Human handoff

A conversation can go from the agent to a person on your team in two ways:

• The agent hands it over, when someone asks for a human, when they’re upset, or when it can’t help.
• You take it over from the Inbox, when you’re watching a conversation and want to step in.

Either way, your team replies from the Inbox, on the same channel the person wrote on, and the agent stays out of that conversation until you hand it back.

It works on the website widget, WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack.

Turn it on

1. Conversation transcripts must be on: Settings → Conversations (owners). The Inbox is where your team reads and replies, so handoff needs it.
2. Open the agent in the Builder → Advanced settings → Hand off to a person → On, and deploy.

The agent gets a built-in hand off to a person tool. It decides when to use it, from what the person writes. To steer it, say when in the agent’s instructions, for example: “Hand off to a person for refunds over 500 SAR, and whenever the customer asks for a manager.”

The agent’s code needs the usual agent = Agent(...) at module level for built-in tools to be added, as the samples do.

What happens

1. The agent calls the tool with a short reason, and tells the person, in their language, that a team member will reply.
2. The conversation is marked Needs a person in the Inbox, with the agent’s reason. The person who built the agent and the owners are notified (bell and email, as each chose in Settings → Notifications).
3. While it’s with a person, the agent doesn’t answer in that conversation. Messages the person sends are kept in the Inbox for your team, and cost nothing.
4. An owner or builder replies in the Inbox. The reply goes out as the agent’s own account on that channel: in the widget, as a WhatsApp message, in the Telegram chat, or in the Slack thread.
5. Hand back to the agent ends it. The person is told “You’re chatting with the assistant again.”, and the agent answers their next message.

On the dashboard’s test console and the API there’s nobody to reply to, so a handoff there only shows in the answer’s How it answered.

When a policy blocks a reply

A policy can hand the conversation over too: turn on Hand the conversation to a person when this blocks a reply. Then, for every agent using that policy, a reply it blocks also hands the conversation to your team, with the reason “The policy … blocked a reply.” The agent doesn’t need Hand off to a person turned on for this.

Take over a conversation

Open a conversation in the Inbox: it refreshes every few seconds while it’s open, so you can watch it as it happens. Click Take over to step in.

• The person is told “A member of the team has joined the conversation.”, and the agent stops answering here. If it’s already writing an answer, that answer still goes out.
• You reply and hand back exactly as after the agent’s own hand-over.
• It doesn’t need the agent’s Hand off to a person setting, only transcripts on, and a conversation on the widget, WhatsApp, Telegram or Slack.
• If the person can’t be reached (the bot was disconnected, or WhatsApp’s 24-hour window has passed), the take-over is refused and the agent keeps the conversation.

On each channel

• Website widget: the visitor sees “A person from the team will reply here.”, and your replies appear in the chat, marked Team. The widget checks for them every few seconds, and picks up again if the page is reloaded in the same browser tab.
• WhatsApp: WhatsApp allows a business to reply only within 24 hours of the customer’s last message. After that, a reply is refused until they write again.
• Telegram and Slack: replies go to the same chat or thread, any time.

If the bot, app or number has been disconnected since, the reply can’t be sent and the Inbox says so.

Who can do what

• Owners and builders read conversations, reply and hand back.
• Viewers, billing and auditors can’t.
• Owners and builders take over.
• The audit log records each take-over, reply and hand-back, without the text.

What’s kept

Handed-off conversations are kept like any other transcript, for your retention period. So that your team can reply or take over, backcrew also keeps each conversation’s reply address on the widget, WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack (a Telegram chat, a Slack thread, a WhatsApp number), encrypted, with the transcript. It’s deleted with the conversation.

While any agent has handoff on, transcripts can’t be turned off. Turn handoff off on those agents first.