Human handoff and transfer rules

Your agent should not handle everything. Knowing when to step aside is part of working correctly.

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Transfer rules

Control center > Transfer rules defines when the AI agent should stop and transfer the conversation to a human advisor. Ciarem ships with rules for the situations that most commonly need a person, each with its own priority and an on/off toggle:

• Explicit human request: the contact directly asks to speak with a person
• Low confidence: the AI lacks sufficient certainty or sources to answer correctly
• Sensitive or critical topic: serious complaints, legal matters, complex payments, or sensitive data
• Repeated failure: the contact repeats the same question and the AI cannot resolve it
• Upset customer: frustration, anger, or negative sentiment is detected
• Complex negotiation: payment exceptions, non-standard discounts, or special agreements
• Out of scope: the topic does not belong to any active agent’s capabilities

You can also click Create new rule for cases specific to your business, for example transferring the moment a contact is ready to buy. These seven rules are just defaults to start from, not fixed settings. You can switch any of them off, edit its wording or priority, or delete it entirely, and add your own alongside them.

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Rule priority

Each rule has a priority: High, Medium, or Low. Priority sets the order the agent checks rules in. It evaluates the High-priority rules first, then Medium, then Low, and the first rule whose condition matches is the one that fires. So when a conversation could match more than one rule, the higher-priority rule wins. Give a rule High priority when it should take precedence no matter what else is happening (for example an explicit request for a person, or an upset customer), and Low priority for broad catch-alls (like out of scope) that should apply only when nothing more specific did.

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What happens on a transfer

Transferred conversations appear in the Inbox waiting for a human. Keep transfer rules enabled and make sure someone on your team is available to take handoffs; both are readiness checks before launch, because a transfer with nobody on the other end is just a slower unanswered message.

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Taking over manually

You do not need a rule to intervene. Every conversation in the Inbox shows its conversation handler: whether it is being answered by the AI agent or a person. From there you can take over and respond manually at any moment, and switch back to Let AI respond when the human moment has passed. The agent stays out of the way while a human has control. If you connected WhatsApp via Coexistence, replying from your phone’s WhatsApp Business app has the same effect: Ciarem sees your reply and the agent does not talk over you.

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What transfers tell you

A high transfer rate is not automatically bad, and zero transfers is not automatically good. What matters is the reason. Monitoring > Live health shows why conversations were transferred, broken down by rule, so you can tell knowledge gaps you can fill from genuinely human moments that should stay human. See Is my agent working correctly?.