Automate Agent Handoff enables admins to seamlessly transfer chats to agents with a single toggle, streamlining the process and ensuring a faster, more responsive customer service experience.


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Benefits of automating agent handoff

Whenever a customer requests live chat assistance, you streamline the transition from bot to live agent by automating the agent handoff process. This initiates a sequence of actions tailored to the customer's needs based on predefined configurations.  

1. Make available for assignment - To route chats to the agent's queue. 

2. Assign to a group - To assign the chat to a particular group. 

3. Trigger a flow - To perform certain validations like checking for Business hours <link article> or want to collect additional information. 


Automate agent handoff to speed up bot deployment, enhance response times, and provide a seamless customer experience with smooth transitions to live agents.

Enable Automate Agent Handoff

Ensure that you configure the Natural Language setting before activating the handoff feature.

  1. In your bot builder, navigate to Natural language > Configure.
  2. Go to Automate agent handoff and toggle it to the right to enable or to the left to disable.
  3. Under Manage customer agent transfer requestsection, choose from the following options
    1. Make available for assignment 
    2. Assign to group 
    3. Trigger a flow

  1. Click Manage utterances to add or review utterances related to the customer’s request to help trigger agent handoff to suit your business requirements better.
  2. An icon will indicate any conflicts with existing utterances, which you must resolve before saving.
  3. Click Save.


Note: Admins need to manually enable the feature for existing bots.


Use Automate Agent Handoff feature

Once the Automate agent handoff feature is enabled, the chatbot will automatically follow the pre-configured actions when a customer requests to chat to an agent. 

Make available for assignment

If you have selected this option, when a customer requests live support, the bot will display the pre-configured message and add the chat to the open conversations queue in the Conversation Inbox. 



An agent can then pick up the conversation and assist the customer directly.



Assign to group

When this option is selected, you can mention the group to which the conversation would be assigned.

Once a customer asks to be transferred to a live agent, this conversation will now be assigned to the group and remain in the conversation inbox until an agent from the group responds to the query.


Trigger a flow

This option allows for additional actions before handing over the chat to an agent.

For instance, you can validate business hours or gather more information from the customer. After performing these validations, the chat will be transferred to the queue. However, you need to add the actions Make available for assignment or Assign to group within the flow to transfer the chat to the human agent.


See More

Explore the following resources to leverage Freddy features to maximize the effectiveness of your support workflow.

  1. Freddy’s Live Translate
  2. Auto-Detect Customer Language
  3. Small Talk for your Freshchat bots