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A person in chat & email lets website chat and email visitors ask for a person. The agent flags the conversation, you are notified, and whoever on your team opens it can reply as themselves. While a person is in the conversation, the agent stays out of it. It is under Agents → your agent → Handoff, in the In chat, email and WhatsApp card. On phone calls, the equivalent is a live transfer, on the same page — see Transfer calls to a person.

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Why it is off by default

Switching this on is a promise. It tells visitors a person is coming, and that is only true if somebody is watching the dashboard. So every new agent starts with it off. Without it, the agent still handles requests for a person honestly: it says it cannot put them through right now and offers to take a message.

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Turn it on

1

Open Handoff

Go to Agents → your agent → Handoff.
2

Switch on A person in chat & email

Under In chat, email and WhatsApp, turn on A person in chat & email. It takes effect on the next message.
3

Limit it to business hours (optional)

Business hours is right underneath. Turn on Only during business hours, set your days, times and timezone, and click Save hours. See Business hours.
Changing this needs the Admin or Owner role.

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What the visitor sees

When a visitor asks for a person, or has something the agent cannot handle, the agent flags the conversation. It tells them the team has been notified and may take a little while, and asks for their name and contact details so nothing is lost.
  • While they wait, the agent keeps answering — a request is not a pause. In the chat widget, a line above the message box reads “Asking someone to join — they’ll reply right here.”
  • When someone joins, the widget header shows “Name joined this conversation” (or “Someone from the team joined”), and replies from your team appear in the same chat. The agent stops replying.
  • By email, your team’s replies are sent from the agent’s address, in the same thread.

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What your team does

A new request sends a Someone asked for a person notification — by email to the workspace owner by default. You can change it to a text or turn it off under Settings → Notifications. If the visitor asks again, the notification says how many times they have asked. A single conversation notifies at most once every five minutes, so an impatient visitor does not become a stream of alerts. Waiting chats also appear under Needs you in the Inbox and on the dashboard, with a Waiting for a person badge. To take it over, open the conversation from the notification, the dashboard or Conversations. The Reply as owner card has: Any member of the workspace can reply and take over, including the Agent role. Replies record who wrote them, so the transcript shows which person on your team answered. See Team and roles. You can also take over a chat or email conversation where nobody asked for a person.

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Handing back

Click Hand back to the agent when you are done. If you forget, the conversation is handed back on its own after half an hour with no reply from your team. A conversation that ended and is reopened by the visitor always starts with the agent again. If they ask for a person again, it is a new request.

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If nobody answers

If nobody joins within about ten minutes, the request times out. The check runs every 15 minutes, so it can take up to 25.
  • The conversation is marked No one answered.
  • In chat, the agent posts: “Nobody’s free to join right now, sorry. Leave a way to reach you and someone will follow up.” It then carries on answering.
  • By email, nothing extra is sent to the customer.
  • For chats, the Inbox and the dashboard read “Nobody reached them in time” and keep it under Needs you for 24 hours.
If the visitor asks again after a timeout, it is a fresh request with a fresh ten minutes. A lot of timeouts is a sign to look at who is watching for requests, or to set business hours.

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Outside business hours

With Only during business hours on, the agent can only request a person during the hours you set. Outside them, it tells the visitor it cannot put them through right now and offers to take a message instead of promising a person who is not there.