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, what the visitor reads while it happens, and which risky topics hand over automatically.
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.
Note
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.
Agents only
Support and Team Agents only. A personal twin answers as one person, so there is nobody behind it to hand a conversation to — and rather than offer a page that could never route anywhere, hiy doesn’t show it at all.
That is why nothing on your own twin’s settings mentions escalation. What a personal twin does when it can’t answer is say so, and — if you have switched follow-up requests on — offer to take the visitor’s details so you can reply yourself. That is the personal twin’s version of the same idea: a person at the end of it, just not in the same minute.
When to hand over
Three choices. Pick one.
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.
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.
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
A handover happens whatever the clock says, whether or not you’ve set Team Hours below — the question is recorded the moment it happens, it’s in this agent’s Inbox tab from that second, and nothing here ever stops it. Turning Team Hours on changes what the visitor reads while it happens; it never changes whether the handover itself goes through.
The handover email you get now carries the visitor’s recent messages and a short AI summary, not just their contact details — so you know what they asked before you reply.
Team hours
By default hiy doesn’t know your team’s hours and won’t guess at them — a visitor told the wrong thing about your availability is worse off than one told nothing, so unless you turn this on, nobody is ever told “the team is offline”.
Turn on Set weekly hours and pick which days you’re on and what time each one opens and closes, in your account’s own timezone — the same one the nightly training sweep already uses, captured automatically from your browser rather than asked for a second time. There are no holidays and no exceptions: a bank holiday is an ordinary working day to this schedule, which is the trade-off for something you set once rather than maintain forever.
Outside those hours, a visitor who’s handed over reads a fixed, honest sentence instead of the usual one — that the team is currently outside its usual hours, and, whenever it can say so honestly, when they’re next online (“Monday at 9am”). The wording isn’t yours to edit, the same way the safety floor’s sentences aren’t: it’s short on purpose, and it’s the one place in hiy where the words are fixed rather than a starting point you can change. The same sentence, with the same honest time, is also in the handover receipt email below.
If you haven’t opened a dashboard page in a browser yet, hiy hasn’t captured your timezone — the toggle nudges you to reload rather than guessing at one for you.
Who it reaches
Note
The panel tells you which of two states you are in, because it reads the deployment rather than assuming. Under the address field you will see one of:
- “Handovers are emailed to …, and are in this agent’s Inbox either way.” — email is set up, and both paths run.
- “Handovers are recorded in this agent’s Inbox; email delivery is not set up on this deployment.” — the address is still saved, and starts being used the day it is.
Either way the handover reaches you, because the Inbox tab is not the fallback — it is where a handed-over conversation is recorded the moment it happens, whether or not anything was also mailed.
By default a handover is addressed wherever this agent’s notifications already go: the notification email you set in Settings → Notifications, or, if you haven’t set one, the address you sign in with.
Fill in Send handovers to and handovers are addressed 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.
Who it’s assigned to
Owner-only, the smallest version of a bigger idea. Open a conversation from the Inbox and, if you own the twin, there’s an Assignee picker beside its status: any member of this twin’s team, or Unassigned. Assigning it emails that colleague the same transcript excerpt and summary your own handover alert carries, so they know what they’re picking up before they open the Inbox. Reassigning replaces the mark; choosing Unassigned removes it rather than leaving a stale name behind.
- A different mark from “I replied.” Assignment says who a conversation is for; the reply mark (Who took it) says who has already acted on it. The two can disagree — assigned to Sam, replied by Priya — and both show.
- Visible to everyone who can open the Inbox, invited colleagues included — only the owner can change it. A colleague reads “Assigned to Sam” the same way they read “Replied by Priya”: it’s information, not a control, for them.
- Removing someone from your team clears any conversation still assigned to them, so an ex-colleague is never left holding an open handover nobody can see they no longer own.
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.
A Support Agent created from a preset starts on that preset’s own sentence, not the generic default — “Let me pass this to the team with your order details — someone will pick it up” for Orders & billing, say, rather than a one-size line that never mentions what was actually asked. Start from scratch gets the generic default above. Either way it’s a starting point, not a fixed one: edit it here whenever you like.
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.
Safety
Some messages hand over before your agent ever sees them — checked on what the visitor typed, in any language, ahead of any answer-generating model call.
The self-harm and minors floor applies to every agent, a personal twin included — even though a personal twin has no Escalation page. The two toggles below only exist where the agent can hand over, so they don’t apply to a personal twin.
Self-harm and minors always hand over. That floor can’t be turned off. The visitor reads a short, kind sentence — not a helpline name — and the offer to reach a person:
| Topic | What the visitor reads |
|---|---|
| Self-harm | “I’m really sorry you’re going through this. I’m not the right one to help with it, but a person can — want me to connect you?” |
| Minors | “I can’t help with this one, but a person can — want me to connect you?” |
Two more are yours to choose, each its own toggle:
| Toggle | Default | Hands over when |
|---|---|---|
| Jailbreak attempts | On | A message tries to override your agent’s instructions. |
| Advice topics | Off | A question asks for medical, legal, or financial advice — off by default, since many agents are asked for advice all day. |
A message that matches a category never reaches the model: your agent’s usual answer, citations and guardrails don’t apply to it, because it was never asked. What the visitor says next — asking to be connected — is the same handover offer as any other, going through Who it reaches, above.
Saving your changes
Nothing on this page saves as you type. A strip appears at the bottom the moment you change something, and it names the group holding the edit — “Unsaved changes in When to hand over” — so a change made in a group you have since collapsed can’t be forgotten. Save handover policy, on that strip, saves the whole page at once — it is still one Save for every setting on the page, and it still costs no training, exactly as it did when it sat at the bottom of the page. Discard beside it puts every field back to its last saved value and asks nothing first, because everything it drops is still on screen in front of you.
With nothing pending there is no strip and no button. There used to be one at the bottom of the page whether or not you had touched anything, which told you nothing about whether it was worth pressing. If a save is refused, the reason is printed on the strip beside the button that produced it. A confirmed Saved. Your agent uses this on its next answer. appears under the groups instead, and only while nothing is pending — the two are never on screen together.
Leaving the page with an edit still on the strip asks you first, in the same words the rest of hiy uses: Saving what you change.
What a handover actually does
When a visitor hands their question over on a Support Agent:
Their question goes with it.
Always, whatever your other notification settings say, because somebody is stuck right now. Turning your notifications off never silences a handover — it lands either way.
Sent. The team has your question and your email. And a receipt is emailed to the address they just left, confirming the same thing — with how long the team usually takes to reply once enough real replies exist to say so honestly (hiy never invents a number). If you’ve set Team hours and they’ve caught you outside them, both the on-screen sentence and the receipt say so plainly instead, with an honest next-opening time when one can be given.
So you can read what led up to it. This is the one place a handover always reaches you. Whether an email reaches you as well depends on the deployment: where email is set up a handover is emailed and recorded here; where it is not, it is recorded here and nothing is sent. The panel above says which of the two you are in rather than assuming — which is why the Inbox, not your mailbox, is the thing to check. See Where a lead came from and Notifications.
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 over. Those two facts are counted separately on purpose, and Deflection and escalation explains why.