Conversation Handoff to Human
Transfer the entire conversation thread from agent to human operator, with state transfer and return primitive.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Transfer the entire conversation thread from agent to human operator, with state transfer and return primitive.
📋 Context
A team runs a customer-facing chat agent — support, sales, billing — that handles most conversations end to end, but some threads exceed what the agent can responsibly do alone: a refund above a policy threshold, a complaint with regulatory implications, a confused customer who explicitly asks for a person. The customer is mid-conversation, the agent has accumulated context across many turns, and the team needs a clean way to bring a human operator in without dropping the thread.
💡 Solution
On escalation trigger (low confidence, explicit user request, policy violation), the agent emits a structured handoff envelope with conversation summary, ticket number, and human operator queue assignment. Operator takes ownership; agent disengages. On return, agent resumes with operator’s note in context.
Real-world Use Case
- Some triggers (low confidence, policy violation, explicit user request) demand transferring ownership of the whole thread, not just one action.
- A human operator queue exists with the capacity to take over conversations.
- A return primitive is needed so the agent can resume after the operator hands back.
Source
Advantages
- Hard cases reach humans.
- Customer experience preserved across the boundary.
Disadvantages
- Operator queue capacity bounds scale.
- State transfer has fidelity loss.