What your plan includes for escalations
How escalation differs by plan: tickets on Lite and Starter, the live Chat Dashboard on Growth and Scale, and what your customer sees either way.
Escalation works on every plan. What changes is where the conversation lands when the assistant hands it over.
Lite and Starter: it becomes a ticket
When a conversation needs a person, the assistant files a ticket in your billing portal with the whole story attached: the transcript, which checks it ran, what those checks found, the customer’s services, and which server they are on. Your team opens the ticket already knowing what happened, instead of asking the customer to explain it again.
The customer is told plainly that a person is picking this up. The widget carries a small “Powered by Panelbot” badge on these plans.
Growth and Scale: it can become a live conversation
These plans add the Chat Dashboard, so an escalation can arrive as a claimable chat while the customer is still sitting there. Someone on your team takes it over mid-conversation and carries on typing, with the same context visible beside the chat.
If nobody is available, it falls back to the ticket path above. Nothing is lost, and the customer is not left staring at a “connecting you now” banner that never resolves.
These plans are also white-label: your brand alone, no Panelbot badge anywhere.
What is identical on every plan
The assistant decides to escalate for the same reasons regardless of price. It escalates when a customer asks for a human, when an operation is above the line you drew, when it is not confident enough to answer, and when something needs approval it cannot give itself.
It also keeps helping while a handoff is pending, rather than going silent the moment it decides to escalate.
Choosing between them
If your team is not sitting in a chat queue during the day, the dashboard will not get used and the ticket path is the honest fit. If you already staff live chat, or you want to, the dashboard is what makes escalations feel instant to a customer instead of “we will get back to you”.