Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | User |
Three ways to enter a colleague's call: silently, audibly, or heard only by them. Available to everyone unless an administrator takes it away.
The three modes
| Mode | What it does | Who hears you |
|---|---|---|
| Listen | Silent intrusion. You hear both sides. | Nobody |
| Barge | Full intrusion. The call becomes a three-way conversation. | Both of them |
| Whisper | Partial intrusion. You coach without the customer knowing. | Your colleague only |
Whisper is the one most people are actually after. Listening tells you what happened; whispering lets you help while it is still happening.
Where to find them
In Collaboration 7 and x-bees on the web, the three options sit on a Colleague function key. Click the key for that colleague and, while they are on a call, Listen, Barge and Whisper appear in the list alongside the usual options. No Colleague key for that person means no options, which is the most common reason somebody cannot find this.
On the Collaboration 7 mobile app you do not need a function key. Open the Contacts tab, find the colleague, and while they are on a call the three options appear next to chat, email and call.
It is switched on unless somebody switched it off
This is the part worth knowing before anything else. Intrusion is allowed by default. It is not a permission an administrator grants; it is one they have to take away, with a Cannot > Intrusion rule on an ACL group in WMS.
So in a system where nobody has looked at this, every user can silently listen to every colleague's calls. That is worth establishing before you decide anything else, and it is not what most people assume.
There is no warning sound unless you add one
A beep can be played when an intrusion starts, including a silent one, but it is off by default. An administrator turns it on with the dialplan variable INTRUSION_NOTIFICATION set to yes.
Together with the point above, the out-of-the-box position is: anyone can listen, and nothing announces it. Whether that is what you want is a decision rather than a setting to leave alone.
Decide who may do this, and tell people
Listening to colleagues' conversations touches employment agreements, works council arrangements and your own privacy policy, and none of that is settled by a checkbox in a phone system. Whether you may use this, who may use it and what you have to tell people beforehand is a question for your own organisation and its legal advice, not something we can answer for you.
What we can do is set it up the way you decide: restrict it to the people who should have it, and switch the notification tone on or off. Tell us what you want and we will arrange it.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.