Transfer of telephone conversations as a transition between call-takers

• Transfer is an important tool for matching callers to call-takers.
• Call-takers take great care to establish that callers know they are transferred.
• It lies on call-takers, not callers, to set the agenda in a transferred call.

This study examines how telephone conversations are transferred and re-opened in calls to the Swedish Board for Student Support. The study relates to research on the opening and closing of telephone conversations, and how with each transfer, the reason for the call may be new to one participant, but may not be new for the other participant. The data consist of 126 calls in Swedish where transfer is explicitly oriented towards by at least one of the participants. The analysis shows that call-takers take great care to ensure that callers know that they are being transferred. Some call-takers also take care to frame the re-opened call as transferred, others do not; in the case of the latter, the interactional burden of establishing a common frame for the call as transferred falls on the caller.