Human handoff and leads

When does the chatbot hand over to a human?

Two triggers, both deliberately narrow:

• the visitor asks for a person (recognised in Slovak, Czech and English);
• the bot fails to answer twice in a row.

Narrow on purpose. An escalation rule that fires easily produces a flood nobody reads, and an inbox nobody reads is the same as no handoff at all.

What if nobody is available to take the conversation?

The conversation appears in Conversations and a colleague can reply in the same chat the visitor is already in. If nobody joins within 180 seconds, the bot takes the conversation back and offers to take an email address. The visitor is never left waiting on a person who is not coming.

How are leads captured?

Depending on what you set the bot up to do — support, lead generation, or internal use — it offers a short form or a call-to-action. The form is shown at most once per visit, collects name, email and phone, and the conversation transcript is attached to the lead on the server, so you read the contact together with what they actually asked.

What the bot is for changes when it asks, never what it claims. A lead-gen bot does not become more willing to invent an answer.

Where do leads go?

• HubSpot — a private app token; creates a contact with email, name and phone. The transcript is not sent automatically, because HubSpot rejects unknown properties and the default names differ per portal; create a property and enter its internal name to receive it.
• Pipedrive — token plus your company subdomain; creates a person with email and phone.
• A custom webhook — flat JSON with the transcript included, which is what you want for Make, Zapier, n8n, or a CRM not on this list.

What happens to a lead if my CRM is down?

You keep it. The lead is written to Grounly's database first and pushed to the CRM afterwards. A CRM outage costs you the sync, not the contact — which is the whole reason the order is that way round.

See also channels — handoff works the same way on Telegram.