Storefront chat has a reputation problem, and it's mostly earned. Shoppers have learned that a chat bubble usually means a bot reciting an FAQ, or a contact form dressed up to look like a conversation. Both outcomes teach the shopper not to bother asking next time.
The assistant answers in products, not paragraphs
The shopping assistant searches the store's own catalog while it's replying, so a question like "something waterproof for about £80" comes back as actual products in stock, with links — not a generic description of what waterproof jackets tend to look like. It's trained on the store's catalog, not the open internet, so it doesn't recommend something the store stopped selling months ago.
The handoff, specifically
When a shopper asks for a person, or a conversation needs judgment the assistant isn't set up to exercise, the conversation appears on a live desk alongside every other active conversation across the stores a team manages — searchable, with a badge on the ones asking for a human. A staff member opens the thread, reads the whole conversation up to that point, and takes over. The assistant pauses. Replies from that point go out as the staff member, in the same chat window the shopper has been using the whole time — no handoff form, no "please email us instead", no starting over.
When the staff member is done, they hand it back and the assistant resumes.
What happens if nobody's at the desk
The desk isn't meant to be staffed around the clock. If a shopper asks for a person and nobody is available, the request routes to the store's support address instead of disappearing into an empty queue. Nothing is designed to fail silently.
What it reports
Message volume and full conversation logs are there to read end to end, along with how often shoppers asked for a human. That last figure tends to be more useful as a product signal than a support metric — a spike in hand-off requests around a particular question is usually pointing at something the product pages should already answer.