Human Handoff

Use Settings -> Security -> Human handoff to choose when a conversation is escalated to a human. Handoff rules are configured per agent.

Handoff Rules

There are two rules. Each one is wired to a real trigger in the chat pipeline.

When a visitor shares their contact details

• Setting: When a visitor shares their contact details (on by default).
• Escalates as soon as the visitor submits the lead form.
• The visitor keeps chatting with the agent; nothing about their experience changes. You are notified that a human may be needed.

When the agent is unsure of its answer

• Setting: When the agent is unsure of its answer (off by default).
• Escalates when the agent answers with low confidence in your content.
• The visitor still receives the agent’s best answer; the conversation is flagged for a human to follow up.
• A Confidence threshold slider controls how strict this is. A turn escalates when its confidence falls below the threshold. Lower values escalate only the least certain answers; higher values send more conversations to a human. The threshold ranges from 5% to 95% and defaults to 40%.

Escalation fires at most once per conversation, so repeated low-confidence answers in the same chat do not raise multiple handoffs.

What the Visitor Experiences

Handoff is invisible to the visitor. They are never blocked and never told the conversation was escalated. They continue chatting with the agent as normal until a team member replies.

Where Escalated Conversations Surface

Escalated conversations appear in the Conversations inbox with an Escalated badge. Escalation also fires any connected handoff integrations (Slack, Zendesk, and subscribed webhooks) so the same context can reach your existing tools.

Owner Replies

Open an escalated conversation in the Conversations inbox to reply to the visitor directly. A reply composer appears at the bottom of the conversation for escalated conversations only.

• Your reply is delivered to the visitor in the chat widget, on the same side as the agent, attributed to the team member who sent it.
• Replies are capped at 4000 characters.
• Only escalated conversations accept replies. Open or closed conversations do not show the composer.

The handoff_requested Webhook

When a conversation escalates, Engine 64 emits a handoff_requested outbound event to every subscribed webhook. The event carries a reason field:

• lead_form_submitted when the lead-capture rule fired.
• low_confidence when the low-confidence rule fired.

Contact fields (email, name, phone, and so on) are present only on lead_form_submitted handoffs. See Webhooks for the full payload.