Handoff overview
How the assistant hands a conversation to your team, which targets it can use and how routing chooses between live chat and offline delivery.
A handoff passes a conversation from the AI assistant to a person on your team. It happens when the shopper asks for a person, when the assistant cannot help (for example after repeated failed answers), when a shopper requests an action the assistant may not perform itself, or when your guardrails require it.
Open handoff settingsLive or offline
Every handoff takes one of two routes:
- Live: the conversation waits in your live inbox until an agent takes over. Live chat is used only when it is switched on, your plan includes the live inbox, office hours are open and at least one agent is online.
- Offline: the conversation, an AI-generated summary and the transcript are delivered to the first matching target in your list (email or a helpdesk). The shopper is told that your team will reply by email, and the assistant keeps helping in the meantime.
If nobody takes a live chat within the maximum wait (30–900 seconds, set under Handoff → Routing), the handoff moves to the next offline target automatically.
Targets
You order the targets under Handoff → Routing. Shopper-facing targets can be offered in the widget; notification targets only tell your team.
| Target | Kind | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Live inbox | shopper-facing (live) | Starter and up |
| shopper-facing (offline) | every plan | |
| Zendesk, Gorgias, Freshdesk | shopper-facing (offline) | Growth and up |
| PrestaShop Customer Service | shopper-facing (offline) | PrestaShop stores |
| Slack | notification only | Starter and up |
| Webhook | notification only | Growth and up |
Targets that your plan does not include, whose integration is not connected, or (for email) that have no verified recipient are skipped. If no shopper-facing target is left, ShopAssist falls back to emailing the store's owners and admins, so a handoff is never lost.
What your team receives
Every offline delivery contains, in this order:
- A warning line "Email NOT verified — verify before disclosing or changing account/order data" whenever the shopper's email is not verified.
- The identity line ("Identity: Guest / Order verified / Signed in · Email verified: yes or no") and, for signed-in customers, the customer id from your platform.
- "This conversation includes AI-generated messages (ShopAssist)."
- The reason, the shopper's message, an AI-generated summary (labelled as such), order numbers named in the chat, the last 50 messages of the transcript and a link to the conversation in your dashboard.
Helpdesk tickets are tagged shopassist, shopassist_handoff, shopassist_ai, reason_<reason>, lang_<language>, identity_<level> and, when the email is not verified, shopassist_unverified.
Always check identity before changing orders
A typed email is not proof of identity. Only treat a request as coming from the account holder when the delivery says Email verified: yes or the shopper is signed in.
Escalation settings
- After failed answers: offer a handoff after 1–5 answers the assistant could not give.
- On action requests: hand off when a shopper asks for something the assistant may not do itself (for example a cancellation outside your policy).
- Require email for guests: for offline handoffs, guests must leave an email before the handoff is sent.
- Share notice: the text shoppers confirm before their conversation is shared with your team (up to 300 characters per language). The shopper must agree to it; the consent is recorded.
Test conversations
Handoffs from the playground and test links are dry runs: nothing is sent to your helpdesk or email, and the conversation shows what would have happened.
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