A call is a room, not a wire.

The room

Where the third person goes.

A direct bridge between two call legs has exactly two ends. Everything involving a third person then has to be built as an exception to it: a hold that is really a mute, a transfer that hangs up on one side and hopes the other end answers, a conference that is a separate feature with its own separate failures. Which is why the difficult transfer, the one where you stay on long enough to say who is calling and why, is so often the one that does not exist.

So a bridge is not the shape used here. The moment somebody answers, both legs are joined into a conference room of their own, and every control after that is an operation on that room: hold this participant, add that one, drop mine.

The room is named after our own call record rather than after an identifier the carrier hands back later. That sounds like a detail and is the reason the rest works: the name is known before either leg exists, in both directions, so no transfer depends on having correctly tracked a carrier’s call identifier through three webhooks.

Controls

One room, five controls.

None of these is a subsystem of its own. Each is a short instruction against the same room, which is why they compose: put someone on hold, bring a colleague in, merge, then hand the whole thing off, and nothing is torn down and rebuilt in between.

Transfers to a colleague and transfers to an outside number are separate fields on purpose. A four-digit extension typed into the number box is a real short code somewhere in the world, and dialling it would show up on your bill rather than as a validation slip, so the number field refuses anything that short.

The roster

Who is actually on the call.

The roster is not our guess at it. We ask the carrier who is connected right this second and enrich the answer from our own rows: what each leg is for, who the person was when they joined, the moment they joined. A leg the carrier no longer lists has genuinely left, so the list cannot go on showing somebody who has already hung up.

Names are captured at the moment of joining. A roster shown during a call does not change because somebody was renamed halfway through it.

Against any participant: mute, hold, remove. Each of those first checks that the leg really belongs to this call. A wrong identifier would simply fail at the carrier, but a valid one belonging to a different call that happens to share the room would not, and that is the sort of thing which only ever shows up in production.

Removing the outside caller is refused outright. Ending their call is a different action, and it is the one that closes the call record properly instead of leaving a room with nobody in it.

Recording

Recording is the organization’s decision, not the agent’s.

A recorded call is captured on two channels: the outside party on one, your side on the other. Who said what is then a matter of listening rather than of memory.

The mode is one setting for the whole organization rather than a preference each person keeps for themselves. There are three of them.

There is a second switch beside the mode: whether an agent 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.

Every recording keeps why it exists: an agent pressed record, or the policy did. “Why is this call recorded?” is a question a review actually asks, and it is not answerable from the audio afterwards.

Recording belongs to the plan rather than being a switch on every account, and moving to a plan without it works forwards only: new recordings stop and the policy locks, while everything already captured stays playable. Losing your existing evidence because of a billing change would be exactly the wrong way round.

Who has to be told, and whether one voice on the call consenting is enough, depends on where the two of you are sitting rather than on anything a switch here can settle. That is a question with its own page, not a footnote to this one.

Softphones

The same call, wherever the person answering is.

There is a browser softphone inside the admin portal and a Windows desktop app. They are the same call engine driving the same conference operations, and an organization can pick one or run both.

Somebody who has forwarded their calls to their own phone is still in the room: the forwarded leg is dialled into the same conference, so hold, transfer, participant control and recording all keep working on it. Their presence reads forwarded rather than available, so nobody is looking at an empty desk wondering whether it even rang.

Calls between colleagues on their extensions go through a room as well, which is why they have the same controls as a call from outside, and why they are left out of your call minutes. They never touch the public network, so billing for them would be inventing a cost.

Afterwards

What the call leaves behind.

Each transfer is a row of its own, carrying which kind it was (handed off blind, a consult completed, a consult merged) and who handed it to whom. Each hold has a beginning and an end. Each leg has the moment it joined and the moment it left.

The note typed while the call is up is saved on the call record, beside the recording and the contact the number was matched to. So what happened on a call is something a colleague reads later rather than reconstructs.

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. I would rather tell you where it really is than find out on the second call.