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Human handover

Human handover lets Sam pass a live conversation to one of your team members when the visitor needs more than AI can give. Pro plan only.

How handover works

A handover is triggered when:

  • The visitor explicitly asks for a human (“Can I speak to someone?”)
  • Sam detects the visitor is frustrated or off-topic
  • The visitor selects “Talk to a human” from a callback form

Once triggered:

  1. The conversation status flips to Escalated in your inbox
  2. Your team is notified (in-app, email, and Slack if configured — see Integrations)
  3. The visitor sees a message: “Connecting you to a member of our team…”
  4. A team member opens the conversation and replies from the conversation detail view

The visitor sees agent replies coming from the agent nickname you set, not from “Sam”.

Configuration

In the Widget Editor → Human handover section:

Enable handover

Master toggle. When off, Sam never offers handover and never escalates.

Agent nickname

The display name visitors see for human messages, e.g. Agent, Support team, or your team member’s first name. Maximum 30 characters.

Wait threshold

How long the visitor waits before Sam shows a “no agent available” message and offers a callback form instead. Range: 0–1800 seconds (default 120 = 2 minutes).

If your team is busy, this prevents visitors from staring at a “connecting…” screen indefinitely.

Working hours

A per-weekday schedule. For each day of the week:

  • Enabled toggle — handover offered on this day at all
  • Start time and end time — when handover is available
  • Timezone — pick your team’s timezone (full IANA list — Europe/Oslo, America/New_York, etc.)

Outside working hours, Sam still answers questions but doesn’t offer handover. Visitors who explicitly ask for a human get a polite “Our team is offline — leave your details and we’ll call you back” message and a callback form.

Best practices

  • Set a realistic wait threshold. 30–60 seconds works for tightly-staffed teams; 2–3 minutes for larger ones with shared inbox handling.
  • Use Slack notifications so your team can react fast. Email is too slow for live handover.
  • Use a generic agent nickname like “Support team” unless you genuinely have one named agent — visitors find name swaps mid-shift jarring.
  • Test handover in the test environment before going live. The widget editor’s Test button opens a private chat where you can trigger handover and see what your visitors see.

What handover doesn’t do

Handover is a real-time human takeover, not a ticketing system. There’s no SLA tracking, queue management, or shift scheduling — for those, use a dedicated helpdesk and connect it via custom webhooks.