The seam the visitor should never feel
For a team that spans shifts or time zones, conversations do not politely end at clock-out. A chat opened at 5:55pm might still be live when the next person takes over. Handled badly, the visitor gets “my shift is ending, please start a new chat tomorrow” — and hears “we don't care.” Handled well, they never notice the handoff happened.
Pass the context, not just the chat
Transferring a live conversation is only half the job; the incoming agent needs the story. What has the visitor already tried? What did the last agent promise? A one-line internal note — “refund approved, waiting on finance to confirm, told them by tomorrow” — saves the customer from re-explaining and saves the new agent from contradicting the old one.
Never make them repeat themselves
The single worst handoff outcome is “can you tell me what's going on from the start?” The visitor already explained it once; asking again signals that nobody was really listening. The full transcript should carry over so the new agent reads in rather than re-interviews. Continuity is the entire point of a handoff.
Have a rule for the in-flight chat
Decide in advance what happens to an open chat at shift end: does the outgoing agent finish it, transfer it live to the incoming agent, or, if it is genuinely paused, convert it to a follow-up that the next shift owns. The wrong answer is “whatever the agent feels like,” which produces dropped conversations exactly when the team is busiest.
How MyLiveChat supports handoff
MyLiveChat lets an agent transfer a live chat to another agent, whisper internal notes that the visitor never sees, and retains the full transcript, so an incoming shift picks up the thread by reading it rather than restarting it. The visitor experiences one continuous conversation, even though two different people handled it.