Overview of the Handoff action

The Handoff action enables a workflow to transfer a user conversation to a human technician when automated support is no longer sufficient. This allows the technician to respond through the bot interface, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Understanding the Handoff action

The Handoff action is designed for situations where the bot is unable to fully resolve the user's issue and needs to escalate the conversation to a real person. When triggered, it routes the conversation to one or more designated users (technicians) who can respond via the bot.

Chat Client Instance

Select the Chat Client instance where the handoff will be sent to

User Emails

Add the emails of the technicians that could potentially respond to this handoff

Wait In Queue Expiry (Minutes)

The time a requestor will wait for a handoff to be picked up before expiring

Inactivity Expiry (Minutes)

The time that the handoff will expire if no message is sent on either end of an active handoff

Handoff Description

Set the description of the handoff to send to the user. This will show up as the description once a handoff has started.

Working with the Handoff action

The Handoff action is a vital fallback for chatbots, ensuring that when automation reaches its limits, the user still receives timely and effective assistance.

You can assign one or multiple technicians by entering their email addresses. These users will receive the handoff request and will have the ability to respond directly through the bot. Adding multiple users increases availability and responsiveness, which is especially useful for distributed teams or shift-based support coverage.

To provide context for the technician, you can configure a Handoff Description. This is a short message that describes the issue or reason for the handoff, helping the human responder quickly understand the situation.

Integrating with Microsoft Teams

When working with Microsoft Teams, it is important to realise that OneBot is designed to work with the configured Teams instance’s Available Status Values configuration. See the article Microsoft Teams Permissions Configuration for further information.

Create and manage Handoff actions

Add a Handoff action

Add the action

Use the following steps to add the action to a workflow.

Configure the action

Use the following steps to configure the action.

1. Click Add in the User Emails section to add a new email or email collection. This opens the Configure Array Item popup.

2. Enter an email or an array of emails, one for available technician.

3. Click OK to complete setup of your new array value.

4. Select the Chat Client Instance, Wait In Queue Expiry (Minutes), Inactivity Expiry (Minutes), and the Handoff Description.

5. Click back in the main view to hide the slide-over.

Edit the action

Use the following steps to make changes to the action.

1. Edit an existing entry by clicking the eye symbol toward the right side of the entry. This displays the Configure Array Item popup and allows you to make changes.

2. Remove an unwanted entry by clicking the red cross toward the right-side.

3. Click back in the main view to hide the slide-over.

Delete a Handoff action

Use the following steps to remove the action from your workflow:

Take care when deleting an action to also remove any logic using its outputs: workflow steps may function incorrectly or break if they attempt to evaluate an output of a deleted action.