A Copilot Studio agent is great at handling the everyday questions on your Power Pages site. It can check order status, explain a policy, or point someone to the right form, all day and all night without a break. But no bot can solve every problem. Sometimes a visitor has a tricky case, a billing dispute, or a question that needs a real person with real judgment. When that moment comes, the worst thing you can do is leave them stuck talking to a bot that keeps missing the point.
That is where a live agent handoff comes in. With the right setup, your Copilot Studio agent can pass the conversation to a human at the exact moment it is needed. The visitor never has to start over or repeat themselves. In this guide I will walk you through how to set up that handoff on a Power Pages site, in plain language, step by step.
What You Need First
Before anything else, you need a place for the live agents to actually work. The handoff sends the conversation to a service hub, and the most common one is Dynamics 365 Customer Service with Omnichannel. This is the system where your human agents sit, pick up chats, and reply to customers. If you do not have an engagement hub like this in place, the handoff has nowhere to go. So make sure that piece is ready before you start wiring things up.
Once you have that, the rest is about connecting your agent to it and telling the agent when to make the jump.
How the Handoff Actually Works
The nicest part of this whole feature is what happens behind the scenes during the handoff. When your Copilot Studio agent passes the chat to a human, it does not just dump the visitor into a fresh, empty window. It carries the full story with it. The live agent receives the entire conversation history plus any details the bot collected along the way, like the visitor’s name, their order number, or whatever the bot already asked about.
This means the human picks up right where the bot left off. The customer does not have to explain their problem twice. The agent reads the history, sees the details, and continues the conversation smoothly. That handover feels seamless to the person on the other end, and it saves everyone time.
Two Ways a Handoff Can Start
There are two main ways a conversation moves from the bot to a human, and it helps to plan for both.
The first is the explicit trigger. This is when the visitor flat out asks for a person. They type something like “I want to talk to a real agent” or “connect me to support.” The bot recognizes the request and starts the handoff.
The second is the implicit trigger. This is more subtle. Maybe the bot tries a few times and still cannot help, or the visitor sounds frustrated, or the topic is one you decided should always go to a human. In these cases the bot itself decides to escalate, even though nobody asked directly. A good setup uses both, so people get a person whether they ask or whether the bot senses they need one.
Step One: Connect Omnichannel in Copilot Studio
Open your agent in Copilot Studio and go to the settings. Look for the Customer engagement hub section. Inside, you will find Omnichannel as an option. Select it and choose Connect. This links your agent to the service hub where your live agents work.
This step matters a lot for Power Pages users. When you add an agent through the Power Pages design studio, that agent does not come with the instructions it needs to transfer chats to Omnichannel. The design studio gives you a working bot, but the handoff part has to be set up by hand. So you open the agent in Copilot Studio directly and make the connection there.
Step Two: Set Up the Escalate Topic
Now you tell the agent what to do when a handoff is needed. In Copilot Studio, go to the Topics page and open the System tab. There you will find a topic called Escalate. This is the built-in topic that runs whenever a conversation needs to leave the bot and reach a human.
Open the Escalate topic and add a Transfer conversation node at the bottom of it. This node is the actual handoff. When the agent reaches this point, it stops handling the chat itself and passes it along to the live agent queue. You can add a short, friendly message right before the transfer, something like “Let me connect you with someone who can help.” A small line like that reassures the visitor that help is on the way.
Step Three: Route the Chat to the Right People
On the Dynamics 365 Customer Service side, you decide where these escalated chats land. This is done with routing rules and queues. You might send billing questions to one team and technical questions to another. Setting this up well means the visitor reaches a person who actually knows the topic, not just the next free agent.
Take time to match your queues to the way your support team is organized. The better the routing, the faster the right person picks up, and the happier your visitor will be.
Step Four: Test the Whole Flow
Once everything is connected, walk through it like a real visitor. Open your Power Pages site, start a chat, and ask for a live agent. Watch the bot recognize the request, show the handoff message, and pass the chat over. On the agent side, confirm that the human sees the full history and the details the bot collected.
Try the implicit path too. Push the bot on a topic it cannot solve and see whether it escalates the way you planned. Test during the hours your agents are online, and also think about what happens when no agents are available, so visitors are not left waiting with no reply.
A Few Closing Tips
Keep your handoff messages short and warm. People feel better when they know a human is coming. Make sure your live agents know that chats may arrive with a history attached, so they read it before they start typing. And review your escalations now and then. If certain questions always get handed off, that is a clue you can improve the bot to handle them, or a sign that topic truly belongs with a person.
When you put all of these pieces together, you get the best of both worlds. The bot handles the easy, common questions fast, and the moment a visitor needs a human, the conversation slides over to a live agent without a hitch. That blend keeps your Power Pages site helpful, personal, and ready for anything your visitors bring to it.