A warm transfer briefs the next person before connecting you, so callers skip the retelling. Here is when it beats a cold transfer, and how AI agents do it.
Most people have been transferred and then asked to explain everything again. ElevenLabs, a voice AI company, has published a guide on how to avoid that. The fix is a warm transfer, where the next person learns the issue before the caller is connected. It covers human operators and AI voice agents.
The difference is who passes along the context. In a warm transfer, the first operator, human or AI, tells the receiving person who is calling and what they need. The caller then picks up where they left off. A warm transfer is also called a warm handoff or an attended transfer.
A cold transfer, also called a blind transfer, connects the caller right away with no advance notice. It is faster because nobody waits for a briefing. The tradeoff is that callers often have to explain their issue from scratch, which adds time and frustrates people with complicated problems.
The guide's rule is to match the transfer type to the cost of losing context. Warm transfers take longer, so save them for calls where repeating the story would annoy the caller or risk a mistake.
The guide describes two messages running in parallel. The caller hears a short explanation of who they are being connected to, what that person can help with, and that they will not need to repeat themselves. The receiving person hears the caller's name, the issue, what has already been tried and what outcome the caller wants.
In ElevenLabs' ElevenAgents product, an AI agent hands a live call to a human through a tool called transfer_to_number. It works with an external phone number or a SIP URI, which is an internet phone address. Two settings make the transfer warm: client_message, which the caller hears, and agent_message, which the human hears.
In the guide's example, the caller hears that a billing specialist is being connected. The specialist hears that the caller was charged twice on their March invoice and wants the duplicate refunded. A separate tool, transfer_to_agent, passes a conversation from one AI agent to another.
A warm transfer in ElevenAgents needs the Transfer to Number tool, a transfer rule, and a phone number imported through the native Twilio integration. The guide urges testing what happens when the destination does not answer or the line is busy. What callers experience then depends on the carrier, SIP trunk or phone system, so check that before launch.
Use a warm transfer when repeating the issue would frustrate the caller or risk an error, and a cold transfer when the next person needs nothing more.
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