Live chat handoff

Every chatbot has an edge — the question it cannot answer, the customer it should not handle, the situation that needs judgment. Handoff is what happens at that edge. Done well, it is invisible: the human arrives with the full transcript, the customer keeps typing in the same window, and nothing is repeated. Done badly, it is the single interaction customers cite when they say they hate chatbots.

Why it matters

The handoff point is where most chatbot deployments quietly fail, in one of three ways: the bot never hands off (trapping people in a loop), the handoff loses context (the customer restates everything), or the handoff goes nowhere (no agent is available and the conversation dies silently). Evaluating any chat product means asking what mechanically happens at each of those points — including the honest case where nobody is online.

How handoff works in Oneop

Handoff is a first-class block in Oneop’s chatbot builder, not an afterthought. A flow routes to a human wherever you place it — on explicit request, on a failed answer, on a classified intent — with an optional business-hours gate: after hours, the flow takes a designed offline branch instead of pretending an agent is coming.

On the agent side, conversations land in the Unified Inbox, where the runtime handles queueing with a visible queue position, an explicit no-agent-available path, agent capacity and load balancing, and a per-plan ceiling on concurrent chats (from 2 on Free to 50 on Business). Presence, typing indicators and delivery receipts run over WebSockets for agents working the queue.

Context survives the transfer because both sides of every conversation — visitor and bot — are persisted through a single choke point in the code, so the transcript the human sees is always complete. After handoff, agents reply publicly, add internal notes the customer never sees, reassign, or resolve — with an AI-drafted reply available on click that the agent edits and sends, never auto-sent.

One scope note: Oneop’s chat channels are the embeddable website widget and the official WordPress plugin. Handoff moves conversations between bot and human — not between messaging networks.

Related terms: AI chatbot, SLA. Product page: Live chat.