14 Nov: Improved human-bot handovers

Ricardo Updated by Ricardo

Improved human-bot handovers: help people who need help faster and better

If you run a hybrid service, where you have automated journeys, but also human support, you know it's often hard to separate conversations that need human help, from passive bot conversations.

We've made a number of improvements to help you deal with this better, and help you provide a fantastic human support experience.

Surface people who need help

We've introduced two new sections to the inbox that will help you find conversations that need help:

1. Waiting for help: conversations that have been flagged as needing help, but haven't been assigned to anyone yet

2. Being helped: conversations that have been flagged as needing help, and have been assigned to someone

However: how do you flag conversation as needing help? Using Route to operator block in journeys.

This is key. If you don't use this block already, it's time to add it to your journeys in the points where you want a conversation to get routed to an operator.

How do I automatically distribute these conversations amongst my team?

If you automated routing enabled, we've changed its behaviour so that conversations that go through the Route to operator block get automatically assigned to available operators.

With these changes, only conversations that matter get surfaced to your operators.

Automatically pause journeys during operator handovers

Before, when you routed a conversation to an operator, journeys would stay active until an operator replied.

Now, we've introduced a setting that enables you to automatically pause journeys as soon as a conversation is routed to an operator.

You can also set how long journeys get paused for. Before, it used to be a fixed 15 minutes. However, that often wasn't enough time for an operator to reply — which caused users to accidentally trigger journeys while they were waiting. Now, you can set whatever time makes sense for you.

Automatically close journey chats after they're done

Before, we used to keep automated journeys chats open, even after users were done. This made it really difficult to find conversations that needed human help.

Now, we introduced a new setting that lets you automatically close journey chats that don't need human help. Conversations that went through the Route to operator block remain open, as those require human help.

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