Call listening feature overview

The Call listening feature allows an agent - typically a supervisor or team leader - to silently listen to a call that is currently in progress. It is designed for training and quality assurance: you hear both the customer and the agent in real time, while neither of them hears you.

Note: To listen to a call, it is required that your account uses LiveAgent's built-in call center, that your agent role has the "Listen calls" permission granted, and that your own browser phone is configured and not currently on a call.

How it works

When you start listening, LiveAgent opens an additional, receive-only connection to your browser phone that carries the audio of the ongoing call. The call itself is untouched - it is not put on hold, transferred or interrupted in any way, and you do not become a participant in it.

The connection is one-way by design. You hear the conversation, but your microphone is never connected to the call: while you are listening, the call widget shows your own audio as inactive. Neither the customer nor the agent can hear you, and there is no indication to the customer that a third person is on the line.

Note: Listening is available for calls handled through LiveAgent's own telephony. It is not offered for internal calls between two agents.

Granting the "Listen calls" permission

Call listening is controlled by the "Listen calls" permission, which is not granted by default - not even to roles that can otherwise handle calls. To grant it, edit the agent's role and enable "Listen calls" in the Calls group of permissions.

On top of the permission, LiveAgent also checks that you have access to the ticket that owns the call. In practice this means an agent can only listen to calls belonging to departments they are a member of, so granting the permission does not expose the whole call center to everyone who holds it.

Tip: Because a listening session is silent and invisible to the customer, grant this permission deliberately - to supervisors, team leaders and trainers - and make sure your call recording and monitoring practices comply with the laws applicable in your country and in your customers' countries.

Listening to a live call

To listen to a call that is currently in progress:

1. Navigate to Reports > Active calls to see the calls that are running right now. The panel refreshes automatically, and you can adjust the refresh interval.
2. Open the ticket of the call you want to listen to.
3. Click the "Listen" button. The button changes to "Connecting..." while the audio connection to your browser phone is being established.
4. Once connected, the call widget switches to the listening state and you hear the conversation.

If the request cannot be completed, LiveAgent tells you why rather than failing silently. The most common messages are:

• "You have an active call in progress." - you cannot listen while handling a call of your own. Finish your call first.
• "You are already listening to this call." - you already have a listening session open for this call.
• "Your browser is not configured for calls." - your browser phone is not set up, so there is nowhere to deliver the audio.
• "Call already ended." or "Call not found." - the call finished before the request reached the server.

Note: You can listen to one call at a time. If you start listening to another call, the previous listening session is closed automatically.

Stopping the listening session

To stop listening yourself, use the stop listening button in the call widget. Your connection is closed and the call continues undisturbed.

LiveAgent also ends listening sessions on its own, so no session is left hanging:

• when the call you are listening to ends,
• when you start an outgoing call or answer an incoming one,
• and when you log out of the agent panel or your session disconnects.

What call listening does not do

It is worth being explicit about the boundaries of the feature, because they are easy to assume otherwise:

• You cannot speak to the agent. There is no whisper or coaching mode - the connection is receive-only, so you cannot privately advise the agent while the call is running. Coaching has to happen after the call, or through another channel such as an internal chat.
• You cannot join the conversation. Listening does not turn into a three-way call. To speak with the customer, the call has to be transferred to you by the agent handling it.
• Listening is not recording. A listening session is live audio only and is not stored anywhere. If you need calls kept for later review, enable call recordings instead - and, if you want them in text form, call transcription.