Control when Vex hands off to a human

Every way a conversation reaches a person

Sometimes the AI should stop answering and let one of your team take over. Every way that can happen in the chat widget is set in one place — Brand → Vex → Personality, on the Human hand-off tab, under the brand the agent belongs to.

1. The visitor picks Request agent. It sits in the ⋮ menu at the top of the chat window and works at any time.
2. The visitor taps the support button. A Talk to the support team button appears under the conversation once the visitor has sent the number of messages you set.
3. The visitor asks Vex for a person. Vex recognizes phrases like "I want to talk to someone".
4. Vex cannot answer. Nothing in the brand's knowledge answers the question, and you have chosen to connect the visitor to a person in that case.

Each of these can be switched off on its own. Vex no longer suggests a person in its own words: a visitor reaches your team only through one of these ways, or through one of the brand's workflows that hands over. And unless you switch it off, Vex first checks whether it can solve the issue itself before anyone is connected — see Let the AI try first below.

If you have been here before: this tab used to be called Agent Handoff, and the "cannot answer" choice used to sit on the Answers tab. Both now live together on Human hand-off.

The Human hand-off tab

The tab lists its settings in the order a visitor meets them:

• 'Request agent' in the chat menu — on, the visitor can ask for a person at any time from the ⋮ menu. Off, the item disappears from the menu.
• 'Talk to support team' button — on, the button appears once the visitor has sent enough messages; you set the number in Show it after the visitor has sent … messages in the last 5 minutes. The default is six. Lower it if your visitors expect to reach a person quickly; raise it if Vex is handling most questions well. Off, the button never appears. A brand that has never saved this switch follows the next one, so nothing changes for it until you change it.
• Visitor asks the AI for a person — the old Automatic Agent Handoff switch. On, Vex can connect a visitor who tells it they want a person. Off, Vex never connects anyone itself: when a visitor asks for a person, it points them to Request agent in the ⋮ menu when that item is on, or on Facebook, Instagram and email to the contact details it finds in the brand's knowledge.
• Offer a person when the AI has no answer — what happens when Vex finds nothing to answer with. See the next section.
• Let the AI try first before connecting — whether Vex checks if it can solve the issue before a person is connected. On for every brand by default. See Let the AI try first below.

If you switch Visitor asks the AI for a person off and want to handle requests for a person your own way, the screen links straight to Brand → Workflows and names the recipe: a workflow whose trigger is "User says" with the intent "The user wants to talk to the support team". The brand's switched-on workflows that hand over to a person are listed under the switches, after Workflows that hand over: — they reach a person whatever the switches say.

When visitors cannot reach anyone

If every way above is off — the menu item, the button and Visitor asks the AI for a person, with the "no answer" choice on Politely decline — and no switched-on workflow hands over, a warning appears at the top of the tab: "Visitors have no way to reach a person in this chat." You can save it that way, but then no chat visitor can ever reach your team. To fix it, switch one of the ways back on, or add a Request agent step to a workflow.

What Vex does when it cannot answer

On the Human hand-off tab, the setting Offer a person when the AI has no 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. If the visitor asked it to do something for them, such as cancel an order or issue a refund, it says plainly that it cannot do that itself. It mentions a way to reach your team only if it was given one, and never makes up a link or an address.
• Connect to a person — if someone from your team is online, the visitor is connected to them right away, with no question asked first. If nobody is online, Vex politely declines instead.

The second choice is grayed out until Visitor asks the AI for a person is switched on, with the hint "Switch on 'Visitor asks the AI for a person' to use this option."

Let the AI try first

Many requests for a person are things Vex can handle on the spot — a question its knowledge answers, or an order it can look up with one of its tools. So when a visitor asks for a person in the chat widget — from the ⋮ menu, with the button, or by writing it — Vex first checks whether it can solve the issue itself. Nothing is written in the chat while it checks.

• The visitor sees "Preparing your request…" and then "Just a moment…" for a few seconds. If the check takes longer than 15 seconds, the visitor is simply handed over.
• If the conversation has no concrete issue yet — for example, the visitor tapped the button straight away, only said hello, or just wrote that they want a person — a card titled Request a person asks: "Tell us briefly what you need, so we can help faster." The visitor sends their answer with the check mark or with Enter, and it shows in the chat as their own message. Vex then checks again with what they wrote.
• If Vex can help, it writes one sentence promising what it can do, without giving the answer yet; the sentence stays in the conversation. Under it are two buttons: Let the AI help and Connect me to a person. The person is always one tap away. The second button reads the same when nobody from your team is online; the visitor then gets the offline notice and can leave their email.
• If Vex cannot help, the hand-off happens as before — see What the visitor sees below.
• If one of the brand's switched-on workflows hands over to a person and fits the visitor's issue, the hand-off happens at once.
• If Vex has just answered the visitor's question and they ask for a person without adding anything new — from the ⋮ menu, with the button or by writing it — the card asks "What's missing from the answer?" and offers The answer didn't help — connect me to a person. One tap connects them, and their question goes to your team. If they write what's missing instead, Vex checks again with it.
• A visitor who asks again after Let the AI help, by tapping or typing, goes straight through, and so does one who picks Request agent while a Request a person card is open, or one Vex can't answer right now: your plan's AI allowance is used up with no wallet balance, their AI is paused, or they reached the daily answer limit.

It is on for every brand by default because it spares your team the conversations Vex can close by itself, and the visitor gets help sooner without losing the way to a person. Each check is billed like an AI answer and counts toward the visitor's daily answer limit, and so does the answer Vex gives after Let the AI help.

To turn it off, switch off Let the AI try first before connecting on the Human hand-off tab. Requests for a person then go straight to your team, as before. Facebook Messenger, Instagram and email are not affected either way: there a request for a person is handed over directly, as before.

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 Reply Time on the chat widget designer's Messages tab. That is no longer a sentence you type: you choose one of eleven promises, from "a few minutes" to "a few days", and every visitor reads it in their own language.

What the visitor sees

When a request goes ahead to a person — Vex could not help, the visitor chose Connect me to a person, or Let the AI try first is off:

1. From the ⋮ menu, the Talk to the support team button or Connect me to a person, the visitor is not asked anything more. When the visitor wrote that they want a person and Vex can't solve their issue, Vex asks first — Yes, connect me (or Yes, leave my email if nobody is online), or No, keep chatting to stay with Vex. Typing works too: a visitor who writes "yes" instead of tapping is connected just the same. The question stays in the conversation, so your team sees it too. After Let the AI help, a visitor who writes that they still want a person is not asked again. Every button the visitor taps shows in the conversation as their own message, so your team sees what they chose.
2. Vex confirms the handoff. After a tap it sends the handoff line — Yaplet's own wording, said in the visitor's language; after a typed yes, Vex says it in its own words. When nobody from your team is online, the handoff line is left out and the visitor gets the offline notice straight away. The per-agent Handoff Message field is gone, so there is nothing here for you to write.
3. The conversation appears in your inbox as unassigned. If Vex checked the request first, it leaves your team a private AI summary note in the conversation, right under the request: one line on what the visitor needs, plus "The assistant found: …" when Vex found something that may help. When the visitor's need is already in their own words — written into the Request a person card, or the question Vex had just answered — the note holds only what Vex found. The note stays in the conversation's history.
4. 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. No separate email confirms the handoff: the customer's next email is your colleague's reply.

When someone hits the daily answer limit

There is one more, automatic way a conversation reaches a person. Every website visitor, e-mail address and Messenger or Instagram user gets a fixed number of Vex answers per 24 hours (30, 10 and 30 by default — set on Brand → Brand settings → Usage limits). At the limit Vex sends one short closing message and pauses for that person for a day; their next message becomes an ordinary agent request with that same handoff line, and your team is notified once. A private "AI paused" line in the conversation tells your team why. Details: Vex usage and credits.

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: it tells the caller it does not have that information. That is now true for every phone agent, whatever its stored setting says and whether or not the brand has a chat AI — the option to answer anyway from general knowledge is gone, and an agent that used it now declines too. There is no field in the dashboard to change this.

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.