The handover
Everyone on a call is in the same place.
You know the transfer that goes wrong. You put the caller on hold, dial a colleague, and either the caller ends up in a voicemail box or the colleague picks up with no idea who is on the line or why. Most phone systems make that transfer a separate feature from the easy one, with its own buttons and its own failures, and it is the one people quietly stop using.
Here, the moment somebody answers, the call becomes a small room. Put the caller on hold, bring a colleague in, talk to them privately, step out, or stay. Every button after the answer is the same kind of action on that room, whether the call came in or went out.
Which is why the awkward transfer works exactly like the easy one. Passing a call straight through, handing it over with an introduction and staying on as three are the same few buttons, ending differently. Nothing is torn down and rebuilt in between.
How the call reached themFive buttons.
Hold, pass the call on, check with a colleague first, keep all three of you on, or add somebody who was never part of a transfer. The same five, in the browser tab and in the Windows app, and they combine: put someone on hold, bring a colleague in, merge, then hand the whole thing off, with nothing rebuilt in between.
Hold
The caller hears your hold music while you stay on the call with whoever else is there. Every hold is written down with the moment it began and the moment it ended, so the call record shows the waiting as well as the talking.
Blind transfer
Pass the call straight through to a colleague at their extension, or to an outside number. You are gone before it rings, which is the whole point of it.
Consult transfer
The caller waits on hold while you talk to your colleague privately, for as long as you need. Then you step out, and the caller comes back to somebody who already knows who they are and why they called.
Merge into three-way
The same consult, ended the other way: you stay, the caller comes off hold, and all three of you are on the call. A handover and a three-way call differ by which button you press at the end, not by which feature you started in.
Add someone
Bring a third person onto the call without putting anybody on hold, for the colleague who was never part of a transfer to begin with. Same action as the consult, minus the hold.
You can see who is on the call.
The list of who is on the call is not a guess. It is asked of the phone network, right now, and filled in from our own records: what each person is there for, who they were when they joined, the moment they joined. Somebody who has hung up disappears from it, because the network no longer lists them.
Names are captured when a person joins. The list shown during a call does not change because somebody was renamed halfway through it.
Mute, hold or remove anyone on the call from that same list, and each action checks first that the person really is on this call and not on another one.
The one thing the list will not let you do is remove the outside caller. Ending their call is a different button, and it is the one that closes the call record properly instead of leaving a room with nobody in it.
Recording is a company decision, set once.
Whether calls are recorded is a setting for the whole company, made once by whoever administers it. Nobody answering the phone keeps a preference of their own, and there are three ways to set it.
Always
Every answered call is recorded, incoming and outgoing, from the first second. Recording starts as the call is set up rather than once people are already talking, so the opening is never missing from a call you kept for compliance.
The agent's choice
The person on the call starts and stops it. The button shows what the call is actually doing rather than what the window remembers, so a recording the company started never looks idle, and reloading mid-call does not lose track of it.
Off
No recording, and no button offering one.
There is a second switch beside the mode: whether the person on the call may stop a recording that is already running. Turn it off and always genuinely means always: the button stays where it was, still showing the call as recorded, and no longer stops it.
Recording comes with the plan rather than as a switch on every account, and moving to a plan without it works forwards only: new recordings stop, and everything already recorded stays playable. Losing your existing recordings because of a billing change would be exactly the wrong way round.
Who has to be told, and whether one person on the call agreeing is enough, depends on where the two of you are, not on any switch here. That question has its own page, not a footnote to this one.
Answer from a browser tab, the Windows app, or your own cell phone.
The phone on your computer is a browser tab inside the portal, or the Windows app. Same call, same buttons, and a company can pick one or use both.
Somebody who forwards their calls to their own cell phone is on the call the same way as everyone else: hold, transfer, adding a colleague and recording all keep working, and their colleagues see them as forwarded rather than as an empty desk that may or may not have rung.
Calls between colleagues, extension to extension, have the same buttons as a call from outside and never count against your minutes. They never touch the phone network, so charging for them would be inventing a cost.
What you install.
Nothing, if you answer in a browser tab: the phone is a page inside the portal, with the same call buttons as the app.
The Windows app needs a 64-bit PC running Windows 10 or later, and a headset, or at least the microphone the computer already has. Each person picks the microphone and speaker for calls and a separate device for the ring, so an incoming call can still be heard with the headset off. Windows has to let desktop apps use the microphone, and the app tells you when it cannot find one.
There is no download page. We hand you the installer while we set you up, and it is an ordinary setup wizard that asks where to put the app.
The installer is not signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may stop it with a “Windows protected your PC” screen, which is what Windows shows for an installer with no verified publisher. Choose “More info”, then “Run anyway”.
Afterwards, the call is written down.
Every transfer is written down: which kind it was (passed straight through, handed over after a consult, or merged into a three-way) and who handed it to whom. Every hold has a beginning and an end. Every person on the call has the moment they joined and the moment they left.
The note you type during the call is saved on the call record, beside the recording and the contact the number was matched to. What happened on a call is something a colleague reads later rather than reconstructs.
Follow a call from the first ring
How it works underneath
Every answered call, inbound or outbound, is bridged into a conference of its own the moment it connects, and hold, blind transfer, consult transfer, merge and add-a-person are each a short operation on that conference. The room is named after our own call record rather than after a carrier call identifier, so the name is known before either leg exists and no transfer depends on tracking the carrier’s identifier through three webhooks.
The roster is the carrier’s live participant list, enriched from our own conference-leg rows: the leg’s role, its join time, and a display name snapshotted at join. Mute, hold and remove each check that the leg’s call identifier belongs to this call record before acting; a valid identifier from a different call that happened to share the room would otherwise pass.
A person who has forwarded their calls is dialled at their cell number by the assignment itself, so the forwarded leg lands in the same conference and every control, including recording, applies to it.
Recording is dual-channel on the conference itself, the outside party on one channel and your side on the other, and every recording keeps a trigger field saying whether a person pressed record or the always policy did.
Transfer and add-a-person take an extension in one field and an outside number in another, and the number field refuses strings of 3 to 6 digits, because a short code dialled by mistake shows up on your bill rather than as a validation error. Calls between extensions go through a conference of their own, are flagged internal on the call record, and are left out of call-minute metering.
Questions people ask
Can I introduce a caller before I transfer them?
Yes. Put the caller on hold, ring your colleague, tell them who is on the line and why, then step out. The caller comes back to somebody who already knows who they are and why they called, and it is the same few buttons as passing a call straight through.
What is the difference between handing a call over blind and checking first?
Handing it over blind passes the call straight through: you are gone before it rings, and whoever picks up starts from nothing. Checking first keeps the caller on hold while you talk to your colleague privately, so the handover happens only once somebody has agreed to take it. Both are written down on the call record, with which kind it was and who handed it to whom.
Can I put someone on hold and take the line back?
Yes. Hold and resume are the same button, and the caller stays in the same call the whole time rather than being parked somewhere else. Every hold is written down with the moment it began and the moment it ended, so the call record shows the waiting as well as the talking.
Can three people be on one call?
Yes. End a consult by staying instead of stepping out and all three of you are on the call, or bring a colleague in directly without putting anybody on hold. You can see everyone who is on the call and mute, hold or remove any of them, with one exception: ending the outside caller’s call is a different button, and it is the one that closes the call record properly.
Does the caller hear music while they are on hold?
Yes, music rather than silence, for as long as the hold lasts. What somebody hears while they wait for a team to answer, before anyone has picked up at all, is a separate thing set on the team: your own audio if you have some.
What this does not do
The roster refreshes by asking, every couple of seconds, rather than being pushed. A mute or a departure can therefore appear a second or two after it happened. That is a known simplification, and the shape of the fix is decided but not built.
A recorded call is audio and nothing else. There is no transcript of it, nothing to search inside it and no summary of it: voicemail messages are transcribed, recorded calls are not.
Recordings are deleted on a schedule rather than kept until somebody remembers them: an administrator sets a window per class of data, 30 days for recordings and 90 for voicemail where nobody has set one, and a nightly job removes what has passed it. Worth knowing before you shorten a window: there is no archive behind the deletion. What you still cannot do yourself is run a bulk export; that one is handled by asking us.
The browser tab trails the Windows app on a handful of things, two of which belong to this page: writing a note while the call is still up, and playing a recording back without leaving the call. They are absent there rather than broken, and the rest of that list is in the same state.
If one of those is the thing that would actually stop you, ask. We would rather tell you where it really is than have you find out on the second call.