Human Handoff
Let the agent offer to transfer a caller to a human, without writing it into every prompt yourself.
Human Handoff tells your agent it's allowed to hand the call to a person — when the caller asks for one, or when they're frustrated or stuck on something the agent can't resolve.
Without it, every node prompt has to say so itself, and an agent only offers a transfer if you remembered to write that instruction. With it on, the behaviour is consistent across the whole agent.
Enabling it
Open an agent's Settings and toggle Human Handoff on. It's off by default for every agent — nothing changes until you enable it.
This setting gives the agent permission to offer a handoff. It does not create the transfer itself — you still attach a Call Transfer tool to the nodes where a handoff should be possible.
It only applies where a transfer is actually possible
The instruction is added only on nodes that have a Call Transfer tool attached. On every other node the agent is never told it can hand over.
That gate is deliberate. An agent told it may transfer, on a node with no transfer tool, will say "let me put you through to someone" — and then nothing happens, because there's nothing to carry it out. A caller who is promised a person and then left in silence is worse off than one who was never offered.
So the practical setup is:
- Create a Call Transfer tool with your destination
- Attach it to the nodes where a handoff makes sense
- Turn Human Handoff on
What the agent is told
In short: it may offer a human when the caller asks for one, or when they're frustrated or stuck; it should offer plainly and once, rather than talking the caller out of it or insisting on trying again first; and it must never promise a transfer it doesn't then carry out. If the caller declines, it carries on helping.
It is deliberately not told the name of your transfer tool — the tool's own description already tells the model how to call it, and duplicating that here would go stale the moment you renamed the tool.
Working with Emotion Detection
If Emotion Detection is also on, the two work together. When a caller sounds frustrated or angry for two turns running, the agent is told so directly — once — and reminded that offering a human is an option.
This matters because the agent otherwise has no memory of the caller's mood across turns. It reacts to the turn in front of it; the escalation signal is the thing that says this has been going badly for a while now.
It stays a nudge, not a rule. The agent decides whether to offer, and won't re-raise a transfer the caller has already declined. As everywhere else, the nudge is withheld entirely on nodes that have no transfer tool attached.
Neither setting depends on the other. Emotion Detection on its own still adapts the agent's tone; Human Handoff on its own still lets it offer a person when asked. Together, the agent also notices a caller who never explicitly asks but clearly needs one.
When to leave it off
- The agent should never hand over. A pure self-service flow — order status, opening hours — where a transfer isn't wanted.
- You want handoff wording under your own control. Your node prompts already say exactly when and how to offer a person, in your own words, and you'd rather not have a second instruction alongside them.
- No transfer tool anywhere. The setting does nothing on its own; it has no effect until a Call Transfer tool is attached to a node.
Related
- Call Transfer tool — the destination, the warm handoff message, and the provider support matrix
- Emotion Detection — detects a frustrated caller turn-by-turn, which pairs naturally with offering a human