Escalation

Escalation moves a ticket from "bot is handling it" to "a human needs to step in."

How users escalate

Every ticket message area includes a Request human button. When clicked:

• The ticket is flagged for staff attention.
• Depending on your setup, staff may be notified in the staff-review channel or by direct mentions.
• Ogma will stop trying to answer until staff engage.

Automatic escalation

Ogma escalates on its own when:

• It cannot find a sufficiently confident answer in your knowledge base.
• The conversation indicates a human-only action (refunds, account changes, sensitive issues, etc.).
• You have configured behavior that requires a human for certain signals.
• Frustration detection is enabled and the customer shows repeated questions, escalation phrases, or caps anger — or the AI sets requiresEscalation on a reply.

When a customer sends several messages in quick succession, that burst is read by the AI before it counts as frustration: bursts that are just a rapid typing style are ignored, and only bursts that actually read as distressed escalate.

Configure frustration handling in Settings → AI & voice → Frustration detection:

Mode	Behavior
Escalate automatically	Heuristic score at/above the threshold or AI escalation → full staff handoff
Suggest only	Creates a quality flag and optional staff-review notification; bot keeps replying

Heuristic scores and reasons are recorded on ticket events for tuning.

Escalated tickets remain in the same private channel. Staff reply there directly.

Staff reply behavior

Once any staff member sends a message in a ticket, Ogma pauses before replying again. The defaults are a 30-minute cooldown, a 5-message window, and OR mode.

Change Staff reply cooldown, Recent message count, and Combine guards with in Settings → Team & access:

• A positive number (for example 15 or 30) — wait that many minutes after a staff message.
• A positive message count — remain silent while a staff reply is within that many newest messages.
• 0 — disable the corresponding guard.
• OR — remain silent while either guard is active.
• AND — remain silent only while both guards are active. If either guard is set to 0, suppression is disabled in this mode.

This prevents the bot from talking over your team while they are helping.

Where staff see escalations

• The ticket channel itself (always).
• Dashboard Staff queue — filter by Escalated or Awaiting staff (Tickets).
• The staff-review management channel created by /ogma autoconfig.
• Quality flags in Settings (Plus/Enterprise) — open tickets flagged for escalation, negative CSAT, or low-confidence replies.
• Automation rules and webhooks on Plus/Enterprise.

Handing a ticket back to the bot

If a ticket was escalated but does not need a human after all, staff can run /deescalate in the ticket channel. The ticket returns to normal bot handling and Ogma resumes answering from the customer's next message — so you can finish your current reply without the bot talking over you.

/deescalate requires a configured staff role and only works inside an open ticket. See Commands.

After escalation

Staff handle the ticket to resolution and run /close when done. The normal close flow (rating DM, transcript, possible tip) still applies.

See How tickets work for the full lifecycle, Support ops for SLAs and alerts, and Auto-learn for what happens to useful resolutions.