Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
The most important thing you configure. Where the conversation goes, when, and what the customer is told.
Set it up
- Open the dialogue where the handover belongs, in the dialogue builder.
- If the handover depends on somebody being there, start the path with an Availability block. That is how you send a messaging conversation to email outside working hours instead of into an empty queue.
- Click the plus icon and select Escalation. Write the message the customer reads at that moment.
- Choose the method. Send an email takes a recipient, a title and optional content. Forward to an agent passes the conversation on; without further instruction it goes to the group set when the AI agent was connected to Support.
- In the details panel, set Escalate to team to send it somewhere else, and Escalation fallback to the dialogue that runs when the handover fails. The Failed escalation reply system reply is what that is for.
- Test it from several points in a conversation.
Add action on the escalation block lets you do something at the same moment, such as setting a field the receiving team needs.
Configure this before anything else
An AI agent that cannot hand over is a trap. Every other setting can be imperfect at launch; this one cannot.
What should trigger it
- The customer asks. Immediately, in whatever words.
- Two failed attempts at understanding. Not five.
- Subjects you have excluded, such as complaints or cancellations.
- Signs of distress or anger in what the customer writes.
Hand over early
The instinct is to let the AI try a little longer, because each attempt might succeed. From the customer's side, each attempt is another minute spent not getting help, and the resentment is cumulative.
An early handover costs one automated resolution. A late one costs the relationship.
Make sure the context travels
It does, and it arrives at the moment of escalation: the conversation history is backfilled into the ticket and the opening messages are inserted then. Until that point the exchange is an AI agent ticket; escalation turns it into an ordinary, editable ticket.
Two consequences that surprise people. The status is set back from Open to New, so an escalated conversation lands in your queue as though it had just arrived. And triggers or automations built on user or organisation tags do not fire while the AI agent has it; they fire from escalation onwards.
Check it once on a real handover rather than assuming it: open the ticket as the receiving agent and read what is there. Making the customer repeat themselves after a failed automated exchange is what customers complain about.
Say what is happening
That they are being passed to a person, and roughly how long. Silence after a handover feels like being dropped.
Decide what happens out of hours
Where nobody is available, say so and take a message. A handover into an empty queue at midnight is worse than the AI saying it cannot help, and the Availability block is what keeps that from happening.
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