Hand the conversation to a person — live in the Inbox, or by email — with availability hours and the contact details you need.
Human handoff is how a conversation stops being the agent's and becomes yours.
Open Capabilities, then Human handoff.
Two channels
Hey Support Inbox (live chat) — the visitor waits in the widget and a teammate replies from the Inbox. Available on Growth and above.
Email — the request is emailed to your team and the visitor is told someone will get back to them. Available on every plan, including Free.
It is the live chat half that needs Growth, not handoff itself. A Free or Starter agent with an email address configured still shows visitors a "message the team" card — it just does not put them in a live queue waiting for someone who has not been paged.
Slack and webhooks are notification routes rather than channels: a handoff request posts to any Slack channel you have routed and fires the handoff.requested webhook regardless of which channel the visitor used.
When it happens
There are no triggers to configure. The agent offers a human when:
- the visitor asks for one
- it cannot find an answer — your knowledge base has content, but nothing in it was close enough to the question
- the visitor asks the same thing again, rephrased
The third case is the one operators underestimate. A repeated question usually means the first answer missed, and that is exactly when a person should step in.
A conversation that a tool already answered — a product lookup, a booking — does not trigger a handoff, even though the knowledge base had nothing to say about it. The catalog and the calendar are deliberately not in the knowledge base.
Availability
Set when a live handoff is possible: always, business hours, or a custom week you draw yourself. Outside those hours the visitor is told so, and asked to leave details instead of being put in a queue nobody is watching.
Hours are interpreted in the agent's timezone — the one on agent settings, falling back to the workspace default.
Availability is a courtesy, not a lock. If the schedule cannot be read for any reason the agent assumes you are available rather than turning handoff off.
Contact details
Choose what to collect before handing off — name, email, phone, company — each required, optional, or off. Email is always at least optional, so you have some way to reply.
Collecting details is on by default. Outside your hours they are always collected, since there is nobody to answer live.
What the visitor sees
A card offering a person. If live chat is on and you are available, they wait in the widget and see replies land. Otherwise they leave details and get a confirmation.
Phone and company answers are saved onto the lead.