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Live handoff in AnroAgents
How a conversation moves from the AI to a human operator and back.
Live handoff in AnroAgents lets a conversation move from the AI to a person. The visitor asks for a human, or the agent decides the question needs one, and the conversation appears in your Inbox for an operator to take over. Live handoff is available from the Pro plan up and is switched on per agent in the Integrations step of the agent form.
What happens when a handoff is requested
When a handoff is requested in AnroAgents, the conversation is queued in the Inbox of the dashboard with the status "Waiting", and the visitor is told plainly that a person has been asked to join. The AI stops answering so that two voices do not talk over each other.
An operator opens the Inbox in the AnroAgents dashboard, presses "Accept Handoff", and from that point types directly to the visitor in the same chat window the visitor is already using. Nothing changes on the visitor's side — no new window, no email, no waiting room.
When the operator is done in AnroAgents they can either return the conversation to the AI, which resumes answering with the full history in context, or resolve it, which closes it out. Both are single buttons in the Inbox.
A handoff request in AnroAgents also fires the handoff.requested webhook, which is the hook to use if you want a Slack or Telegram notification rather than watching the Inbox. Note that handoff.requested is the name of a webhook event, not a button in the interface: the only handoff button in the AnroAgents dashboard is "Accept Handoff" in the Inbox, and on the visitor's side the widget simply offers to bring in a person.
Canned responses
Canned responses in AnroAgents are quick reply templates for operators. Each has a shortcut and a body, and typing / in the live chat brings up the list.
Configure canned responses per agent in the AnroAgents agent form. They are worth setting up for the three or four sentences every operator types daily — asking for an order number, explaining delivery windows, sending a booking link.
Staffing it honestly
Live handoff in AnroAgents is only as good as the person behind it. If nobody is watching the Inbox, a visitor who asked for a human waits in silence, which is worse than an AI that says it cannot help but offers an email address.
If you cannot staff handoff during all opening hours, leave it off on the AnroAgents agent and use Escalation Rules instead: the agent then gives out the right contact for the situation rather than promising a person who is not there.
Where conversations end up
Every handed-off conversation in AnroAgents stays in the Conversations archive with the full transcript, marked with who said what — visitor, AI or operator. That archive is what makes handoff worth reviewing: the questions the AI could not answer are the list of what to add to the agent's knowledge base next.