Contact form and handoff

Some conversations need a person: a refund dispute, a sales enquiry, a question your content can't answer. Buddy can collect the visitor's details in the chat, let them ask for a human at any time, and alert your team straight away. Everything here is on the agent's Contact form tab, and changes apply without publishing.

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Set up the contact form

1. Switch on Enable the contact form

   The agent can then offer the form whenever a visitor wants to be contacted.

2. Choose when else it appears

   Show after the fallback message

   When the agent couldn't answer from your knowledge.

   Show when escalating to a human

   When the agent hands the conversation to your team.

3. Edit the Form title and Fields

   The default fields are Name (required), Email (required), Mobile (optional) and Message (required). Add up to 8 fields of type Text, Email, Phone or Long text, reorder them, and mark them required. Name, email and phone are stored on the lead; other fields, such as “Order number”, are kept alongside it.

4. Set the Submit button and Thank-you message

   Defaults: “Send” and “Thanks! Our team will get back to you shortly.”

5. Save

Offer a human

In the Human hand-off card, Show a “Talk to a human” button in the chat header is on by default. Visitors can use it at any time. The agent also hands off on its own when a visitor asks for a person or when it judges that a human is needed.

Every hand-off appears in your Inbox as needs human, with a summary and an urgency level. Your reply appears in the visitor's chat.

See submissions

The Submissions view on the Contact form tab lists this agent's leads. For every agent at once, go to Inbox → Contact submissions, where you can search and export them to Excel or CSV. Each lead links to its conversation.

Send leads to your CRM

Use Send to your API on the Contact form tab to push each submission to your own endpoint or CRM as it arrives.

1. Enter your endpoint

   Choose POST, PUT or PATCH and the URL. Add any headers your endpoint needs; they're encrypted at rest.

2. Choose the body

   Standard JSON sends the payload below. Custom template lets you shape it for your CRM with placeholders such as {lead}, {lead_id} and {conversation_url}.

3. Try Send test

   Under Test with a sample submission. Nothing is saved.

4. Click Enable push to API

{
  "event": "lead.created",
  "id": "…",
  "created_at": "2026-09-27T10:04:12Z",
  "agent": { "id": "…", "name": "Acme Assistant" },
  "conversation_id": "…",
  "conversation_url": "…",
  "lead": { "name": "…", "email": "…", "phone": "…", … }
}

Verify and retry

• Each request carries X-Buddy-Event, X-Buddy-Delivery (the lead id, the same on retries, so you can de-duplicate) and X-Buddy-Signature: t=<unix>,v1=<hex>.
• The signature is an HMAC-SHA256 of <t>.<raw body> using your whsec_… secret, the same scheme as event webhooks. Use Rotate to replace the secret.
• Network errors, timeouts, 429 and 5xx responses are retried for about 15 minutes.
• Each lead shows its delivery status (Delivered, Failed, Retrying), and Send again pushes it once more.

Need every event, not just leads? Event webhooks on Pro also cover hand-offs, conversations and more.

Troubleshooting