Direct handover to an agent for longer user questions

VishalSandhu — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:40:54 GMT

With the following setting in your chatbot builder you can add another feature to your bot, which gives you the possibility to deactivate your chatbot early. If a user sent a long message describing his issue (in our example below longer than 15 characters), it often makes sense to directly open tickets for an agent instead of running a user through a series of bot-questions.

And this is how it works!

There are two different scenarios: if the user is writing to your company for the first time or the user is a returning user.

Variant A (new user): If the user writes his/her request to your company for the first time, you might want to ask him to consent to your data privacy policy before opening a ticket/running the bot. In this case, you will need to save the information on the length of the start message of the user and use it to condition the bot-flow after the user gives his consent.

Variant B (old user): The user has been in contact with your company before. In this case, the bot can directly check the length of the user message and decide whether to open a ticket/proceed with the bot flow.

Variant A

1) We are in the dialog of the chatbot.

In the first step the topic "Default" is important. Here you can find the welcome message (_start).

2) Navigate to the menu "variables" and create a new numeric variable that will later store information on the length of the user message, e.g. with a name lenghtofstartmessage.

3) Navigate to the user question "_start."

Put a special expression $lenghtofstartmessage=(length($chat_text$))$ which saves the length of the user message ($chat_text$) into a variable $lenghtofstartmessage$ directly into the text-box along with the bot-answer. The command will be run in the background and will not be visible to the user.

3.) Navigate back to the dialogue. In this example, we have privacy consent built into the bot. So go to the privacy topic.

4.) Now go to the green arrow to the right of the $consent$ user question and create two conditions.

There are two different conditions you can set:

Either the message is shorter than 15 characters ($lenghtofstartmessage$<15), then the bot switches to the topic selection menu...

…or the message is not shorter than 15 characters. Then the message has more than 15 characters and a ticket is created and the bot is disabled (this condition can be left empty).

Your bot will be deactivated if a user has already described his/her request in detail!

Variant B

1.) In the second case, the user is a returning user who has been in contact with your channel before. Now it is not the welcome message that is important, but the user question "*".

2.) You can directly check the length of the message that a user sent you. Navigate to the user question "*".

Either the user’s message is shorter than 15 characters. Then, in that case, the selection menu appears…

… or not and the message has more than 15 characters. Then a ticket is created and the bot is disabled.

Your bot will be deactivated if a user has already described his/her request in detail!

Note: If the process is the same for the new and the old user, then the conditions in the _start dialogue should also be as in the "*" dialog.

article Direct handover to an agent for longer user questions in Legacy - Engage Bot

Direct handover to an agent for longer user questions