What WAIT, TALK, DISPO, and DEAD time mean on the Agent Time Detail Report

The Agent Time Detail Report has a handful of time columns that look similar but count very different things. Getting them straight is the difference between reading the report correctly and drawing the wrong conclusion about how an Agent spends a shift. The columns overlap on purpose, which is the part that trips people up, so here is what each one actually measures and how they relate.

The four time buckets that add up

WAIT, TALK, DISPO, and PAUSE are the four buckets that sum to AGENT TIME, the agent's total time on the system. They do not overlap with each other, so this is the clean breakdown to start from.

• WAIT: the time the agent is waiting for a call to be delivered. High WAIT usually means the dialer is feeding calls too slowly, not that the agent is slacking.
• TALK: the time the agent is talking to a customer or sitting in dead state. It rolls DEAD and CUSTOMER together, so it is your real on-call Talk time.
• DISPO: the time on the disposition screen, where the agent picks the call result like NI or SALE. This is the agent's Wrap-up time and is recorded as its own Disposition bucket.
• PAUSE: the time in pause mode, including states like LOGIN and LAGGED, each split out by pause code on the right of the report.

DEAD, CUSTOMER, and CONNECTED

Three more columns slice the call itself, and these are the ones that overlap with TALK. CUSTOMER is the time in a live call with a customer on the line. DEAD is the time the agent is still in the call after the customer has already hung up. Because TALK equals DEAD plus CUSTOMER, a large DEAD share inside a normal-looking TALK number means agents are lingering on dead calls before they dispose them.

CONNECTED is the odd one out: it is WAIT plus CUSTOMER, so it measures the time waiting for a live call together with the time actually on one. It deliberately leaves out dispo and pause, which makes it a tidy view of an agent's call-handling time without the admin overhead folded in.

How the call columns relate

The cleanest way to keep these straight is to remember that CUSTOMER and DEAD are the two pieces of TALK, while CONNECTED reaches back to include WAIT.

flowchart TD
  A[WAIT for a call] --> B[CUSTOMER live talk]
  B --> C[DEAD after hangup]
  B --> D[TALK total]
  C --> D
  A --> E[CONNECTED]
  B --> E
  D --> F[Counts toward AGENT TIME]

All of these numbers start from the agent's clocked-in Agent session, so they only make sense alongside the timeclock totals at the top of the row. A column read in isolation will mislead you almost every time. For the full walkthrough of the report, read how to read the Agent Time Detail Report, and the reports overview shows where it sits among the rest.

Every managed VICIdial server we run ships with these agent reports built in. See our pricing.