The customer already explained the problem, and a person promised a follow-up. Then an agent joins and opens with “Could you describe the issue?” It inherited the conversation without inheriting the work.

A support handoff tells the next participant what has been tried, what was promised, what remains unanswered, and who acts next. The Zendesk Sunshine Conversations integration provides the conversation and participant information for it, and the task design decides whether the next agent uses it well.

Read the whole sequence#

A message can be a request, a correction, a promise, or a response to a question from several exchanges earlier, so read it in place.

Take a customer asking about a missing export. The first reply suggests retrying, the customer reports the retry failed, and a later reply promises an investigation. A summary saying “customer needs retry instructions” now misleads the next agent.

Read the relevant messages in order and keep their identifiers. Identify which suggestion the customer already tried and which commitment remains open. If the connected account retrieves only part of the conversation, state that limit first.

Separate the customer’s request from the company’s commitment#

A request for a refund and a promise to issue one are different facts. An agent that combines them into “refund requested and approved” invents authority the conversation did not contain. Use a handoff structure that keeps them visible:

Customer goal: the outcome the customer wants
Already tried: steps and the customer's reported results
Company commitments: exact promises, owners, and relevant message references
Unanswered question: the decision or missing fact blocking progress
Next owner: the person or authorized system expected to act
Reply status: draft needed, waiting on a decision, or response already delivered

Tie each interpretation to a message reference so the next person can inspect the promise.

When an owner or deadline is missing, record the gap: “We will investigate” names no accepting team and no due date. The agent flags the omission for the operator.

Decide who is supposed to reply#

Several participants can observe a conversation without all owning the answer. An agent that responds merely because it received a message can interrupt a human handoff or duplicate another integration’s reply.

Zendesk describes how its switchboard manages control among participating integrations. Its documentation also notes that integrations outside the switchboard receive subscribed message events regardless of control state, so receiving an event does not show that your agent owns the response.

Establish reply ownership before delivery. If another person or integration has taken over, give them the handoff and do not answer the customer independently. Keep the conversation identifier with the ownership decision.

The Deixic connection exposes reads for conversations, messages, participants, integrations, and related resources, and no send-message or switchboard-control action. Use a separately authorized tool when the task needs to change provider state.

Make the seam between support and other systems explicit#

Some answers need an account lookup, a billing check, or an engineering investigation. Pass that task the specific unresolved question and source references.

For billing, resolve the customer mapping before joining support context to Salesforce and Stripe information. For an engineering report, preserve the reproduction and discussion when handing it to a GitHub agent.

The return handoff says what was established, what remains open, and which response is now appropriate. A completed lookup is not a resolved customer problem, and the next agent must not say “done” before anyone has answered the customer.

Check for an answer before delivering another one#

Before sending through an authorized messaging path, check whether somebody already responded after the draft was prepared. If delivery becomes uncertain, inspect the conversation before repeating it, and keep the delivered message identifier.

When a person and an agent work in parallel, make their work visible enough to reconcile without making everyone stop while one participant thinks.

Test a conversation with a failed earlier suggestion, a promise without an owner, a human takeover, an inaccessible earlier message, and a response delivered while the agent was drafting. In each case the handoff preserves the customer’s progress.

Deixic’s action history records calls routed through its connection, and your team can save reviewed follow-up instructions for the next task to reuse.