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Human support & escalation

When the AI can’t help — or a visitor explicitly asks for a human — InsiteChat hands the conversation to your team. Every escalation is tracked, surfaced in a dedicated dashboard, and resolvable with one click.

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How escalation works

When a visitor escalates:
  1. The conversation is marked Escalated with a timestamp
  2. Email alerts go to every configured recipient
  3. The conversation appears in the Human Support tab as Open
  4. A conversation.escalated webhook fires (if configured)
  5. The visitor sees a confirmation message in the widget

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Escalation triggers

There are three ways a conversation gets escalated:

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Configuration

Open your chatbot → Embed tab → Human Support sub-tab.
1

Enable inline escalation CTA

Toggle Show escalation CTA on. After every bot reply the widget renders two buttons:
  • A positive feedback button (e.g. “That answered my question 👍”)
  • A request help button (e.g. “Connect to an agent 👤”)
Tapping the positive button records a thumbs-up and dismisses the CTA pair for that message. Tapping request-help escalates the conversation.
2

Optionally replace smart follow-ups

Toggle Replace smart follow-ups with escalation on if you want the CTA pair to take the place of auto-generated follow-up suggestions. Off by default — both can coexist.
3

Customize labels

  • Positive feedback label — defaults to “That answered my question 👍”
  • Request help label — defaults to your localized “Talk to a human” string
  • Confirmation message — shown to the visitor after they escalate (defaults to the localized “Sent! The team will follow up soon.”)
4

Add email recipients

Enter up to 10 email addresses that receive escalation alerts. The chatbot owner is always notified — recipients here are added on top. Press Enter or click Add to add an address; click the × on any chip to remove.
5

Save

Click Save Customization. Settings take effect on the live widget within a few seconds.
The user-level notify_escalation setting in account preferences is a master kill-switch. If you turn it off, you stop receiving escalation emails on every chatbot — even if you’re listed as a recipient.

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Human support dashboard

Every chatbot has a Human Support tab that shows escalated conversations and triage metrics.

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Stat strip

Four KPIs computed over the last 30 days:

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Triage view

A master-detail layout: a list on the left, the full transcript on the right.
  • Filter pills — Unresolved / Resolved / All
  • Conversation list — last message preview, escalation timestamp, message count, status badge
  • Transcript pane — full message history with timestamps, formatted markdown for assistant replies
  • Mark resolved / Reopen — one-click status toggle, instantly updates the stat strip
  • Export — download the transcript as CSV for record-keeping or CRM ingestion
Email alerts include a deep link straight to the relevant conversation: /dashboard/chatbots/<id>/human-support?conv=<conversation-id>. Click it from your inbox to land directly on the transcript.

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Email alerts

Each recipient receives a plain-text email with:
  • Chatbot name
  • Visitor’s most recent question
  • Escalation timestamp
  • A link to the conversation in the Human Support dashboard
Recipients are deduplicated case-insensitively and capped at 10 (plus the owner). Invalid addresses (no @) are rejected at save time.

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Webhook payload

If you have a webhook subscribed to conversation.escalated, you’ll receive:
See Webhooks for delivery, signing, and retry details.

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Tips

Set realistic expectations

Edit the confirmation message to set a response-time expectation: “We’ll reply within 1 business day.”

Pair with a lead form

Set lead-form timing to before_escalation so you always capture a contact method before handoff.

Route by team

Add team-specific aliases (sales@, support@) to the recipient list — your mail rules can fan-out further from there.

Watch the resolution rate

A falling resolution rate suggests escalations are getting dropped — review unresolved items weekly.