instead, so you need to be available on that channel and, when Eligible responders has anyone ticked, be one of them. This applies to admins too.
• Live support opens on the first row of the queue, which may not be the conversation you took over. Look for it under In progress, owned by you.

Finish a taken-over chat the same way: Resolve or Return to AI.

Live handoff versus ticket #

The agent creates only one piece of support work per escalation. With human handoff on, the handoff owns the flow and creates a fallback ticket only when live help is unavailable or nobody accepts in time. Your team can still raise a follow-up ticket afterwards when the case needs one.

The tracker #

Live support has two views, switched at the top: Workspace, the queue you work in, and Tracker, which is admin-only and answers how the team is doing. Pick a period: Today, Last 7 days, or Last 30 days.

Right now #

The first card describes the present, in a sentence: how many people are on shift, how many are on a break, and whether anyone is waiting. Beside it are the live counts: waiting for a person, being helped now, and, when it is not zero, still to get a first reply.

Customers waiting with nobody on shift is the state this card exists to make impossible to miss.

Your team #

Everyone who was on shift or picked up a customer in the period, with their current presence, how many customers they helped and finished, and a bar splitting their shift into working time and break time. Bars are scaled against the longest shift on the team, so lengths compare across people.

A row can also say that customers went to someone else after no reply. That is auto-assign moving a customer on after this person's window ran out. It is recorded, not judged: the usual reason is that they were already busy with another conversation.

Select anyone to open their detail: customers helped, finished and still open; their typical waiting, first-reply and handling times; a week of shift bars, each day drawn as a timeline of shift and break; the share of their shift spent with customers; and which channels their customers came from. When customers moved on from them under auto-assign, it also says how many were offered to them and how many they started.

Clock times in the shift record are in the time zone your live hours use, not the viewer's, so a manager reading from another country sees the same 09:00 their team saw.

How your team did #

Outcomes over the period, by day and in total: how many customers reached a real person, how many gave up waiting, how many were sorted out and closed, and how many were handed back to the AI. The headline puts it plainly, for example 9 in 10 customers reached a real person, with the exact counts beneath.

How quickly customers were looked after #

Three timings, each written as a sentence: how long most customers waited before someone picked them up, how quickly most got a first reply after that, and how long a conversation usually took from pick-up to finish. The first two also state the slow end (the longest anyone waited, the slowest first reply), because that is what generates complaints.

A timing nothing has reached yet reads Not measured yet, never 0s.

Troubleshooting #

I can't turn availability on, or it switches itself off. You are outside live hours. The note beside the switch says when the next window opens. An admin can change the hours in Settings.

I'm available but get no customers. Check Receiving: the channel may be off. Check that you are in Eligible responders. With auto-assign on, you may have missed two offers in a row; accept the next customer from the queue yourself and offers resume.

The agent creates a ticket instead of offering a person. Check that human handoff and that channel are on, that it is inside live hours, and that at least one eligible responder is available on that channel.

I can't accept a customer. Go available for this channel before accepting. means you are offline or that channel is off under Receiving. … has this one for a few more seconds means it is reserved for someone else; wait for the countdown. This handoff request has expired. means it waited past Maximum live wait and became a ticket.

A WhatsApp reply fails. The customer may have opted out, or their 24-hour window has closed. Carry on through a ticket rather than working around the channel's rules.

A staff message is missing from Inbox. Refresh the conversation and check the handoff is on the same channel thread. Human messages carry the sender's name and a Human label.

The customer shows away. The handoff has not been dropped. The customer has simply been quiet, or closed the web chat. Keep it open until they return or End inactive live chat after ends it.

A phone handoff won't connect. Allow microphone access, and check that the call is still live. Only the person who accepted a phone handoff controls hold.

No sound or desktop alerts. Alerts are set per browser in Settings → Notifications. Check Desktop notification is not Blocked by your browser, and that the tab has been clicked at least once since it opened (browsers block sound until you interact with the page).

For asynchronous support, see Working tickets. For reviewing the AI part of a conversation, see Conversations and contacts.