Inbox and human handoff
How a person takes over a conversation, and hands it back.
The Inbox is where your team works. Every conversation from every channel appears in it, live.
When a handoff happens
Three ways:
- The visitor asks — "can I talk to someone".
- The agent decides — it has a built-in tool for requesting a handoff, and will use it when it cannot help.
- A rule fires — a blocked topic, a repeated failure to answer, or another condition you configure.
The conversation is then flagged for attention. The visitor is not dropped or told to email you; it stays the same thread.
Taking over
Open the conversation and click Take over. From that moment the agent stops replying and you are talking to the customer directly. Your replies appear in their widget in real time over a WebSocket — no reload, no "an agent will be with you shortly".
While you have it, you can:
- Reply as yourself.
- Insert a canned response — a saved snippet, for the things you type forty times a week.
- Run a macro — several actions at once, such as replying, tagging and closing.
- Add a note — internal, never shown to the customer.
- Tag the conversation.
- Assign it to a teammate.
Handing back
Hand back returns the conversation to the agent. It keeps the full history, including what you said, so it does not contradict you in the next message.
Hand back when the thing that needed a person is done. Leaving conversations parked with an operator is how an inbox becomes a backlog.
Statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
open | Active |
pending | Waiting on the customer or on something you are doing |
closed | Done |
Contacts
Each conversation is linked to a contact. From the contact you can see everything that person has ever asked, across every channel, along with their labels and your notes. It is the difference between answering a question and knowing who is asking.
Who can work the inbox
The operator role exists exactly for this: it can handle conversations and read
analytics, and can change nothing about your agents or knowledge. It is the right role for
a support team that should not be able to edit prompts.
owner, admin and editor can also work the inbox.
Keeping an eye on it
The Attention view collects conversations that need a human — handoff requests, and conversations flagged by a guardrail. Working that list is the daily routine.
Analytics tracks handoff rate over time. A rising handoff rate is usually not a staffing problem; it means the agent has stopped being able to answer something it used to handle, or your customers are asking about something new. Check the unanswered questions report before adding people.