Human Handoff

Plan requirement

Human handoff is available on Pro and above. It is not part of the free Starter plan. If a paid plan lapses, handoff switches off with the rest of the paid features until the plan is active again. You can compare what each plan includes on the pricing page.

Turning handoff on

Open your chatbot, go to Configuration, then General, and open the Human handoff tab. Switch it on and the rest of the settings appear.

This tab saves on its own, separately from the main Save button on the page. If you try to leave with unsaved handoff edits, Inletbase asks you to confirm first.

Availability: always on, or working hours

Handoff only offers a person when someone could realistically answer. You have two ways to set that:

• Always available treats your team as reachable at any hour, so the option to talk to a person is always offered.
• A weekly schedule lets you set a start and end time for each day, and turn individual days off entirely. Days default to 09:00 to 17:00.

When you use a schedule you also pick a timezone, and your hours are read in that timezone rather than the visitor's. The end time has to be later than the start time on the same day, so overnight shifts are not supported; a day set up that way counts as closed. If the timezone is missing or not valid, Inletbase treats your team as offline rather than guessing.

Wait time and missed chats

When a visitor asks for a person, the chat moves to waiting and your team has a limited time to pick it up. You set that window between 1 and 30 minutes, and the default is 3 minutes.

If nobody claims the chat before the window runs out, it is marked missed. The visitor is not stuck: they can keep talking to the AI, and the missed chat still shows in your conversations so you can follow up.

Email notification

By default, Inletbase emails your team when a visitor asks for a person, so a request does not sit unseen in the dashboard. You can turn this off in the same tab if you would rather watch the conversations screen yourself. To stop a single busy chat generating endless mail, there is a cap on how many of these notifications one chat can send.

What the visitor sees

In the chat widget, the menu at the top of the window holds the handoff options:

• Talk to a person asks for a teammate. This appears when handoff is on and your team is inside working hours.
• Leave a message is offered instead when nobody is available, so the visitor can still get a reply by email.
• Back to AI assistant returns the conversation to the chatbot.
• Start a new chat clears the conversation and begins again.

While a chat is waiting or with a teammate, a banner at the bottom of the widget shows the current state, and a Continue with AI button lets the visitor go back to the chatbot without waiting. Replies from your team appear in the conversation with the teammate's name, so the visitor can tell a person from the AI.

The AI is also aware of these options. If it cannot help with something, it can point the visitor at the right button by name instead of leaving them stuck.

Taking over a chat as a teammate

Handoff requests arrive in your chatbot's conversations. Open the chat you want and you will find the handoff controls above the reply box:

• Claim takes the chat. Its status becomes human and the visitor is told a person has joined.
• Reply sends your message straight into the visitor's widget, under your name.
• Return to AI hands the conversation back to the chatbot.
• End chat closes the conversation when it is finished.

Only one teammate holds a chat at a time, so two people cannot reply over each other.

Chat statuses

Each conversation shows where it stands:

• AI, the normal state: the chatbot is answering.
• Waiting: the visitor has asked for a person and the wait window is running.
• Human: a teammate has claimed the chat and is replying.
• Missed: the wait window ran out before anyone claimed it.
• Closed: the conversation has been ended.

Privacy and security

Every chat gets its own random key in the visitor's browser, and only a hash of that key is stored on our side. Requests about a chat have to present the key, so knowing or guessing a chat id is not enough to read your team's replies or act on someone else's conversation.

Your team replies through the dashboard rather than the public chat API, and the same allowed domains rule that governs the widget also governs handoff requests, so only your own sites can start one.

Next steps

• Conversations covers reading chats, spotting leads, and exporting a transcript.
• Training your chatbot is how you reduce the number of chats that need a person at all.
• Knowledge gaps shows the questions that pushed visitors to ask for a human in the first place.

Frequently asked questions