Handing over to a person
A Support or Team Agent that can't answer shouldn't leave someone stuck. The Escalation page is where you decide when it stops trying, who that reaches, and what the visitor reads while it happens.
It's three settings, not a rule builder. Support and Team Agents have the page; a personal twin doesn't, because it answers as one person and has nobody behind it to hand a conversation to.
Changes here are live on the next question. Nothing is rebuilt and no training is used — editing the sentence your visitors read costs you nothing from your monthly allowance, the same as changing your voice or your rules.
When to hand over
Three choices. Pick one.
- When it can't answer — your agent admits the gap, then offers to pass the question on. This is what every agent does today, and it's what you get if you never open this page.
- Or when asked for a person — the same, plus any time somebody asks to speak to a human. It's additive: asking for a person is a second reason to hand over, never a replacement for the first one.
- Never hand over — no handover is offered and nobody is promised a reply. Your agent still says plainly when it can't answer; it just stops there. On a Support Agent this also removes the email box a visitor would otherwise see under an "I don't know", so what the agent says and what's on screen agree.
There is no ordered list of conditions here on purpose. Two rules need an order, an order needs a tie-break, and before long you'd be learning a workflow engine to say "hand over when you're stuck". If you find yourself wanting a second rule, tell us what it is — that's a decision worth making out loud rather than one that arrives by accident.
Handover is always attempted
There are no working hours, and hiy will not guess at yours. It doesn't know when your team is on, so it never tells a visitor "the team is offline". A handover is attempted whatever the clock says, and the notification lands in your inbox the moment it happens.
That's deliberate. A visitor told the wrong thing about your availability is worse off than one told nothing — and a schedule this product can't honour would be exactly that.
Who it reaches
By default a handover goes wherever this agent's notifications already go: the notification email you set in Voice & rules, or, if you haven't set one, the address you sign in with.
Fill in Send handovers to and handovers go somewhere else — a shared support inbox, say — without moving your other emails. Leave it empty to go back to the default. Change your notification address later and the default follows it, because there's no second copy of it stored here.
This setting is on Support Agents. A Team Agent hands over in words: it tells a colleague that this one's for you, and your colleagues already know how to reach you.
What it says while handing over
The sentence a visitor reads after your agent says it can't answer. There's a sensible default; edit it so the handover sounds like your team rather than like the agent giving up.
Keep it short — the box caps at 200 characters, which is about two lines of chat, and it's a sentence in a conversation rather than a policy statement. Clear the box to go back to the default.
Your agent says it in these words or close to them. It won't recite it robotically over a question it can answer, and it can't be used to overrule the rules that never bend: your agent still says it's an AI when asked, still sticks to what your sources support, and still never invents an answer.
What a handover actually does
When a visitor hands their question over on a Support Agent:
- They leave an email address, and their question goes with it.
- You get an email straight away — always, whatever your other notification settings say, because somebody is stuck right now.
- They get a receipt confirming a person has it, with your team's usual reply time once there's enough history to state one honestly.
- The conversation is in your Inbox, so you can read what led up to it. See Where a lead came from.
What this doesn't change
Turning handover off doesn't change your numbers. Escalation rate counts conversations where your agent said it couldn't answer, as the server saw it — not whether anyone was handed off. Those two facts are counted separately on purpose, and Deflection and escalation explains why.