How do I escalate an AI chat to a human, and what does the customer see while they wait?

There are two layers to this: how the handoff happens, and what the customer experiences during it.

How escalation works

1. Automatic (confidence-based). The built-in AI assistant answers customers in the chat widget, grounded in your knowledge base. When it is not confident it can ground an answer in your docs, it escalates to a human instead of guessing — a human is always in the loop before anything risky is said. Nothing needs to be configured for this path; it is on by default when the assistant is enabled.
2. AI-draft mode (human sends). If you prefer humans to send everything, enable the drafting mode (auto-responder / Ask-AI). The assistant drafts a reply, the draft lands in your approval queue, and a human reviews and sends it. Escalation here is simply the draft waiting for your team.
3. Manual by your team. Your agents work the ticket queue directly (active / pending / snoozed / closed lifecycle, priority, tags, assignment), so anyone on your team can take over a conversation at any point — assign it to themselves and reply from the helpdesk.

What the customer sees while they wait

• The conversation stays in the same chat widget thread — there is no jarring switch to a different window.
• Messages the AI sends are assistant messages in the thread; when a human takes over, replies come through the same widget, so the customer simply sees the conversation continuing (customers recognize the change by the reply style/wording rather than a separate UI).
• If no one is online, the widget behaves like normal live chat: the customer leaves their message and email, it becomes a ticket, and your team's next reply reaches them by email plus the chat thread.

Practical tip: the widget language follows your settings (see the Spanish-widget guide), so if you serve multilingual customers, set the widget language before an escalation so the waiting experience stays consistent.

If you tell me which mode you run (instant AI answers vs. AI-draft), I can give you the exact settings path for it.

— DeskCrew Support