Does escalating stop the AI for all conversations?

No. When a teammate takes the conversation over, the AI is paused only for that one conversation. Every other conversation keeps being handled by the agent as normal.

How does the customer keep chatting after escalation?

The same chat thread continues — replies now come from a human in your help desk instead of the AI. The customer doesn't switch channels.

Can the AI take back over?

Yes. Re-enabling AI replies on the ticket resumes the agent and closes the ticket.

What if nobody is available?

The ticket is still created and waits in the inbox. Use scheduling and assignment's next-shift fallback to route it to whoever is on next.

Escalate to a human

Hand a conversation to your team when the agent can't resolve it. The agent signals a handoff in the chat and flags the conversation for your team, who take it over from the Help Desk with an AI-written summary and the full transcript.

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No agent resolves everything. The Escalate to a human action is the safety valve: when a question is out of scope, sensitive, or the customer simply asks for a person, the agent hands the conversation to your team instead of guessing.

Escalation is the bridge between the AI and your Help Desk. It pairs perfectly with a good fallback message — when retrieval finds nothing relevant, the agent should say so and offer to connect the customer with a human.

What happens on escalate

The action posts your handoff message in the chat thread and flags the conversation as escalated (firing a conversation.escalated event). It surfaces in the Help Desk Conversations view, where a teammate clicks Take over to open a summarized live_chat ticket and pause the AI for that conversation. You can also route to an external help desk with an Escalations action (Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, Freshdesk, Zoho Desk, Help Scout, or HubSpot).

Add the action

1
Open Actions → Escalate to a human
Add the action from your agent's Actions tab.
2
Set the handoff message
Write what the customer sees when escalation kicks in — e.g. "Let me connect you with a teammate."
3
Describe the triggers
In the description, tell the agent exactly when to escalate: explicit requests for a human, refund disputes, anything outside its knowledge.

Pair it with your fallback

In your best practices prompt, instruct the agent: "If something isn't covered, offer to connect the customer with the team." Then this action carries out that promise.

From conversation to ticket

Turning a flagged conversation into a Help Desk ticket happens on Take over — from the Conversations view, where escalated conversations surface. Taking over builds the ticket with full context:

1
Summarize
Bookbag reads the conversation transcript and writes a short subject line and a 2-3 sentence summary, in the customer's language.
2
Create a live-chat ticket
A ticket of type live_chat is opened with AI replies switched off, so the customer doesn't get bot and human replies at once.
3
Assign
The ticket is routed to an available teammate using your assignment rules, or left unassigned for someone to grab.
4
Hand back (optional)
When the issue is resolved, an agent can resume AI replies, which closes the ticket and returns the conversation to the bot.

check

The agent picking up the ticket sees the full chat transcript, the AI summary, and any previous tickets from the same requester — so they start with context, not a cold thread.

Manual takeover

Escalation can also start from your side. In the Help Desk Conversations view, any live chatbot conversation has a Take over button. Clicking it runs the same flow — summary, ticket, AI paused — and assigns the ticket to you. See Takeover for the full walkthrough.

FAQ

What's next

Help Desk overview

Where escalated conversations land and get resolved.

Takeover

Manually take over a live conversation.

Ticket assignment

Route escalated tickets to the right teammate.

Collect leads

Custom action