Warm Handover: bring in a person, then step out

Some decisions should not be made by a model. A refund above a limit. An angry caller who has asked for a person twice. A legal or medical judgement. A VIP the client wants handled personally.

A cold transfer, just forwarding the call, makes the caller start again from zero. A Warm Handover is the voice agent pattern that does what a good receptionist does. It puts the caller on hold, calls the manager and briefs them: “I have Sam on the line. Order 4471 arrived cold, she wants a full refund, and it’s her third complaint this month.” Then it connects them and steps out.

Use it when

A person has to decide, and the caller should never have to repeat themselves. Refunds above a limit, escalations, legal or medical questions, VIPs, and any call where the agent has tried twice and failed.

Agencies should treat this as a selling point, not a failure mode. “The agent hands hard calls to your manager with a briefing” is what makes a nervous business owner say yes.

Avoid it when

Nobody is available to answer. Ringing an empty desk is worse than not trying. Offer a callback instead and let the Bookends wrap-up schedule it and send the briefing by text.

Latency

Hold time while the person joins. Play hold audio, tell the caller roughly what is happening, and have a fallback after a ringing timeout.

Build it on LiveKit

LiveKit ships a prebuilt WarmTransferTask (in beta, Python). It puts the caller on hold, dials the person into a private consultation room, briefs them from the conversation history, then connects them to the caller.

import os
from livekit.agents import Agent, RunContext, function_tool
from livekit.agents.beta.workflows import WarmTransferTask


class Support(Agent):
    @function_tool()
    async def escalate_to_manager(self, ctx: RunContext, reason: str) -> str:
        """Bring in the on-call manager. Use for refunds over $50 or a repeated request for a person."""
        result = await WarmTransferTask(
            sip_call_to=os.environ["ON_CALL_NUMBER"],
            sip_trunk_id=os.environ["OUTBOUND_TRUNK_ID"],
            chat_ctx=self.chat_ctx,
            ringing_timeout=30.0,
        )
        return f"Transfer finished: {result}"

If the manager does not answer, the task returns to the caller so the agent can explain and offer a callback. See LiveKit’s agent-assisted warm transfer guide for the manual workflow and options.

How it combines

Warm Handover is the exit door for every other pattern. An Observer that detects rising frustration is a good trigger. A Relay can end in one. And the Bookends wrap-up should still run afterwards, so the client’s CRM shows both halves of the call.