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Handover & reply hours

Your AI agent and your team share one inbox — this page explains who speaks when. You control it with three tools on the Agent tab of the AI Agent page: Reply hours (when the agent may reply at all), Handover control (whether it waits to be handed a conversation), and Intelligent auto-handover (letting it pick up suitable questions on its own). In the Inbox, you can take over and hand back any chat with one click.

Reply hours

The agent only replies within the window you set:

  • From (hour) and To (hour) — e.g. 8 to 20. Use 0 to 24 for around the clock. The window may wrap past midnight: From 17, To 9 means “from 5 pm to 9 am the next morning”.
  • Timezone — the timezone the hours refer to (e.g. Europe/Berlin).
  • Active weekdays — toggle the days the agent works. A day that’s off means no agent replies that day.

Messages that arrive outside the window are not discarded. The agent holds them and answers at the next opening — provided WhatsApp’s 24-hour service window is still open by then. If it has closed, the agent can’t send a free-form reply anymore; use an automation with a template or follow up manually.

Handover control

By default, Only reply when handed control is checked. The agent then stays silent until a conversation is explicitly handed to it, and it holds the conversation for a limited control window:

  • Max. control (minutes) is the ceiling (default 60). While the customer keeps replying, the window rolls forward — an engaged conversation isn’t cut off mid-sentence — but never beyond the maximum. When it lapses, the agent goes quiet again until the next handover.
  • This gating is what keeps the agent from barging into chats your team or your automations are running.

If you uncheck it, the agent doesn’t wait for a control window: once it’s active for a contact, it keeps handling that chat without the time limit.

How a conversation reaches the agent

There are three ways the agent takes over a chat:

  1. An automation hands over. Add the Hand over to AI agent step to any automation — see Automation steps. You pick which agent takes the conversation and can set a Conversion goal (optional): Sign-up / registration, Appointment booking (call), Purchase / order, Referral, Free trial, Capture contact details, Arrange a callback, Request a quote, or Review / feedback — or Keep the agent’s default. The counterpart step Take back from AI agent switches the agent off for that contact again.
  2. Intelligent auto-handover. Enable the Intelligent auto-handover checkbox and the agent picks up suitable questions on its own (details below).
  3. Manually in the inbox. Open the chat and click the bot badge in the header (Bot off · enable) to hand the conversation to the agent.

Intelligent auto-handover

With Intelligent auto-handover on, every incoming free-text message is checked: can the agent competently answer this from its scope and knowledge? Only then does it take over.

What triggers a takeover:

  • A free-text question the agent can fully answer — typically support, product, pricing, availability, or booking questions covered by its knowledge base.
  • Only outside any running automation or form — button taps, list picks, and form answers always belong to the flow that asked, never to the agent.

What does not trigger a takeover:

  • Complaints that need a human touch.
  • Sensitive, legal, or financial disputes.
  • Anything outside the agent’s scope.
  • Pure small talk.

In those cases the agent stays silent and the message simply waits for your team in the inbox. Auto-handover errs on the side of silence: when in doubt, it does not take over.

What happens on a handover to humans

There are two directions of handover — to the agent (above) and back to people. A chat comes back to your team when:

  • The agent hits its limits. If it can’t answer from its knowledge, it tells the customer it will check and offers a human. The chat then needs a person.
  • Its control window lapses (with Only reply when handed control on) — the agent goes quiet.
  • A teammate takes over (next section).

There is no automatic assignment or push notification when the agent steps back — the conversation simply sits in the Inbox like any other chat, where you can assign it to teammates or teams and work it with the usual inbox views. Make checking the inbox part of your routine, especially at the start of your human coverage hours.

Taking over manually — and resuming the agent

In any chat in the inbox, the badge in the header shows who’s driving:

  • 🤖 Bot active — the agent is handling this contact. Click the badge to pause it and take over yourself.
  • You can also just type and send a reply: the moment a human replies manually, the agent pauses for that contact automatically. You’ll never talk over each other.
  • 🙋 Taken over · Resume bot — you (or a teammate) have taken over. When you’re done, click it to let the agent reply again.
  • Bot off · enable — the agent is off for this contact (for example after an automation ran Take back from AI agent). Click to switch it on for this chat.

Pausing and resuming is always per contact — taking over one chat never affects the agent’s work in other conversations.

While you’re in a chat, use the Conversion menu to record the outcome (Purchase completed, Appointment booked, Mark as lost). This matters for the agent too: a contact marked ✓ Converted won’t be pitched again — the agent switches to helping instead of selling.

Worked example: agent covers evenings and weekends, humans take weekdays 9–17

A small team answers WhatsApp themselves on weekdays from 9:00 to 17:00 and wants the agent to cover everything else:

  1. On the Agent tab, set Reply hours to From (hour) 17 and To (hour) 9 — the window wraps overnight, so the agent replies from 5 pm through 9 am the next morning, every day. Set your Timezone and leave all Active weekdays on.
  2. Keep Only reply when handed control checked and enable Intelligent auto-handover, so evening questions the agent can answer are picked up automatically.
  3. In the morning, the team starts the day in the Inbox: chats the agent handled overnight are reviewed, and warm ones are continued by a human — the first manual reply pauses the agent for that contact automatically.
  4. At the end of the day nobody has to flip a switch: from 17:00 the agent’s reply window opens again for new incoming messages.

One honest caveat: the hour window applies to every active weekday, so on Saturday and Sunday the agent also replies only 17:00–9:00. A message on Saturday at noon is answered at 17:00 (if the 24-hour window is still open) — for most teams that’s fine. If you want true full-day weekend coverage, set the hours to 0–24 instead and rely on taking over manually during weekday office hours: the takeover badge and the automatic pause on manual replies do the same job without a schedule.