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Conversation Handover
Conversation Handover

The Conversation Handover plugin allows you to pass control of the Messenger conversation from Chatfuel to other Facebook apps.

Edgar avatar
Written by Edgar
Updated over a week ago

The Messenger platform has a Handover Protocol feature that allows you to have more than one app participate in a conversation within your Page’s inbox — while making sure the conversation flow isn’t broken, and there are specific rules that control this. 

This feature can be used in many ways to make managing your conversations easier. For example, you can make sure that you’re using a Chatfuel bot for general conversations, and then a different app to allow the users to talk to a live support agent. 

No matter what you’d like to do using this plugin, here are the basic steps you need to take in order to set it up.

How to add a Conversation Handover block

Conversation Handover is only available for our legacy Blocks builder. It is not possible to use this plugin in Flow Builder.

  1. Open the Blocks tab.

  2. Create a new block or choose an existing one.

  3. Click + More to open the full list of plugins.

  4. Choose Conversation Handover plugin.

Setting up Conversation Handover in Facebook settings

1. Go to your Facebook Page’s Settings → Messenger Platform. Click “Configure

2. You’ll need to set only one app to be the Primary Receiver (this should be Chatfuel).

3. Go to Chatfuel, and add the “Conversation Handover” plugin

4. You’ll first need to pick your Secondary Receiver app here or to write its ID that can be found in the same page of the Handover protocol settings:

5. You can also set up the desired timeout period here. That means that the bot will take control of the conversation after the specified amount of time. Keep in mind that changing the timeout in the plugin will affect only future handovers for your users. You can also use the Graph API request defined in the plugin if you want to return control to Chatfuel before the timeout kicks in.


Congratulations! You have your handover protocol set up.


In your Conversation Handover plugin, you can also add keywords that would trigger the conversation to return to the bot. You'll find this field at the end of the plugin card

You can insert the keywords in any language you wish, but it's best if the language matches the one you have set up in your Keywords tab. If the user types one of the keywords, the conversation will be handed back from the third-party app you're using. Keep in mind that the bot can't read the messages your operators send from the third-party app - the user needs to type those.  

If you want to make sure that the user knows they are no longer in the third-party app, in a live chat session with your agent - you can simply place a Text Card after your Conversation Handover plugin that makes that clear.
Any of your bot's cards can be placed after the Conversation Plugin - and it will be delivered to the user right after the handover session is finished.
You can use this to collect feedback on the Live Chat sessions, or simply return your users to a specific part of the bot's flow.

Also keep in mind that, while the Conversation Handover is active, Live Chat won't be available for that specific user.

If you have any trouble with the Conversation Handover plugin, send it over to the support team and we’ll help you out — team@chatfuel.com

Additional information:

Facebook’s documentation (including the Handover Protocol API Reference)

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