Inbox and human handoff

Every conversation from every channel lands in your Inbox.

Find your way around the Inbox

• All — every open chat. Chats waiting for a person always come first, with how long they've waited.
• Needs human — only chats handed to your team (the sidebar shows how many are waiting). Mine — chats assigned to you.
• Handled by AI and Archived (at the bottom of the list) — chats the AI is answering on its own, and closed chats. Closing a chat moves it to Archived; it comes back if the customer writes again.
• Sort and Filters (next to the title) — channel, unread, low-confidence answers, mentions, paused, assignee, priority and team. Save any combination as a view.
• Details (the panel button in a chat) — assignee, priority, intent, sentiment, tags and the ticket; who took part; and the visitor's city, local time, browser, the page they're on and how many times they've chatted. Add to contacts saves them; Block visitor stops the AI answering them.
• City, region and time zone come from Cloudflare's visitor location headers when your app is behind Cloudflare, otherwise the time zone comes from the visitor's browser.

Turn handoff on

Under the agent's Settings → Human handoff:

• Allow human handoff — customers can ask for a person; the AI pauses and the chat appears in your Inbox under Needs human.
• Handoff message — what the customer hears. Leave it empty for a smart default. Use {team} for the department and {name} for the assigned person, e.g. Sure — I've passed this to our Billing team. Rafi will reply here shortly.
• Bring in a person automatically — if a customer stays angry or frustrated after the AI tried, the chat goes to your team. After two unanswered questions the AI offers a person.

When the agent hands over

• The customer asks for a person.
• The customer is upset, or the agent can't answer after trying (with Bring in a person automatically).
• A procedure step or a trigger says so.
• A flow reaches a Hand to team step.

With departments, the AI reads the chat, picks the right team and assigns the chat. Outside working hours it tells the customer when your team is back instead of promising a quick reply. The handoff also writes a short summary for your team, sends alerts and fires the handoff.requested webhook.

Taking over

Open the chat. If the AI is handling it, click Join conversation — the AI pauses while you're in and the reply box opens (or Add note to leave an internal note without joining). Chats already handed to your team open with the reply box. The customer sees who joined. Use Quote on a customer message to reply to it, and Translate in the header to read the customer's messages in English.

When a team member replies

• Website chat: the AI stays quiet in that chat until it's closed or someone clicks Resume AI.
• WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram: when the customer writes again, the team gets the wait time to answer — if nobody does, the AI replies and takes the chat back.

Wait for a team reply before the AI answers (minutes) sets that wait time. After a handoff the AI keeps helping until a team member replies. 0 means the AI never answers on its own; use Resume AI.

Closing chats

• Click Close when you're done. Website visitors can then rate the chat; on WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger and Instagram the customer is asked for a 1–5 rating. See Ratings.
• Close answered chats after (hours) — when your team has replied and the customer doesn't write back for this long, the chat closes by itself and leaves the helpdesk. If they write again, it reopens and the AI answers. 0 = never close automatically.

Inside a chat

• Saved replies — insert answers you type often; save new ones from the reply box.
• 📎 Attach a file — pictures, PDFs, documents, spreadsheets or zips up to 8 MB.
• Internal notes, @mentions, AI compose and translation — see Helpdesk tools.
• Make ticket — track the chat as a ticket for follow-up.
• Improve this answer — turn a bad AI reply into a Q&A answer (Q&A).
• Save as test — turn the chat into an automated test.
• ⛔ Pause / Block visitor — stop the AI on spam (Guardrails).
• ↗ Send to … — create a ticket in Zendesk, Freshdesk and others (Escalation).

Filters

Filter by status (AI handling, Needs human, closed), channel, priority and Assigned to me, and search messages, names and phone numbers. Save filter combinations as views.