Transfer
Moving a live call from one agent to another agent, queue or outside number.
A transfer moves a live call from the agent handling it to somewhere else - another agent, an in-group, an internal extension, or an outside number. In VICIdial it is driven from the transfer panel on the agent screen, usually bound to a hot key.
The two kinds
Cold transfer, also called blind. The agent sends the call to its destination and drops immediately. Fast, and it costs the customer their context: whoever picks up starts from nothing, and if nobody picks up, the caller is stranded.
Warm transfer, also called consultative. The agent puts the customer on hold, reaches the destination, explains the situation, then drops off and leaves the two parties connected. There is a brief three-way state in the middle while all three are on the line. Slower, and much better for anything the customer would otherwise have to repeat.
VICIdial also supports keeping all three parties on the line permanently rather than dropping the original agent, which is a three-way call rather than a transfer.
Where transfers show up in your data
A transferred call splits across two tables. The original outbound leg lives in vicidial_log; the transferred leg lands in vicidial_closer_log with its own queue_seconds, queue_position and term_reason. Reports that read only one of them will under-count one side of the operation, which is the usual reason a fronter/closer team's numbers do not reconcile.
Configuration worth knowing
Whether an agent can transfer at all, and to what, is a per-user permission plus the campaign's transfer configuration. Transfers out to the public network leave through a trunk like any other call, and three_way_dial_prefix on the campaign lets you route them down a different carrier from your bulk outbound - worth setting if your cheapest outbound route is not the one you want a customer conversation on.
Choosing between them
Use warm transfer whenever the receiving party benefits from context, which on a sales floor is nearly always - it is the entire basis of the fronter and closer split. Cold transfer is for cases where the destination is a queue that will handle the call from scratch anyway.