How to create a VICIdial Drop List

Creating a Drop List is mostly a matter of telling VICIdial three things: where to look for dropped calls, which drops count, and where to put the new leads. Get those right and the schedule handles the rest. This walks through it field by field so you do not have to guess what each box wants.

Before anything else, the feature has to be switched on at the system level. Go to Admin then System Settings and enable Drop Lists. Once that is done, a Drop Lists option appears under the Lists section, and you can click Add a New Drop List.

Step 1: name and identify the entry

The Drop List ID is the internal handle for this job. It must be 2 to 30 characters and contain no spaces. The Drop List Name is the human-readable description, 2 to 100 characters, so write something you will recognize in a list of jobs, like "sales-queue-drops-hourly." There is also an Admin User Group field that controls which admins can view the record; the default is --ALL--, which lets any admin with Modify Lists permission see it.

Step 2: pick the run server

The Run Server is the machine that actually executes the job. It must be a server that runs the Keepalive process every minute in its crontab, because that is what triggers the job at the scheduled time. The default is the active voicemail server defined in System Settings, which is the right choice on most single-box setups.

Step 3: point it at a target list

The List ID field is the Lead list that gathered drops get inserted into. Create this target list first if it does not exist yet. Most operators use a dedicated callback list so the recovered leads do not get tangled up with a cold-calling file, and so they can give it its own campaign settings and call times. If you have never built a list, adding a new list covers it.

Step 4: choose inbound groups and drop statuses

Inbound Groups is the set of queues the job watches for dropped calls. Pick only the Ingroup queues you actually want to recover from. Drop Statuses is the list of statuses that qualify a call as a drop worth gathering; the default is DROP. These two fields together define exactly which calls become leads, so they are the heart of the setup.

flowchart TD
  A[Enable Drop Lists in System Settings] --> B[Add a New Drop List]
  B --> C[Set Drop List ID and Name]
  C --> D[Choose Run Server with keepalive]
  D --> E[Set target List ID]
  E --> F[Select Inbound Groups]
  F --> G[Set Drop Statuses]
  G --> H[Set schedule and Active]

The diagram is the whole create flow in order. Each step narrows what the job does until the last two, schedule and active, decide when and whether it runs at all. Scheduling and drop-status selection are big enough topics to deserve their own walkthroughs.

Step 5: test before you trust it

Leave Active set to N while you set up. There is a Run Now Trigger field for testing: set it to Y and the job will run once, usually within a minute, without waiting for the schedule. Check that leads landed in the target list with the Disposition you expected, and that the count looks sane. Only after a clean test run should you flip Active to Y.

For where this sits in the broader lead pipeline, see the lists and leads guide.

Get a dialer that has this built in

Drop Lists are part of stock VICIdial, and on VICIfast your box is provisioned and ready in under 40 seconds with the feature there to enable. See our pricing to start.