How to make a VICIdial agent field required

Some data you simply cannot afford to let an Agent skip. An email for a confirmation, a postal code for shipping, a vendor reference number for billing. VICIdial lets you make any of the standard lead fields mandatory so the agent has to fill it in on every call before they can hang up. You do this through a screen label, not the campaign settings directly, and there is one extra switch you have to flip for it to take effect. Get it half-configured and the field stays optional with no error message, which is exactly why this one trips people up.

Setting a field to REQUIRED

A screen label is a template that controls how the 19 standard fields on the agent screen behave. Open or create a screen label, then find the field you want to make mandatory, such as Label Email or Label Postal Code. Instead of typing a custom display name, type the special value ---REQUIRED--- into that field. This forces the agent to populate the field on all calls before being able to hang up and Disposition the call. The same trick works for most of the standard fields, the same way you might type ---HIDE--- to hide one or ---READONLY--- to lock it. A screen label covers 19 standard fields in total, from Title and First Name through to Comments, and any of them you leave blank simply use the hard-coded defaults in the agent interface. So you only ever touch the one or two fields you actually want to make mandatory and leave the rest empty. For the full picture of how these label templates fit together, see the agent screen configuration guide.

Here is the part people miss. REQUIRED only works if the campaign the agent is logged into has Allow Required Fields turned on. That is a separate setting on the campaign modification page, and it acts as the master switch for the whole feature. Set the field to ---REQUIRED--- on the screen label, assign that label to the campaign through the Agent Screen Labels pulldown, and enable Allow Required Fields on the same campaign. If any one of those three pieces is missing, the field will quietly behave like a normal optional field and the agent will be able to disposition the call without it. There is no warning that you forgot a step, so it pays to confirm all three at once rather than assuming the label alone did the job.

How the pieces connect

flowchart TD
  A[Set field to REQUIRED on screen label] --> B[Assign label to campaign]
  B --> C{Allow Required Fields enabled}
  C -->|Yes| D[Agent must fill field before hangup]
  C -->|No| E[Field stays optional]

Read that flow top to bottom. The screen label declares the intent, the campaign assignment carries it to the agent, and Allow Required Fields is the gate that actually enforces it at hangup time.

Common gotcha

Because a screen label can be shared across many campaigns, think before you mark something REQUIRED. If a campaign reuses the same label but its leads never carry that data, agents will get stuck unable to disposition calls, and your Wrap-up times will climb as they hunt for data that does not exist on that record. If only one campaign needs the requirement, give it its own screen label rather than overloading a shared one. It also helps to know which fields are even worth requiring, and the VICIdial lead fields list is a handy reference for what each standard field holds. Pick the ones that genuinely block downstream work if they are empty, not every field on the screen. And test with a single agent before you roll it out to the floor; make a test call, try to hang up with the field blank, and confirm the screen actually stops you. If it lets you through, one of the three pieces is not in place.

Mandatory fields are one of the cheapest ways to push clean data into your CRM without nagging agents in training. Set the label, flip Allow Required Fields, and the screen does the enforcing for you. If you want a VICIdial platform where screen labels and campaign settings just work without server wrangling, take a look at VICIfast pricing.