What happens when Chloe hands off a thread

    What the customer sees, what appears in your inbox, and how to tell why she stopped.

    5 min read · Updated 13 September 2026

    A handoff is not an error. It is Chloe doing the most useful thing she can do when she should not be the one answering: stopping clearly, and making sure somebody notices.

    The two reasons she hands off

    A rule matched
    One of your escalation rules describes this conversation. The handoff names the rule that fired.
    She could not answer
    No rule involved. She did not know. The handoff says she could not handle it and asked for a teammate.

    Worth telling apart, because they need different fixes. A rule match is the system working. A could-not-answer is a knowledge gap, and if you see the same one repeatedly, that is a job for your knowledge sources.

    What the customer sees

    Chloe tells them plainly that she is bringing somebody in, and says what for. She says something like "I'm bringing a human teammate into this conversation to help with your question about the free plan's document limit."

    She does not go quiet, and she does not produce an error. From the customer's side a colleague is being fetched, which is what is happening.

    The customer has been told a person is coming. That is a promise made on your behalf, and it is the reason handed-off threads deserve attention ahead of most other things in your inbox.

    What you see in the inbox

    The thread moves out of the Autopilot queue and into the Inbox queue, where work waiting for a person lives.

    On its card in the thread list, a headphones icon appears. Hovering it says Chloe handed this over to the team. That icon is the quickest way to spot escalations while scanning.

    The event in the conversation

    In the middle column, among the messages, an orange block marks the moment: Handed off to a human.

    Underneath it is the reason. If a rule fired, it names the rule, in the words you wrote it in. If she could not answer, it says the assistant could not handle this and asked for a teammate.

    Read that line before you read anything else in the thread. It tells you in one sentence whether you are dealing with an angry customer, a legal matter, or a question nobody had documented.

    The bar above the composer

    On a handed-off thread the bar above the reply box reads Handed off to you, with a Resume button at the end.

    Its help icon spells out the choice: Chloe could not answer this one, so reply yourself, or hand it back to let her auto-reply again. Handing it back is covered in Returning a thread to Chloe.

    The flag in the feed

    In the Feed on the right, the reply where she stopped carries an orange Flagged for a human badge.

    Do not confuse it with Flagged for review, which means something quite different. She answered but was not confident. One means she stopped; the other means she carried on and is not sure she should have.

    Picking the thread up

    1. 1Open the thread and read the Handed off to a human line to see why she stopped.
    2. 2Read her draft, if she left one. It is often most of a good answer.
    3. 3Assign the thread to yourself so the rest of the team knows it is covered.
    4. 4Reply. The customer has been told a person is coming, so do not leave it long.

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