Human handoff
Human handoff is the moment an AI assistant stops answering and passes a conversation to a person, carrying the history with it so the customer does not have to start again.
What it means
An assistant answers most of what a store is asked, and then meets something it should not answer: a damaged parcel, a refund that has gone quiet, a customer who has already been patient twice. Human handoff is the moment it stops, tells the shopper a person is coming, and puts the conversation somewhere a person will see it. The important part is not the transfer, it is what travels with it: what was asked, what was already answered, and what the shopper was looking at.
Why it matters
The common failure is not that the AI could not help. It is that the shopper had to explain everything a second time to a person who arrived with none of the context, in a different place, hours later. A handoff that carries the thread turns an escalation into a continuation, which is the difference between a refund request and a repeat customer.
What a good one looks like
Asking for a person is an option, not a guess. The assistant goes quiet rather than talking over the team. The shopper is told honestly when someone will be there, including when the store is closed. The reply arrives in the same conversation the shopper started, on the channel they chose. And when the conversation is done, the assistant picks up again knowing what happened.
A shopper tells the assistant their order arrived damaged. It stops, tells them a person has it, and the conversation appears in the store team's inbox with the order, the product and the thread already attached.
MerchantIQ hands off on the storefront and on Instagram, into one Unified Inbox where your team answers with the whole conversation in front of them, and can send products from your catalog in the reply. It is off until a store switches it on, per channel.
Human handoff, in brief.
Does human handoff mean the AI failed?
No. Most handoffs are conversations that were always a person's job: money, mistakes and exceptions. A store should read them as a queue to answer, and as a list of the things worth fixing upstream.
What happens to the assistant during a handoff?
With MerchantIQ it stops answering that conversation. On a storefront it stays silent until the team marks the conversation done; on Instagram it waits a day after a team reply before it speaks again.
Where does the team answer?
In the MerchantIQ dashboard, in one queue that holds both storefront chats and Instagram DMs, so nobody has to watch two places.
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