Handoff requests
A handoff request is a visitor explicitly asking to speak to a human. It is the clearest buying signal — and the clearest frustration signal — your chatbot will ever hand you.
What counts as a request
The chatbot listens for an explicit ask: "can I speak to someone", "I want a human", "get me a real person".
It deliberately ignores ordinary requests for assistance. "Can you help me with pricing?" is a normal question and gets a normal answer. Without that distinction, half your conversations would raise false alarms.
What happens
- The visitor is acknowledged. The chatbot tells them it will connect them with a human and asks them to hold on.
- The conversation is flagged in your live inbox.
- An email is sent to the notification address configured in human handoff settings — once per conversation, not once per request.
Responding
Open Live Chats, find the flagged conversation, and take it over.
Read the transcript before you type. The visitor has already explained their problem once; making them repeat it is exactly the frustration that made them ask for a human in the first place.
When nobody is available
The visitor is not stranded. The conversation is waiting in your dashboard, and if they left contact details you can follow up.
Two things make out-of-hours handoffs work:
Set expectations in your welcome message.
Ask for a human any time — someone from the team will pick it up. We're here Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.
Turn on lead capture. Someone who asked for a human and left an email address is a warm lead with a written record of what they wanted. That pairing is the single highest-value configuration in SiteMesh.
Treat these as a signal, not just a queue
Every handoff request is the chatbot telling you it fell short. Some of that is unavoidable — some questions genuinely need a person. But patterns are worth reading.
Review them periodically:
| Pattern | What it means |
|---|---|
| Same topic, repeatedly | A content gap. Write that answer as pasted text. |
| Requests early in conversations | Visitors may not trust the bot. Improve your welcome message and quick prompts. |
| Requests after a wrong answer | Stale or missing content. Check Improving answers. |
| Requests about orders and accounts | Expected — the bot cannot see individual customer records. Nothing to fix. |
Emails are not arriving
Work through this list:
- Handoff is enabled on the chatbot
- A notification address is set, and spelled correctly
- The visitor made an explicit request — vague ones do not trigger it, by design
- Check spam and junk folders
- Only the first request in a conversation sends an email; later ones in the same conversation are intentionally suppressed
The flagged conversation appears in the dashboard regardless of email delivery, so treat the inbox as the source of truth.
Turning handoff off
If you cannot staff it, turn it off rather than leaving the promise unfulfilled. A chatbot that says "I'll connect you with a human right away" and then does nothing is worse than one that never made the offer.