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Human Handoff

Your bot handles most conversations on its own. But sometimes a visitor needs a real person — a tricky case, a sensitive question, or a deal worth closing in the moment. Human handoff lets a visitor pass the conversation to your team and chat with them live, right inside the widget.
Human handoff runs on operator seats, which come with your plan. See Pricing Plans for what your plan includes.

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How a Visitor Reaches Your Team

The widget shows a Talk to a human button in its header whenever a live agent is available — that is, when you have at least one operator seat and one active operator.
Chat widget header showing the Talk to a human button
When the visitor taps it, the conversation joins your team’s queue, and your operators get an email letting them know a visitor is waiting.

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Answering from Your Dashboard

Handoffs land in the Conversations area of your dashboard, which has two views switched with a toggle:
  • Tracking — a read-only history of conversations, visible to your whole team.
  • Live inbox — the operator workspace where you actually reply. This toggle only appears for members who are operators.
Conversations tab showing the Tracking and Live inbox toggle and a live conversation
In the Live inbox, waiting conversations appear in real time — a sound plays when a new one arrives (you can mute it). Each conversation shows a status: Waiting, Active, Closed, or Slack. Select a conversation to see the full transcript and a reply box. Type your reply and press Enter to send (Shift + Enter adds a new line).
  • Your first reply claims the conversation. From then on it’s yours, and other operators see it as handled. If two operators open the same one, only the first to reply gets it — the other keeps their draft and a note that someone else took over.
  • Close it when you’re done. The Close conversation button ends the handoff, returns the visitor to the bot, and removes the conversation from every operator’s live inbox. The visitor can request a human again later.

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Who Can Answer: Operators & Seats

Being an operator is a capability you grant per member — separate from their role. An owner or admin marks a member as an operator from Members & Roles, and any role can be one. How many people can be operators at once is set by your operator seats, which come with your plan. Your Members page shows how many seats are used out of your limit. If a plan includes no operator seats, human handoff stays off and the Talk to a human button never appears.
Operator seats are governed by billing. Use Members & Roles to assign operators, and see Pricing Plans for seat limits.

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Conversation Markers

The transcript records who joined and left, so anyone reviewing it later gets the full picture:
  • Operator joined the conversation — added when an operator sends their first reply.
  • Operator closed the conversation — added when the handoff is closed.
In the widget, the visitor sees a simple A team member joined divider when a person takes over.

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AI Compose: Draft Replies from Your Knowledge Base

While you answer live, you don’t have to write every reply from scratch. Next to each visitor message, an AI compose button (✨) appears on hover.
AI compose button appearing next to a visitor message in the operator inbox
Click it and BestChatBot drafts a reply to that specific message, grounded in your knowledge base, and drops it into your reply box. A banner reminds you it’s a draft — “AI draft — generated from the visitor’s message, review before sending.”
Generated AI draft in the operator reply box with the review banner
You stay in control: edit the draft (any typing clears the AI flag), then send it like any other reply. If your knowledge base can’t ground an answer, the draft is a neutral, safe message instead.
AI compose is free — a draft never counts against your response quota. Only the bot’s own automatic replies do.

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Answer from Slack Instead

Prefer to handle live chats where your team already works? You can route handoffs to a Slack channel and reply from there.

Connect Slack

Handle handoffs from a Slack channel — your team replies in Slack, visitors keep chatting in the widget.

Members & Roles

Assign operators and manage who can reply to live conversations.