No more handset monitoring! Don't fear, I have a solution.

The discovery

Did you know that the Cisco 8800 series SIP phones don’t support handset monitoring? It’s crazy—and it’s true!

About a week ago I got a call from one of my customers needing to train a new employee on the phones, asking to enable the setting that allows a second person to listen from the handset while the new employee uses the headset. Naturally I said “sure thing” and went over to the phone’s configuration page in CUCM to enable handset monitoring.

“That’s weird… I can’t seem to find the handset monitoring option…”

I had just migrated that desk over to a Cisco 8811 phone not more than a week prior.

Off to Google I went, where I quickly learned that the newer 8800 series SIP phones no longer support built-in handset monitoring.

The options

I started thinking about how to solve this issue:

1. I could put the old SCCP phone back in—but it was a Cisco 7961, and those phones are deprecated in modern versions of CUCM. Add on that they don’t support TLS 1.2, and those legacy phones have to go.
2. The trainer could silent-monitor the call through the call recording system—but then if they needed to step in and speak on the call, they wouldn’t be able to.

The solution: Headset Buddy

I took to Google again and came across a hardware adapter that resolves this issue.

A $22 USD adapter called the Headset Buddy (HM-RJ9Cisco) provides side-by-side phone training with dual volume and mute controls and works with wired or wireless headsets. Even better, it specifically lists the Cisco 8800 series phones as compatible.

Source: Headset Buddy — Cisco Agent Buddy Training Switch Adapter

Does it work?

After receiving and testing this device on a Cisco 8811 phone (which shares the same hardware audio path behavior across the Cisco 8800 series), I found one important caveat.

I took the adapter to the customer, plugged it into the headset port of the phone, and plugged one headset and the handset into the Headset Buddy—but the handset didn’t work. Then I plugged the Headset Buddy into the handset port—and the handset worked, but the headset didn’t!

Here is what I found: because the RJ9 handset port and RJ9 headset port on the Cisco 8800 series use different pinouts/impedances, both devices plugged into the splitter must match the port type:

While you cannot mix one handset and one headset on the same splitter port, the adapter works reliably for side-by-side training as long as you pair either two headsets on the Headset port or two handsets on the Handset port.