How to auto reschedule anyone callbacks that miss

If your agents set a lot of personal callbacks and some slip past their scheduled time, you can have VICIdial reschedule them automatically. The trick is to convert an overdue USERONLY Scheduled callback into an ANYONE callback so any free Agent can dial it. Here is how to switch it on for a Campaign.

The steps

• Open the admin portal and go to Campaigns, then click the campaign you want to change.
• Scroll to the scheduled callbacks block and find Scheduled Callbacks Useronly Move Minutes.
• Set it to the number of minutes you are willing to wait after the callback time before handing it off. For example, 60 gives the owning agent a one-hour grace period.
• Save the campaign. The conversion job runs every minute, so no restart is needed.

That is the whole configuration. There is no script to schedule and no cron entry to edit; the value lives on the campaign record and VICIdial's existing per-minute process reads it from there. If you run several campaigns, set the number on each one separately, because what makes sense for a tight callback queue is rarely the same as what makes sense for a relationship-driven sales line.

What happens after you save

flowchart TD
  A[Set Move Minutes above 0] --> B[Job checks callbacks each minute]
  B --> C{Callback overdue past window?}
  C -->|No| D[Stays USERONLY]
  C -->|Yes| E[Convert to ANYONE]
  E --> F[Enters the hopper]
  F --> G[Dialed by any free agent]

Every minute VICIdial scans the USERONLY callbacks. Anything still undialed past your window flips to ANYONE, drops into the Hopper, and gets dialed by whoever is available. Nothing about the original Lead record changes except the callback owner, so the customer history stays intact.

Because the job runs on a one-minute cycle, the handoff is close to real time. A callback that comes due at 3:00 PM with a 30-minute window will convert right around 3:30 PM, not at some nightly batch hours later. That responsiveness is what makes the feature useful for live queues rather than just end-of-day cleanup.

Picking a sensible window

Too short and you yank callbacks away before the original agent even gets back from a break. Too long and the customer waits past the point of being useful. Most teams land somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes, then adjust once they see how many callbacks actually convert in a normal day. If almost none convert, your window may be doing nothing and you could shrink it; if a flood converts, your agents may be over-booking personal callbacks they cannot service. If you are not sure your converted callbacks are reaching the hopper at all, read how ANYONE callbacks go back to the hopper. For the broader setup of reserved callbacks, the scheduled callbacks overview covers the whole flow.

One thing to confirm: the agents still need scheduled callbacks enabled in their user options, otherwise they cannot set callbacks in the first place and there is nothing for the move-minutes job to convert. If you set Move Minutes and nothing ever converts, that user-option gap is the first place to look, followed by checking that agents are actually choosing the My Callback option when they save a CALLBK disposition.

It is also worth deciding this per campaign rather than globally. A campaign where personal relationships drive the sale might keep Move Minutes at 0, while a high-volume callback campaign uses a tight window so no promised call slips through. The setting lives on each campaign's detail screen for exactly that reason.

Run it on managed hosting

Want a dialer where these settings just work without you maintaining the box? We provision a dedicated, hardened VICIdial server in under 40 seconds. Check the pricing and pick a plan.