When your agent hands a conversation to you

Your agent handles most conversations end to end, but it is built to know its limits. When a situation needs a human, it stops, flags the contact Needs Human Intervention, and notifies you. This guide covers when that happens and what to do about it.

The handoff is silent on purpose

When the agent escalates, it does not send a "let me transfer you to a human" message. It simply stops replying, and the conversation waits for you. That is deliberate: a canned handoff line promises something the agent cannot control (how fast you will arrive), and in your DMs, a quiet pause reads far more naturally than a support-desk script. From the prospect's side, the thread just goes quiet until you pick it up.

Any reply the agent had queued is cancelled at the same moment, so it will never talk over you after a handoff.

What triggers a handoff

The agent hands a conversation to you when:

The prospect genuinely asks for a human. A clear, unmistakable request to be handed to a person is honored immediately, at any point in the conversation. Asking for you by name, for "the coach", or for someone on your team is not the same thing, and no longer stops the conversation: the agent answers, takes a message, or arranges the introduction and keeps going.
The request is about an existing commitment. Refunds, cancellations, rescheduling a booked call, changing payment or personal details: the first mention goes to you. The agent never negotiates or promises on these.
A buyer reports a delivery problem. "It never arrived" or "the file is broken" after a purchase goes straight to you, no back-and-forth first.
Booking hits a wall. The prospect cannot find a workable time on your scheduling link, or the booking setup itself has a problem the agent cannot work around.
A checkout or booking link cannot be created. Rather than promising a link that never comes, the agent stops and flags you. This usually means something needs attention in Settings → Integrations.
The conversation stalls. A prospect keeps engaging but a needed answer never lands after several honest attempts (for example, an email address that never arrives in valid form), or the conversation runs abnormally long. The agent stops rather than looping.
The agent cannot answer confidently. If a reply cannot be grounded in your offer's information, the agent prefers silence plus a handoff over making something up.
Something repeatedly goes wrong technically. If the agent hits repeated internal errors on one conversation, Cloziq stops it on that conversation and flags it for attention rather than letting it misbehave.

What is not a handoff

If a prospect asks you to stop messaging them, that is not an escalation. The conversation ends right there as Disqualified, silently, and it never lands in your Needs Human Intervention queue. Cloziq checks for an opt-out before it checks for a handoff request, so an opt-out always wins. Worth knowing if you treat the queue below as your daily list: people who opted out will not be in it. See When a prospect opts out.

How you find out

The moment a contact is flagged, you get a notification in the Needs Human Intervention category: in the in-app inbox always, and by email and push if you have those enabled in Settings → Notifications. The contact also shows a Needs Attention banner on their profile, and you can filter Contacts by the status to build a working queue.

What to do when it happens

Open the contact and read the Activity thread to see exactly where things stopped.
Reply to the prospect yourself from Instagram. Mind Instagram's messaging window: if the prospect's last message is more than 24 hours old, you may need to wait for them to message again before you can reply.
Handle the actual issue: process the refund, fix the Stripe or Calendly connection, answer the hard question.

The agent will not rejoin that conversation; once flagged, it is yours. If you later want the agent to be able to start fresh with that person, use Allow New Sales Conversation on the contact.

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