Taking over a conversation

Your agent does not act alone on the things that matter. When it reaches something it should not decide by itself, it raises a handoff and waits. This page covers that queue, and what happens when you decide to answer a customer yourself.

Handoffs

The Handoffs screen is the queue of escalations your agent raised for a human decision. Nothing is sent to a customer until someone here approves it.

By default the screen shows what is still pending, because it exists for decisions that are owed rather than as an archive. The Status chips let you look at approved, denied and expired escalations too, and a count beside them tells you how many are awaiting a decision.

Each row shows the escalation's status, which customer it concerns, the action the agent proposed, and how long ago it asked. Selecting a row opens the escalation beside the queue with everything the agent recorded when it raised it, and the controls to resolve it.

The queue updates itself

The Handoffs screen shows "Live" in the top right when it is receiving updates as they happen. An escalation raised while you are looking at the screen appears without you refreshing.

If that connection drops, the indicator changes to "Reconnecting" rather than showing you an error. That wording is deliberate: the screen is still correct, it is just no longer instant, and it re-reads everything the moment the connection returns. You have not lost anything and no data is missing.

Taking over

Sometimes approving an escalation is not enough and you want to answer the customer yourself. You can do that from the transcript.

At the bottom of any conversation is a single button: Take over this conversation. Pressing it does not send anything. It opens a confirmation that asks whether you are sure you want to be handed the conversation, and tells you what accepting means:

The agent stops replying in this thread and you answer as yourself. Your name is recorded on every message you send.

You confirm, or you cancel. This confirmation is enforced by Peaklight itself, not only by the page you are looking at, so it cannot be bypassed. A confirmation that only exists in the browser is a suggestion, not a confirmation.

Answering as yourself

Once you have taken over, the conversation shows a banner saying you are answering it and that the agent is paused, and the button is replaced by a message box.

Write your reply and send it. Two things happen that are worth understanding.

Your name is attached to the message. Authorship is recorded on our side, from your session, rather than being something the page decides. In the transcript your message appears under your name, not under a generic "Human" label, because the reason for recording who answered is so that the transcript can say who answered. Anyone reading the conversation later can tell your reply from the agent's.

You are told whether it actually reached the customer. The message carries its own delivery state. If delivery failed, the message says so and the page raises it as an alert rather than a quiet note: the customer did not receive it, and you should send it again. That state lives on the message itself, so it is still there after your next message and after a reload.

A successful send is not announced separately under the box. It does not need to be. The message shows "Delivered" in the transcript, where the state stays put.

Handing back

When you are finished, Hand back to the agent returns the conversation.

What the agent does on the turn after a handback is something we are not documenting yet. We have seen behaviour in that moment that we are not satisfied with, and we would rather leave this section unwritten than describe something we cannot currently stand behind. This page will be extended once that behaviour is settled.

In the meantime: if you have handed a conversation back and you need certainty about what the customer sees next, tell us and we will look at that thread with you.