Skip to main content

​
Live monitoring for digital conversations

Quality scoring tells you how an agent handled a conversation after it ended. Live monitoring tells you what’s happening right now — and a supervisor can step in while the customer is still waiting. On digital channels (web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, social, email) there are four actions:
  • Watch — silently follow the thread. Supervisors see the transcript live without the customer or the agent being told.
  • Whisper — send a private coaching tip to the handling agent. The tip lands as an internal note in the agent’s open thread; the customer never sees it.
  • Barge — take over the conversation. From this point on the supervisor’s replies are what the customer sees, and the thread is reassigned to the supervisor.
  • Unwatch — stop a watch session (available to the supervisor who started it).
Every action is visible on the supervisor wallboard and in the agent’s thread as a live badge (watching / coached / seized), so the whole team can see who is overseeing which conversation.

​
Watch a conversation

From the dashboard, a supervisor opens any live conversation and chooses Watch — or over the API:
The response confirms the session is active and reports the stamped marker:
Watching is read-only — the supervisor is invisible to the customer and never appears in the transcript. Stop the session with Unwatch:
A supervisor can only stop their own watch session — one supervisor can’t clear a colleague’s marker. If the thread was taken over (barged), stopping the watch doesn’t hand it back; assign it back to the agent explicitly (see below).

​
Whisper a coaching tip

When an agent is mid-conversation and a supervisor can see the right move, they can coach without the customer seeing anything:
The tip arrives in the agent’s open thread as an internal note marked supervisor coaching, delivered over the same inbox channel the agent already subscribes to — so there is nothing new for the agent to poll. The tip is bounded to 500 characters; an empty tip returns 422 EMPTY_TIP. Whisper requires an agent to be actually assigned to the conversation (you can’t coach nobody) and an open thread (closed/archived threads return 422).

​
Barge in (take over the thread)

When coaching isn’t enough, the supervisor takes the thread:
From that moment the conversation is assigned to the supervisor and their replies are the ones the customer sees. Barge is idempotent — a supervisor who already owns the thread gets already_barged: true back and nothing re-stamps. The takeover respects your team’s channel concurrency caps: if the supervisor is already at their maximum for that channel (for example email = 1), the barge is refused instead of silently overflowing their workload — the same rule a manual reassign would apply. Handing the thread back is an explicit assign:

​
Who can monitor

Every live-monitoring endpoint requires an elevated role — owner, admin, or supervisor — plus a full agent seat in your workspace. The hard-delete-of-a-conversation gate isn’t relaxed here either: a developer or billing member gets 403.

​
Permissions and audit trail

Every watch / whisper / barge / unwatch action is audit-logged with the acting user, the conversation, the action, and the caller IP, so you can answer “who took over that VIP thread?” months later.

​
Common failure codes