Take over a conversation from the AI

Take over a chat—and resume the bot when the work is done.

Staff handoff lets visitors ask for a person and gives your team a live workspace to answer them. When a staff member takes control, the AI response is paused for that conversation so customers never receive competing replies.

For semantic escalation, open the bot’s Actions & Tools and enable “Allow external Jev triage after privacy review” after reviewing your organisation’s processing requirements. Jev also needs a server API key. In active mode it assesses intent and sentiment; your saved active rules still determine the staff button, contact form and priority. Uncertain or unavailable evaluations fall back to local recognition. Jev does not submit a staff request for the visitor.

Open the bot’s Jev log tab to inspect the latest 100 evaluations, confidence, matched rule, local or Jev source, latency and estimated input cost. Use Refresh after a test message and check the key, approval and mode indicators. Shadow mode records assessments without applying them. The log contains no message text; recorded rule advice can still be suppressed by contact or self-service checks.

Do not forget to resume: a taken-over conversation stays staff-handled until a team member explicitly resumes it. If no staff member is available, configure the offline copy and contact options in Appearance so the visitor receives a clear fallback.

• Enable the workflow: Turn on Staff Console takeover in Experimental settings when you want the visitor-facing CTA/form and automatic routing. A manual take-over from Staff Console always overrides this setting for the current conversation.
• Define when a human should help: In the bot editor, create rules for intents, sentiment, custom keywords, minimum message length and business-hour-only handling. Configure the CTA, immediate form opening, priority and internal tag.
• Be available: Set your live chat name and photo under Settings → My profile, then manage presence and working hours under Settings → Live support. Visitors see availability messaging based on configured staff state and the bot’s custom text.
• Take over in Staff Console: Open the session, review the history and visitor context, then take over. The conversation now belongs to the staff member and the bot stops answering.
• Resume deliberately: When the human work is complete, use Resume in the session. The bot’s normal response path returns and the visitor sees the configured resume notice.