Escalation & Handover
How conversations are transferred from AI to human agents.
Escalation Triggers
There are three ways a conversation can be escalated:
1. Manual button
The widget shows a "Talk to human" icon button next to the input area. Clicking it immediately escalates the conversation via POST /conversations/:id/escalate.
2. Explicit user request
If the user types a phrase like "I need a human", "talk to agent", "позовите оператора", or similar — the system detects this before calling the AI and immediately escalates. Detection is language-agnostic: an intent classifier recognizes handover requests in any language, and a built-in phrase list (English, Russian, Spanish, French, Turkish) short-circuits the most common requests instantly.
3. AI-detected handover
The agent decides for itself. While composing an answer it reads the material retrieved from your knowledge base, and when that material does not answer the question it emits a handover marker instead of improvising. The conversation moves to your team and the customer is told a person is coming — no threshold to tune, and no score standing between the customer and a human.
What Happens After Escalation
| Behavior | Details |
|---|---|
| AI responses | Stopped. All new user messages are saved as follow-ups and forwarded to the team. |
| Widget UI | Shows a "Waiting for agent" banner. The input stays active — the user can keep typing, and new messages are saved as follow-ups and forwarded to the team; the input placeholder changes to "An agent will reply here shortly...". A "Continue with AI" button lets the user resume AI conversation if needed. |
| Notifications | In-app notification is created for the support team. Email alert is sent if configured. |
| Routing & assignment | The conversation is assigned to your default support team, then auto-assigned to an available teammate (round-robin or least-busy, respecting each teammate's open-conversation cap). If auto-assignment is disabled or no teammate is available, it stays in the team queue under "Needs human" for manual pickup. |
| Auto-resolve | Escalated conversations are never auto-closed once a teammate is involved: any conversation that is assigned, escalated, or has a human reply stays open until a person resolves it. Auto-resolve applies only to bot-handled threads: inactive bot-only conversations close after a period of inactivity (default 30 minutes, configurable per AI agent). If an escalated conversation is abandoned before pickup, the bot first sends a check-in message and closes it only after 24 more hours of silence. |