Hi,
Post warm transfer we notice an additional latency in the order of 2000ms between transferred to human and user who called. This latency doesn’t exist during cold transfers.
We are already doing thousands of dollars of business with Retell AI monthly and want to scale it to 10x this but this is a huge dealbreaker.
Can someone help us out on this issue?
Best,
Shaurya
Hello @info26
Could you please share the call IDs where you experienced latency? This will help us investigate the issue more effectively.
Thank you!
Hi this is an example of a call id call_786e43252f011615f71367809a5. Note the problem occurs post the warm transfer. There is an additional 1-2 seconds of latency between the end user and the transferred to agent post retell’s agent disconnecting from the call. This issue is consistent with most of our stores. The same issue doesn’t occur when we do a cold transfer.
Hey @info26
I’ve escalated this to our team for further review.
We’ll update you as soon as we hear back.
Best regards
Hey @info26
I checked with the team and this is an architectural difference, not a bug — warm transfer requires Retell to stay in the media path (needed for hold music, bridge audio cue, human/voicemail detection, and caller ID passthrough), which adds latency that cold transfer avoids by exiting entirely.
What you can do today: If calls don’t require warm transfer features, switching to cold transfer will eliminate the extra latency. Otherwise, this is the expected tradeoff for warm transfer functionality.
Thank You