Three ways a conversation reaches a person
Sometimes the AI should stop answering and let one of your team take over. There are three moments where that happens, and you control all three from the same place — Brand → Vex → Personality, under the brand the agent belongs to.
- The visitor asks for a person. Vex recognises phrases like "I want to talk to someone" and asks the visitor to confirm before connecting them.
- Vex cannot answer. The question falls outside what the brand knows, and Vex either declines politely or offers to connect the visitor with a person — your choice.
- The visitor has written several messages. A "Talk to support" button appears after a number of messages you set.
One thing to know before you start: the two settings behind this used to sit on one screen and now sit on two. The "cannot answer" choice is on the Answers tab; everything about connecting a person is one tab over, on Agent Handoff.
What Vex does when it cannot answer
On Brand → Vex → Personality → Answers, the setting When the AI Doesn't Know the Answer decides what happens when nothing relevant turns up in this brand's knowledge. Two choices:
- Politely decline (recommended) — Vex tells the visitor it does not have information about that topic. It does not guess and does not make things up.
- Offer to connect with a human — if one of your people is online, Vex asks the visitor whether they want to be connected, and hands over only if they say yes. If nobody is available it politely declines instead.
The second choice is greyed out until automatic handoff is switched on, with the hint "Enable agent handoff on the Agent Handoff tab to use this option."
The "Talk to support" button
Open the Agent Handoff tab. It holds three settings:
- Automatic Agent Handoff — the master switch. With it on, Vex can connect visitors to a person and the "Offer to connect with a human" choice above becomes selectable. With it off, Vex never offers or escalates on its own.
- Handoff Message — what the visitor reads immediately before being connected. Use it to set expectations, for example "Connecting you to a colleague now."
- Show 'Talk to Support' Button After — how many messages a visitor must send within the last five minutes before the button appears. The default is six. Lower it if your visitors expect to reach a person quickly; raise it if Vex is handling most questions well.
If you switch the master handoff off, the product asks you to build a workflow for this brand to handle requests for a person instead, and links straight to Brand → Workflows. It even names the recipe: a workflow whose trigger is "User says" with the intent "The user wants to talk to the support team". Without something in that role, the AI may tell a visitor it is connecting them and then not do it.
If nobody is online when the handoff happens
The conversation is queued in your inbox as unassigned and waits there — nothing is lost and the visitor can keep writing. What the visitor reads about waiting comes from the Reply Time Text on the chat widget designer's Messages tab, described on screen as the expectation shown to visitors.
What the visitor sees
- Vex asks them to confirm — Yes to be connected (or to leave an email address if nobody is online), or No to keep talking to Vex.
- Vex sends the handoff message.
- The conversation appears in your inbox as unassigned.
- Someone picks it up and carries on in the same thread — the whole Vex conversation is visible to them.
On Facebook, Instagram and email conversations, Vex skips the Yes/No confirmation and connects the visitor directly. Facebook and Instagram have their own tappable controls instead: a persistent chat menu with Talk to a human (and Talk to the AI bot to switch back while waiting), plus a Talk to a human quick reply that appears on Vex's answers once the same message threshold is reached. On email conversations every AI reply carries a "Talk to a human" button the customer can use at any time, and Vex confirms the handoff by email.
Phone calls work differently
On a phone call there is no handing the caller over to a person, so all of the above collapses to a plain refusal when the agent finds nothing. What it says in that moment is read from the phone agent's own stored setting and then from the brand's chat AI — and there is no field anywhere in the dashboard to change it. A brand with no chat AI therefore always hedges and answers from general knowledge on the phone.
Who can pick the conversation up
Access is decided per brand. A teammate only sees this brand's conversations if they have been granted it, at Settings → Organization settings → Organization, on that person's row under Brand access. Owners and administrators always have access to every brand.
Next step
Once handoff is set up, check how often Vex actually escalates: Find knowledge gaps Vex couldn't answer. A high escalation rate almost always means missing knowledge rather than a bad setting.