Notify your team

What it is

Notify team is a Call Action type that sends your team a short email when something in a conversation is worth a human's attention — without interrupting the visitor. In the type picker it reads "Send your team a message when something matters."

The visitor never learns the alert was sent. The chatbot writes a one-line summary of what happened, the alert goes out on a background queue, and the conversation carries on as normal.

Notify or handoff?

These two look similar and are used for very different things.

	Notify team	Human handoff
Visitor is told	No — silent	Yes, the reply says someone will follow up
Conversation is flagged as escalated	No	Yes
Counted in the Handoff Rate KPI	No	Yes
Typical use	"Heads up, this looked like a big lead"	"This person needs a human now"

Use notify for awareness. Use Hand off to a human when the visitor is waiting on a person. Nothing stops you enabling both on the same chatbot with different descriptions.

When you would use it

• A sales-qualified lead mentioned a budget, a team size, or an enterprise plan.
• Someone reported a bug, an outage, or a broken checkout.
• A visitor mentioned a competitor by name, or asked about a feature you do not have yet.
• A conversation went badly and you want to review it, but the visitor did not ask for a human.
• A VIP customer or a named account turned up on the widget.

Where to find it

Open Dashboard → Chatbots → your chatbot → Actions, select New action, then choose Notify team under Start from scratch.

Steps

1. Open the Actions tab and select New action.
2. Choose Notify team.
3. On Details, set a Name such as Flag a hot lead.
4. Write When should the AI use this? with the specific moments worth an alert. Be strict here — an over-firing notify action gets muted by your team within a week and then it is worthless.
5. On Configure, set Notify email. Leave it blank to use your account email.
6. Optionally set a Subject (optional). Leave it blank and Agentency uses its own localised subject line; fill it in and every alert from this action carries the subject you wrote, which makes inbox rules and filters easy.
7. Save, run the Test tab with a realistic sample message — nothing is sent and nothing is recorded in the sandbox — then turn on Enabled.

What your team receives

An email, in the same branded layout as the rest of Agentency's mail and in the chatbot owner's saved language. It contains:

• the chatbot's name;
• the summary the chatbot wrote about why it is flagging this conversation;
• the visitor's last message;
• a link straight to that conversation in your dashboard.

The summary is written by the model at the moment it fires — you do not template it. That is what makes the alert readable ("Visitor from a 200-person logistics company asked about SSO and annual invoicing") instead of a bare "action triggered" ping.

If Notify email is empty or invalid, the alert falls back to the chatbot owner's account email, so an alert is never dropped for a blank field. Point it at a shared inbox, a distribution list, or the intake address of your ticketing tool rather than one person's mailbox.

Delivery happens in the background so a slow mail server can never delay the visitor's reply. The email typically lands a moment after the visitor sees the answer.

Routing an alert into Slack, Teams, or a ticket

Notify team sends email only. If you want the alert to land somewhere else, use a Custom API action with one of the built-in templates instead — Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams all take an incoming-webhook URL and need no credential beyond that URL. Zapier and Make bridge to almost anything else.

Set that action's description to the same trigger wording you would have used here, and you get the identical behaviour delivered to a channel instead of an inbox. See Use a preset and the full list in the Call action preset reference.

That is a different thing from connecting Slack or Discord as a channel, which is about letting people chat with your chatbot there. See Connect Slack and Connect Discord.

Keeping the noise down

An alert nobody reads is worse than no alert. Three habits that work:

1. Name the signal, not the topic. "When the visitor mentions a budget over 10,000 or asks about annual invoicing" beats "when the visitor asks about pricing" — the second fires on every price question you already answer well.
2. Exclude what the chatbot already handles. Add a clause like "Do not use this for ordinary product or pricing questions the knowledge base answers."
3. Review the run log after the first week. Open the action's Run log and read the arguments on each run. If most summaries are dull, tighten the description. See Call Action history.

What you will see

In the library, the notify action is a card with the Enabled badge, run count, last run, and success rate. In the Run log, a delivered alert reads Success; one where no destination could be reached reads Failed with the reason Delivery failed. The run's arguments show the summary the chatbot wrote, which is the fastest way to judge whether the action is firing for the right reasons.

Limits and plan notes

• Notify counts as one enabled Call Action: Free 0, Starter 3, Standard 8, Pro 12, Agency 20 per chatbot. See Plans and what you get.
• The optional subject is capped at 150 characters.
• You need permission to manage actions on that chatbot. See Roles and permissions.
• Like every action, notify is bounded by the per-visitor and per-chatbot run caps that stop a single session flooding your inbox.
• The alert email carries the conversation summary and the visitor's last message — treat the destination inbox as somewhere customer data legitimately lands, the same way you would treat your support inbox.
• Requires confirmation is available on this type but almost never right: it would make the visitor click Confirm before your team can be told about them.

Common problems

No email arrives.

Check the Run log first. Success means Agentency delivered it, so look in the destination mailbox's spam folder and any filters on it. Failed / Delivery failed means the address could not be reached — re-check the Notify email field.

The action never fires.

The action must be Enabled, the chatbot's model must support tool calling (if not, the tab shows "Actions are temporarily unavailable" — see Chatbot AI settings), and the description must match how visitors really phrase things. Use the Test tab with a real sentence to find out which.

We get flooded.

Tighten the description and add an explicit exclusion clause. If a single visitor is triggering it repeatedly, note that the per-session cap already stops one conversation running actions indefinitely — but the fix is the description, not the cap.

The alerts arrive in the wrong language.

They follow the chatbot owner's saved language, not the visitor's. Change it in your profile settings. See Appearance, language, and timezone.

I want the alert to include the visitor's email address.

Notify sends a summary, not a contact record. Pair it with a Collect visitor details action so the contact is saved to Customers, and use the conversation link in the alert to find them.