Transfers, Forwarding and the Duty Roster

Sooner or later a caller needs a person. A voice agent can hand the call over in two ways, choose between several destinations based on what the call turned out to be about, and — if you use the duty roster — reach whoever is actually working right now instead of a number that was right when the agent was built.

What you'll need

The agents:voice:manage permission.
A saved voice agent on Telephony delivery.
The numbers you want to forward to. Any reachable phone number works; they do not have to be numbers you provisioned in KarmaFlow.
For duty-roster routing, a configured duty schedule — see Duty Schedule.

Warm and cold transfers

Both are tools you enable on the Tools tab. The agent decides which to use from your instructions, so enable the one you want it to use — or both, and tell it when each applies.

sequenceDiagram
    participant C as Caller
    participant A as Voice agent
    participant H as Your team member
    Note over C,A: Warm transfer
    A->>C: "Let me get someone — one moment"
    A->>C: Hold music
    A->>H: Dials, then briefs: who is waiting and why
    A->>C: Bridges caller and human
    Note over C,A: Cold transfer
    A->>C: "I'm putting you through now"
    A->>H: Forwards immediately, agent leaves

Warm transfer (transfer_call) puts the caller on hold with music, calls the human, tells them who is waiting and what the call is about, and only then connects the two. The human walks into a conversation already in progress instead of starting over. If the destination does not answer, or answers with voicemail, the agent falls back to the next destination rather than dumping the caller.

Use it for anything where context matters — support escalations, a qualified lead, a complaint, anything the caller has already explained once.

Cold transfer (cold_transfer) forwards immediately and leaves. Faster, no hold music, no briefing.

Use it when the destination does not need context: a main switchboard, a department that will ask its own questions, a caller who explicitly asked for extension 204.

Both tools exist so the agent can pick. Say in your instructions which situations call for which — "warm transfer anything a customer has already described; cold transfer a caller who asks for a specific person by name" is a good default.

Set up forwarding destinations

Telephony tab → Call Forwarding ("Specify forwarders for conditional call routing").

Click Add Forwarder.
Fill the row:
- Forward Number — the number to dial.
- Condition — plain English describing when this destination is the right one. The agent reads these and chooses.
Add a row per destination. Use Remove to delete one.
Save Changes.

The Condition field is the part that decides whether this works. Write conditions that are mutually exclusive and phrased the way your instructions phrase the same situations:

Forward Number	Condition
+1 555 0142	Billing, invoices, refunds, payment problems
+1 555 0143	Technical faults where the customer has already tried the basic steps
+1 555 0100	Anything else, or the caller asks for a person without saying why

Avoid conditions that overlap ("urgent issues" and "technical issues" will both match the same call) and avoid conditions that depend on information the agent has no way to know.

Always include a catch-all row. A caller who needs a human and matches none of your conditions is the worst outcome on this page.

Route to whoever is on duty

Telephony tab → Call Forwarding → Use On-Duty Roster for Transfers (off by default).

When it is on, the people currently on duty — those whose duty record allows accepting transfers — are tried ahead of the forwarders below, and the agent is given the cascade rules for working down the list. Your forwarders stay as the fallback.

Turn it on when who answers depends on the day or the shift, and off when a destination is a department rather than a person.

It requires a configured duty schedule: Agents → Workflows → Duty Schedule. With nothing scheduled, the switch has nothing to route to and the agent falls through to the forwarders.

Related duty tools

Two more tools on the Tools tab work with the same schedule and are worth enabling together:

duty-check — looks up who is on duty, so the agent can tell the caller who will call them back, or decide whether escalating is even possible right now.
duty_notify / duty-notify-confirm — email and text the on-duty person about this call, with a fallback to the configured default contact. This is the answer to "nobody can take the call right now": the agent takes the details and the right person is notified rather than the caller being told to try later.

Full reference: Duty Schedule — Voice Agent Tools.

Write the instructions for a transfer

The tools and the numbers are the easy half. What decides whether transfers feel good is the instructions:

Say when to try and when not to. Without a rule, agents either transfer at the first sign of difficulty or never transfer at all.
Say what to tell the human. The briefing is generated — tell it what matters: the caller's name, the account, what they have already tried, what they want.
Say what to do if nobody answers. Take a message and notify with duty_notify? Offer a callback? Both? The fallback should be your decision, not an improvisation.
Say what to tell the caller while they wait. Silence plus hold music with no explanation is where callers hang up.

Reaching an extension or getting through a menu

If a destination is behind an IVR or an extension, enable send-dtmf on the Tools tab — it lets the agent press keypad tones to navigate a menu or dial an extension. Outbound calls can also dial an extension automatically after the callee answers. See Placing Outbound Calls.

Troubleshooting

The agent never transfers. Check transfer_call (or cold_transfer) is ticked on the Tools tab, that at least one forwarder exists, and that the instructions actually tell the agent to use it.
It transfers to the wrong person. The conditions overlap or are too vague. Rewrite them so exactly one matches any given call, and mirror the same wording in the instructions.
The human gets no briefing. That is a cold transfer. Warm transfers brief; enable transfer_call and say which situations warrant it.
The caller is dropped when nobody answers. Add a catch-all forwarder, and say in the instructions what to do when a transfer fails.
The on-duty switch is on but calls go to the forwarders. Nobody is scheduled right now, or the scheduled person's record does not allow transfers. Check Agents → Workflows → Duty Schedule.
Transfers work in the browser test but not on the phone. Telephony-only behaviour — transfers, voicemail detection and caller-ID lookup — is not part of a browser test, and the panel says so. Use Simulate Call.