Your bot answers the routine questions. Your team takes over when a visitor asks.

The bot has been answering well. A new question comes in — one where the right answer depends on judgment, on context the bot doesn’t have, or where the customer just wants to talk to a real person. On most AI-only chat tools, that’s the moment the experience falls apart: there is no way to reach a person, the bot keeps offering canned suggestions, and the customer closes the tab.

NebulaHex is built differently. Some questions belong to AI. Some belong to your team, and the visitor decides which: once you switch on live chat handoff (it is off by default), one tap on Talk to a human in your website widget brings your team in — quickly, with full context, inside one continuous conversation. The headline number most deflection tools brag about — “we deflected X% of tickets” — only tells half the story. What matters at least as much is what happens to the rest. If they reach your team smoothly, you have a real support system. If they fall through the cracks, you have a leaky funnel dressed up as a feature.

The escalation flow on NebulaHex has one job: get a human onto the conversation, with full context, before the customer disengages. Everything else — the inbox UI, the notifications, the routing to Slack or your helpdesk — is in service of that one job.

When a conversation gets escalated, three things happen in parallel. The conversation is marked as waiting for human attention and surfaces in your team’s live inbox. Notifications fire to whichever destinations you’ve connected — Slack channels, helpdesk tickets, custom webhooks. And the bot stops responding on that thread, so the next message the customer sees is from your team, not another AI attempt that misses the point.

There is exactly one path into the inbox queue, and one moment that looks like a path but isn’t. Knowing both is useful because they shape how you tune your bot.

Only the first lands in your inbox. The second keeps the conversation with the bot and can leave you a record of what your knowledge base is missing.

The inbox is where your team lives during support hours. It’s a single page in the NebulaHex dashboard, designed to look and behave like a chat client your agents already know how to use, not like a configuration screen they have to learn.

The page is split into two panels: a queue of conversations on the left, the active conversation on the right. Six things are worth knowing about it.

Every team member appears in the inbox under a display name your team controls, so what the customer sees matches your brand voice rather than internal handles. The default agent name and per-bot escalation copy are configurable from each bot’s escalation settings.

Taking over a conversation is one click. The Take Over button on a Waiting row claims the thread for the signed-in agent. The conversation moves out of Waiting and into Mine. The bot stops responding on that thread immediately — there is no race condition where the customer’s next message gets answered by both the bot and the agent.

The transcript above the input is your context. Every previous turn is visible: what the customer asked, what the bot tried, where the bot got stuck or what the customer pushed back on. Nothing has been summarized or paraphrased. You read the same words the customer wrote and decide what to say next based on the actual conversation, not a synopsis of it.

Most live conversations end with the agent solving the customer’s problem and saying goodbye. One click marks the conversation resolved. Three things happen.

The conversation moves to the Resolved tab and stops appearing in the active queue. The bot resumes — meaning that if the customer comes back to the same session and asks another question, the bot answers. And the conversation stays in the Resolved tab for a day, so your team can look back at what it handled.

The NebulaHex inbox is the primary surface for handling live conversations, but it’s not the only place an escalation shows up. Many teams already have a support workflow that lives in another tool. NebulaHex meets that workflow where it is.

You don’t have to choose one. A common configuration is “Slack ping for visibility, Zendesk ticket for the queue of record, NebulaHex inbox for the live reply.” All three fire on the same escalation. The customer’s experience doesn’t change — they’re still chatting in the same widget — but every team that needs to know is notified, and the official record of the ticket lives where your agents already track work.

Connections to Slack, Zendesk, and other helpdesks use OAuth, and Freshdesk connects with an API key you paste, so NebulaHex never sees your password for any of those tools. Stored credentials are encrypted at rest and in transit. You can disconnect any integration at any time from the same card you connected it on; once disconnected, the bot stops calling that tool immediately and the credentials are removed from our side.

Inside NebulaHex, role-based access controls who can see and use the inbox. Owners and admins configure which destinations escalations route to. Members can take over and reply to conversations. Viewers see the queue but cannot open a thread, so managers spot-checking conversations and new agents shadowing before they’re given reply rights both need Member.

Conversation transcripts are stored so your team can review them and so the bot has context for follow-up questions. They are not used to train AI models. See our privacy policy and terms for the full posture.

You don’t have to choose between AI deflection and human support. NebulaHex gives you both, and the handoff between them is built so cleanly that your customers won’t see the seam.