Email, Ratings & Agent Handoff
How visitors reach a human, what happens when your team is offline, and how Yaplet captures email addresses, sends transcripts, and collects conversation ratings.
Overview
Most conversations start with Vex. This article covers what happens when a visitor needs more than the AI can give — how they reach your team, how you stay reachable when nobody's online, and how the conversation wraps up.
Requesting an Agent
There are three ways a visitor ends up talking to a human.
They ask from the header menu
The ⋮ menu in the chat header offers "Request agent" whenever nobody from your team has the conversation yet. This is the escape hatch.
A button appears automatically
Once a conversation has gone back and forth enough times without resolving, a "Talk to the support team" chip surfaces on the left under the last reply. It's a nudge for visitors who are clearly stuck but haven't thought to ask for a person.
Vex offers to connect them
The AI can proactively offer a handoff, showing a solid "Yes, connect me" chip (or "Yes, leave my email" when nobody is online) and a soft "No, keep chatting" chip, on the left. Vex only promises a human when your team is genuinely reachable — the availability check happens before the offer is made, so it never writes a check it can't cash.
What the Visitor Sees After Requesting
The conversation switches to awaiting state. The header reads "Waiting for an agent...", a status event appears in the thread, and Vex posts the handoff line, in the visitor's language:
"Let me connect you with one of our human agents. 😊"
That sentence is Yaplet's own. Only a workflow's Request agent step, or an API tool that hands over with its own message when it fails, can say something else.
What comes next depends entirely on whether anyone is online.
The visitor gets your configured reply-time expectation as a message in the thread:
"We usually reply 🕘 in a few minutes"
The bolded part is the Reply Time you picked on the widget's Messages tab, said in the visitor's language. The conversation now sits in your Inbox waiting for someone to pick it up.
The visitor is told honestly that the team is away:
"Sorry for the inconvenience, all our agents are currently offline. Please leave your message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible."
If Yaplet doesn't have their email yet, the message asks for it too and the email form opens right in the thread — because without an email there's no way to follow up once they've closed the tab.
Nothing is lost when you're offline. The composer stays fully usable, the message reaches your Inbox, and you reply when you're back.
Who counts as "online"
An agent counts as online when their profile status is Online and they have been granted access to this widget's brand. Access is granted per brand, not per widget — in the Brand access section of the Organization page, which you open from your avatar menu at the top right under Manage team, or in the Inbox access list on the Chat widget's Features tab. Owners and admins always count.
Changing their mind
While waiting, a "Talk to AI Bot" chip (and an AI Mode entry in the ⋮ menu) sends the visitor back to Vex. That cancels the request and logs a status event, so your team knows the visitor didn't need them after all.
Email Capture
An email address is what turns an anonymous browser tab into someone you can actually follow up with. Yaplet collects it in four ways:
| Route | When it happens |
|---|---|
| Capture Email setting | Turned on, the email form blocks the composer before the visitor's first message |
| Offline handoff | The form opens automatically when a visitor requests an agent and nobody's online |
| The ⋮ menu | "Edit email" — visitor-initiated, and only shown while no email is on file |
| Workflow step | A custom workflow collects it as part of a guided flow |
The form is a card in the AI's place asking "What is your email address?", with one field on the page color and the submit check inside it; the format is validated before it is accepted.
Once an email is on file, the form never appears again.
Transcripts
The ⋮ menu offers "Send Transcript", which emails the visitor the whole conversation. If Yaplet has no email for them yet, it opens the email form first.
This is genuinely useful after a long troubleshooting session — the visitor keeps the steps you walked them through. A status event records that the transcript was sent, and to which address.
Conversation Ratings
An agent can ask the visitor to rate the conversation at any time with Ask for rating in the Inbox sidebar — see Inbox Sidebar Actions. With Collect Ratings on, the widget also asks automatically when the agent leaves the conversation with Leave chat or Leave all — see Chat Actions. Once the visitor has rated an agent, that agent can't ask again in the same conversation for 7 days.
The rating form shows five faces:
| 😡 | 😟 | 😐 | 😊 | 😍 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
The card sits in the AI's place; the picked face is tinted and grows a little while the others dim. Below them is an optional free-text field, "Please provide additional feedback (optional)", with the submit check inside it. The question above the faces — "Please rate your experience" — is Yaplet's own, shown in the visitor's language.
Both the score and any written feedback land in the conversation as status events, and feed your Live Chat reports.
Putting It Together
A well-tuned setup usually looks like this:
- Capture Email off — let visitors start instantly; the offline path collects the email when it's actually needed.
- A reply time you can honor — an honest "a few hours" beats a broken "a few minutes". Visitors forgive slow far more readily than wrong.
- Collect Ratings on — it's one tap for the visitor and the only structured quality signal you get.
- Vex answering first — so your team only sees the conversations that genuinely need them.