Handoff to a human

A handoff moves a conversation from the bot to your Open queue. It happens when the customer asks, or when the bot knows it should.

What triggers a handoff#

Trigger	Example
The customer taps Talk to a human	Shown under every bot answer.
No article matches the question	A question your knowledge base doesn’t cover yet.
Claude decides the articles don’t answer it	Only with AI answers on.
The message clearly needs a person	Words like `human`, `agent`, `real person`, `refund`, `charged twice`, `cancel my account`, `bug`, `not working`, `broken`, `error`, `crash`.
Claude errors or refuses	The customer is never left without a path forward.

What the customer sees#

If Relay doesn’t know their email yet, the widget asks for their name and email first, so you can reply after they leave. It skips this when your app already passed their email.
A short system message confirms that the team has been notified.
Your reply appears live in the widget, with an unread badge on the launcher if the panel is closed.
If they don’t read your reply within a few minutes, they get it by email.

Your side#

The conversation moves to Open and appears in your inbox, with the bot’s earlier answers in the thread so you can see what was already tried. Reply as usual; see Working the inbox.

Tip

Tag handed-off conversations with the topic (billing, export). Busy tags in Analytics tell you which articles to write next.