How to edit a scheduled callback in admin

A Scheduled callback is a lead an agent marked to be called again at a future date and time. Once it is set, the record lives in the system and waits for its trigger time. But agents make mistakes, dates change, and sometimes a callback needs to move to a different person. When that happens, a manager with the right permissions can open the callback in the admin interface and change almost anything about it.

This walks through editing a callback from admin.php. The one prerequisite: your VICIdial user account must have permission to modify leads. Without that, the lead modification page is read-only and the changes below will not save.

Where the callback record lives

Callbacks are not stored on a separate screen. Each one points at a Lead in the system, so editing a callback really means editing that lead. To find the callback you reach it through one of three listing screens — by user, by campaign, or by list — and from there you click into the lead itself.

flowchart TD
  A[admin.php] --> B[Open user, campaign or list screen]
  B --> C[Click CallBack Holds link]
  C --> D[Callback listing]
  D --> E[Click lead ID]
  E --> F[Lead modification page]
  F --> G[Change status or callback type]
  G --> H[Save lead]

Step by step

• 1. Open the modification screen for the relevant user, Campaign or list in admin.php.
• 2. Scroll to the bottom. You will see a link reading "Click here to see all CallBack Holds for this user" — or for this campaign or list, depending on which screen you are on. Click it.
• 3. You now see a list of scheduled callbacks. Each row shows the lead, the list ID, the campaign, the date the customer was last called, the date the callback is scheduled for, the agent who set it, whether it is ANYONE or USERONLY, and the current Status (lead status) of the callback.
• 4. Click the lead ID for the callback you want to change. This opens the lead modification page.
• 5. From here you can change the lead status to remove the callback record, flip it between ANYONE and USERONLY, or reassign the owning user ID. Save the lead when you are done.

What you can change from here

Removing a callback is just a matter of changing the lead status so the callback no longer applies. Converting a USERONLY callback to ANYONE puts it back into the campaign Hopper when it goes live, instead of staying reserved for one agent. Going the other direction, ANYONE to USERONLY, lets you hand a callback to a specific person by setting their user ID. These are separate jobs with their own gotchas — the scheduled callbacks overview covers how the two types behave, and anyone vs useronly callbacks explains why the distinction matters before you flip one.

One thing to keep straight: editing the lead does not retroactively undo a call that already happened. It changes what happens next time the callback comes due.

Stop fighting the admin layer

Editing callbacks is straightforward once you know which screen the link hides under, but it gets old hunting for it across user, campaign and list views. On a managed VICIdial box you get a fully wired admin interface and a working dialer in under 40 seconds, so you can spend your time on the leads, not on the install. See VICIfast pricing to get started.