Managing when your AI chatbot steps in—and when it steps aside—is key to delivering a seamless customer experience. Whether you’re routing users to a specific support agent or pausing the AI to avoid overlap, this guide walks you through everything you need to automate the handoff process across your channels. From assigning conversations based on keywords or intent detection to pausing bot replies during live chats or business hours, here’s how to do it all efficiently.

How to automatically assign conversations to human agents

Assigning a conversation to an agent using keyword-based chatbots

When setting up the Start Bot Flow, you can automatically assign conversations to a team or specific agent as soon as someone interacts with the bot (by sending the keyword or clicking the button that triggers it). Here’s how:

Create a new bot. Double-click the Start Bot Flow component to configure it.

Under Assign Conversation to a Group, select the Role of the team members you want the chats assigned to. You can also choose a specific agent under Assign Conversation to User.

💡 PRO TIP: If you select only a role, the bot will assign conversations randomly among team members with that role.

Assigned chats will appear in the Mine tab of the Live Chat and Shared Inbox for the respective agents.

Assigning a conversation to an agent using the AI chatbot

If you want your chatbot to automatically transfer conversations to a human agent when users request it, you can do this using Intent Detection. This feature helps the system recognize specific phrases—like “I want to talk to a person”—and trigger a handoff to your support team. Here’s how to set it up step by step.

Open the Bot Manager and go to AI Assistant. Make sure AI is enabled, and that the campaign you want to configure is selected. Turn on the toggle to Enable Intent Detection.

When intent detection is enabled, the system tries to match the user’s message with a predefined intent. If no match is found, a response will be generated using the AI training campaign. In this case, we’ll use intent detection to identify when someone wants to speak with a human agent.

Once it’s turned on, you’ll see a button to Create New Intent Detection Campaign. Click it.

Add a list of similar phrases your customers might use to request a human agent, separated by commas. For example: “talk to a human,” “speak to an agent,” “transfer me to someone,” etc. Then, give it a title—e.g., Speak with a human.

Then, turn on the toggle for Enable Agent Assignment. This way, when the AI detects this intent, it will automatically assign the conversation to a specific agent or team.

Select the Team the conversation should be assigned to. Then, write the automated message that will be sent to the user once they’re connected to a human agent. Click Create.

Finally, you can optionally enable Do not assign agent in business off hours. This ensures the AI only assigns chats to human agents during their available working hours.

💡 PRO TIP: To edit your business hours, go to Bot Manager → Configuration. There you can set your Time Zone, Start Time, End Time, and Off Days.

Click Save Settings to apply your changes. Repeat this process for each account and social network where you’re using this campaign.

How to pause the AI to respond

Once a conversation has been assigned to a human agent, you may want to pause the AI so it doesn’t keep replying and accidentally interfere with the human interaction. Pausing the AI ensures the conversation stays personal and doesn’t confuse the customer with overlapping responses.

In this section, we’ll explore different ways to pause the AI — starting with how to do it automatically during your business hours.

Automatically during Business hours

You can set your bot to automatically pause during the hours when your agents are available. Follow these steps.

Go to the Bot Manager of the social network where you configured your AI. Scroll down to the Configuration section.

Under Business Hours, toggle on the switch labeled Disable Bot Reply. If you haven’t already, set your Timezone, Start and End Time of your business hours and Off Days.

Save. Click the Save button at the bottom of the page to apply your changes.

Manually on the Shared Inbox

Open the shared inbox. Look for the conversation you want to pause. Click on the Pause button next to “Bot Reply”. The Status will change to “Bot Reply Off”. Make sure to save your changes to apply them.

Once you are done speaking with the lead, you can turn it back with the same process.

Manually on the Live Chat

Open the Live chat of the social network you are using. Look for the conversation you want to pause. Click on the Pause button next to “Bot Reply”. The Status will change to “Bot Reply Off”. Make sure to save your changes to apply them.

Once you are done speaking with the lead, you can turn it back with the same process.

Manually on the Subscriber Manager

Open the Subscriber Manager of the social network where your lead contacted you. Look for the lead by name and click on the Subscriber Actions Button.

On the modal form, click on the “Pause” button next to “Bot Reply”. The Status will change to “Bot Reply Off”. Make sure to save your changes to apply them.

Once you are done speaking with the lead, you can turn it back with the same process.

Automatically during mobile access responses (WhatsApp and Facebook only)

If you connected a WhatsApp Business Account using the QR method and therefore kept mobile access, or if your are using Facebook Messenger on your phone, you can configure the bot to automatically pause when an agent is answering on the mobile app. Let’s see how.

Go to the corresponding social network’s Bot Manager, and then to Configuration.
On the General section, look for the switch called “Bot Replies while agent on mobile app”. Turn it off.

Make sure to apply your changes by clicking on the Save Button at the bottom of the page.