Confidence-based handoff rules
Two different signals can hand a ticket off to staff: Atlas doesn’t know the answer, or the customer explicitly asks for a human. You get to tune both.
Where to find these
All of the settings below live under Configuration > AI > Knowledge base > Feedback & learning in the dashboard.
1. Atlas doesn’t have a confident answer
When the customer’s question doesn’t match anything in your knowledge base well enough, Atlas can either decline to reply (the quiet path) or kick the ticket up to staff (the loud path). Two toggles control this:
- Auto-escalate on low confidence - when on, Atlas escalates the ticket instead of replying with a low-quality answer. When off, it just stays quiet and your team picks it up the normal way.
- Ping staff on escalation- when on, escalation events ping the staff role you’ve configured. When off, the escalation still happens but it’s silent - useful if you already monitor the dashboard inbox.
2. The customer asks for a human
Independently of the confidence check, Atlas listens for messages like “can I talk to someone” or “I want a real person”. The setting that controls this is Human-assistance threshold, a value between 0.1 and 1.0 (default 0.8).
It’s a confidence score on whether the customer is really asking for human help. At or above the threshold, Atlas hands off immediately. Below it, Atlas keeps trying to answer from the knowledge base. Lower the threshold (e.g. 0.6) if you’d rather over-escalate than miss a request; raise it (0.9) if customers often say “human” while meaning something else.
Two related toggles you’ll see nearby
- Flag sensitive topics- when a question touches billing, account, security, or legal, the ticket is flagged for staff while Atlas still replies. Good middle ground: customers don’t wait, but a human reviews.
- Escalation batch window - if a flurry of escalations come in close together, they get bundled into one notification instead of pinging your team N times in a row. Defaults to 30 seconds; set to 0 for immediate notifications; max 5 minutes.
- Escalation duration - after a ticket has been escalated, Atlas backs off for this many days before trying to help again. Default is 7. Set to 0 if you want Atlas to stay out of the ticket permanently once a human is involved.
The priority detector also has a threshold
Separately from handoff, Atlas can detect ticket priority (low / medium / high / critical). That feature has its own confidence threshold in Configuration > AI > Priority detection (default 0.7). Below it, Atlas leaves the priority alone instead of guessing - useful if your team relies on priority for paging.