Talking to a human: live handoff and lead capture

Your Sales Assistant handles most shopper questions on its own — but some chats are better finished by a person. When a shopper asks to speak to someone, or tells the assistant it isn't helping, it can hand the conversation off to your team. You reply live from your dashboard; and when nobody is available, the assistant still turns the chat into a lead instead of a dead end.

This page explains how the handoff works, where you answer it, and how to set up who gets notified.

This applies to the Sales Assistant extension. If you haven't installed it yet, see Installing and managing extensions.

What happens when a chat is handed off

At the moment a shopper needs a person, one of two things happens — and which one depends on whether anyone on your team is on shift:

• Someone is on shift → the assistant tells the shopper it's connecting them with a person, the chat appears in your dashboard for a teammate to pick up, and the shopper can talk to them live in the same chat window.
• Nobody is on shift → the assistant doesn't promise a live person. Instead it says the team is offline and that someone will get back to them — so a chat that would otherwise be lost becomes a lead you can follow up.

Either way, the assistant asks the shopper for their email address, so your team can reach them even if the chat is interrupted — they close the tab, lose their connection, or nobody picks the chat up in time. When the shopper shares an address, the assistant confirms it in the chat, it appears on the conversation in your dashboard, and you receive an email with it.

What counts as asking for a person. The assistant hands off when a shopper clearly asks for a human ("can I talk to someone?", "is a real person there?"), or says the assistant isn't helping after it has tried. A plain "help me" or "I need help" is treated as a question for the assistant itself, which replies by asking what they're looking for.

One alert per request. If the shopper asks for a person again shortly after, the assistant reassures them that the team already knows — you aren't sent a second alert for the same chat.

Either way the conversation is saved, so you can always pick it up later.

Answering chats: the Sales chat tab

The Sales chat tab appears on a store's page once the Sales Assistant is active for that store (activate it from the store's Extensions tab) — installing the extension on your store doesn't add the tab by itself. It has two sections:

• Escalated — conversations handed off to your team, waiting for (or being handled by) a person. The section label shows how many are waiting.
• All conversations — every chat shoppers have had with your assistant, newest first, including the ones it handled entirely on its own. Open any one to read the full conversation with the time of every message; chats that were handed off are marked escalated. The list loads a page at a time — use Load more for older chats and Refresh to see the newest. This view is read-only: to take over a chat, use the Escalated section.

In the Escalated section you can:

• See waiting and active chats, each with the date and time the chat started, and open any one to read the full conversation — everything the shopper and the assistant said, before and after the handoff, with the time of every message. An open conversation refreshes on its own, so new messages (such as an email address the shopper leaves) appear without reloading.
• See the shopper's email address on the conversation, if they shared one.
• Claim a chat and reply to the shopper in real time.
• Hand the conversation back once the shopper is sorted.

Your public name. When you join a chat, the shopper sees a friendly line such as "Alex from the team joined the chat." You choose the name that appears there — set a display name in the Sales chat settings so shoppers see your shop or a person's name rather than an email address.

Your notify roster: who gets told about new chats

You keep a small list of people to notify when a chat needs a human. For each person you add:

• Name and mobile number. Each number is verified once by a code sent over text, so alerts only ever go to numbers you control.
• On shift. Mark someone as available when they're ready to take live chats. Availability is what decides whether the assistant promises a live person or falls back to capturing the shopper's email (see above).
• Text me about new chats. A per-person switch. Someone who's watching the dashboard can stay on shift but turn off the per-chat text alerts, so they're not buzzed for every conversation.

How many people you can add depends on your plan. If you add someone new and hit the limit, you'll be told which plan level raises it.

Giving a client or teammate access (agencies)

If you manage a store on someone else's behalf — or want a colleague to handle chats — you can invite them to your account and grant them access to a specific store. They'll only see the Sales chat for the store you granted, and nothing else. This is the tidy way to let a store owner answer their own shoppers while you keep managing everything else.

Good habits

• Keep at least one person on shift during your busy hours so shoppers get the live experience when it matters most; let it fall back to email capture overnight.
• Set a display name before you go live — it's the first thing a shopper sees when a human joins.
• Follow up the offline leads. A chat nobody picked up — especially one where the shopper left an email address — is a real buying signal: a shopper who wanted to talk.

For where the assistant gets its answers in the first place, see Feeding your Assistant: which content goes where.