Unanswered Chat Escalation Guide
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Unanswered Chat Escalation Guide
Where to find it: Routing & Escalation → 2 · Unanswered chats
This section controls what happens when a chat sits in the queue and nobody picks it up.
It applies to every account. It is not part of the Advanced Routing add-on, and it works
on both the Legacy and Smart Routing engines.
What it does
Every minute, Velaro checks all open conversations and applies these rules:
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Escalate unanswered chats | Master switch for everything in this section. On by default. |
| Fallback team | Where an unanswered chat gets transferred. If this is empty, nothing ever transfers. |
| Escalate after | How long a chat may wait unassigned before it moves to the fallback team. |
| Untouched assigned chat notice | How long an assigned chat may go with no agent reply before an escalation notice fires. |
| Return unclaimed transfers to sender | When an agent-to-agent or agent-to-team transfer goes unanswered, try the original agent (if they are back online) or the original team first, before using the fallback team. Off by default. |
| SLA warning threshold | Percent of the SLA target elapsed at which a warning notice fires. |
| SLA breach threshold | Percent of the SLA target elapsed at which a breach notice fires. Cannot be lower than the warning threshold. |
A transfer only ever happens when both conditions are true:
1. Escalate unanswered chats is on, and
2. A fallback team is selected.
If escalation is on but no fallback team is set, the page shows a warning. Unanswered chats
keep waiting in their original queue until the team's queue timeout marks them as missed.
The most common misconfiguration
"Chats aren't transferring when nobody's available" almost always means **no fallback team is
selected**. Escalation defaults to on, but there is no default destination, so there is nothing
for the escalation pass to do. Pick a fallback team and the transfers start on the next run.
Note that a team cannot escalate to itself, and Velaro will not transfer a chat to the fallback
team when the chat is already sitting on that team.
Per-team overrides
The values on this page are the account-wide default. Any individual team can override any of
them, and the team's value wins. Resolution order for each setting, independently:
1. The team's own value
2. The account-wide value on this page
3. A built-in default (escalate on, 60 minutes standard / 15 minutes for urgent tickets,
60-minute untouched notice, 75% SLA warning, 90% SLA breach, no fallback team,
return-to-sender off)
Clearing a team's override sends it back to the account-wide value. Clearing an override never
affects that team's other routing settings, such as its queue timeout or bot profile.
Urgent tickets escalate faster
When the conversation is a ticket with Urgent priority and nothing overrides
"Escalate after" anywhere, Velaro uses a 15-minute threshold instead of 60.
Want something other than a plain transfer?
Use a Workflow on the Missed chat trigger. It fires whenever a chat ends up unanswered,
and from there you can do anything a workflow can do, including:
- Send a survey and branch on the answers (a
Send surveyorTrigger surveynode) - Route to a different team based on what the visitor said or which page they were on
- Send an email, create a ticket, push to a CRM, or notify Teams/Slack
Use this section for the simple "move it to the overflow team" case, and a Missed chat workflow
when the follow-up needs any logic.
Related notices
Two other notices are driven from the same pass:
- Untouched assigned chat fires an
assigned_conversation_untouchedworkflow event, so you
can build a nudge or supervisor alert on it.
- SLA breach fires an
sla_breachworkflow event and dispatches the Teams and Slack cards
configured under Notifications.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause to check first |
|---|---|
| Nothing ever transfers | No fallback team selected, on the team and account-wide |
| Transfers happen too late | "Escalate after" is still on the 60-minute default |
| A chat bounced between two teams | "Return unclaimed transfers to sender" is on. It is limited to one bounce per transfer chain, so a chat cannot ping-pong forever. |
| Chats are marked missed instead of transferring | The team's queue timeout is shorter than "Escalate after". Raise the queue timeout, or lower "Escalate after". |
| Settings look right but nothing happens | Confirm the team the chat actually landed on. Per-team overrides win over this page. |
History
These rules shipped in July 2026 with full enforcement but no settings screen, so for a period
they could only be changed by Velaro support with a direct database change. In practice that meant
every account ran on the built-in defaults, which include no fallback team, so no unanswered chat
was ever transferred anywhere. The settings screen described above closes that gap. If an account
reports that unanswered chats have never transferred, this is why, and selecting a fallback team
is the fix.
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