Human handoff

The AI handles 80-95% of conversations on most stores. The remaining slice — refunds, complaints, high-value B2B, edge cases — is where a teammate needs to step in. Handoff is the mechanism that makes that transition smooth for both sides. This page covers triggers, routing, and handing the conversation back.

Manual handoff

Any shopper can ask for a human. Zubby listens for explicit phrases (“talk to a person”, “speak to a human”, “escalate”) and renders a “Talk to someone” button after the third turn. When clicked or detected, the conversation enters Awaiting human state.

Teammates can also pull a conversation into manual mode from the inbox detail pane — click Take over. The AI yields and stops generating; your next message is sent as a human.

Auto-handoff triggers

Default triggers that route automatically:

• Refund / return intent — anything involving money going back to the shopper.
• Negative sentiment after 2 turns — frustration detected.
• Low confidence on a non-trivial question — three retries below the retrieval threshold.
• VIP shoppers during business hours — your highest spenders get human attention by default.
• Order status with damage / late / lost — anything that needs a real apology.

Routing by skill

Beyond auto-assigning a single owner, you can route to a team with skills:

• Language — Spanish conversations to your Spanish team.
• Region — EU shoppers to the EU CS team.
• Topic — sizing requests to your stylist team; B2B requests to sales.
• VIP tier — top 1% spenders to the founder’s inbox.

What the human sees

When you open a handed-off conversation, the right rail shows everything: shopper profile (lifetime value, lifecycle stage, recent orders), the full AI transcript with citations, why the handoff was triggered, and any internal notes from previous interactions.

Handing back to the AI

After resolving a question, click Hand back to AI. The agent reads the human-authored turns as additional context and resumes. You can also schedule a hand-back (e.g. “hand back in 24 hours”) if the shopper asked you to check in later — the AI will follow up at the scheduled time.

Notifications

Wire up handoff notifications wherever your team lives:

• Email — single, daily digest, or per-event.
• Slack channel.
• Microsoft Teams channel.
• Mobile push (iOS / Android via the Zubby app).
• Outbound webhook — for custom integrations. See Webhooks.

Agent assist

Even when a human is replying, the AI is a co-pilot. Click Suggest reply for a context-aware draft, or hit Cmd+J to insert a canned reply. The AI also flags sensitive language (“we’ll definitely refund you”) before you send.

Out-of-hours behavior

Conversations queued for handoff outside business hours show a delayed-reply expectation to the shopper (“We’ll reply by 9 AM Tuesday”). When the team comes online, queued handoffs surface at the top of the inbox sorted by wait time.

Adjacent

• Inbox
• Training
• Audience rules