Everything you need to know about Facebook's handover protocol and how it handles having multiple apps manage your Messenger channel
The handover protocol is Facebook's solution to having multiple apps manage your Messenger channel. It does this by establishing primary and secondary receivers.
The primary receiver is, as you might guess, the first app to receive inbound messages from your fans. When installing both primary and secondary receivers, it's the primary receivers job to determine the nature of the fan's message and decide if it should respond, ignore or handover to the secondary receiver.
The secondary receiver sits and waits to be called upon. It's common for a customer support application to be installed as a secondary receiver, so when the primary cannot figure out which auto-response to send, it pawns the job off to a customer service agent, using the secondary receiver app, to be handled manually. Once the conversation has been resolved, the secondary receiver can then pass back to primary to continue business as usual.
We advise you to always set up POP as the primary receiver. This ensures we capture all your fan data so that we can broadcast your communications to everyone who enters the messenger channel.
If you have further questions about the handover protocol or specific use cases you wish to run past our team, please contact us on hello@iampop.com