How to Read the VICIdial Inbound Summary Hourly Report

The Inbound Summary Hourly Report answers a simple staffing question: when do the calls actually arrive? Instead of one daily total, it splits your inbound activity into an hour-by-hour grid, which makes peak periods jump off the page.

What the report shows

You select a group of in-groups and, optionally, a call time scheme to filter by. At the top you get a per-in-group summary of the standard inbound stats: calls offered, answered, abandoned, and the related averages. An in-group, written in VICIdial as an Ingroup, is the queue that holds inbound callers and decides which agents receive them. Below the summary the same stats repeat, this time split per Ingroup and per hour, so you can read one queue's whole day across a single row of hourly columns.

Reading the hourly grid

Scan the offered column down the hours first to find your volume peaks. Then look at the answered and abandoned columns in those same hours, because a busy hour with rising abandons is the one that needs more staff. The Average speed of answer (ASA) usually climbs in the same window, and the Abandonment rate is the cleanest single signal that a peak is outrunning your agents. Each hang-up in the queue lands as an Abandoned call, so a cluster of them at the same time every day is a staffing pattern, not noise.

Turning peaks into staffing

• Find the two or three hours with the highest offered counts.
• Check whether abandons and speed of answer spike in those same hours.
• Compare agent Occupancy in the peak versus the quiet hours to see if people are stretched thin.
• Move schedules so coverage lines up with the volume, not the clock.

How an inbound call lands in the grid

flowchart LR
  A[Caller dials in] --> B[In-group queue]
  B --> C{Agent available}
  C -->|Yes| D[Answered]
  C -->|No| E[Holds in queue]
  E --> F{Caller waits}
  F -->|Picks up| D
  F -->|Hangs up| G[Abandoned]
  D --> H[Counted in that hour row]
  G --> H

For the bigger picture of where this report sits, start with the VICIdial reports guide, and when you want the same shape over a longer span, the VERM calls per hour report plots hourly volume across many days at once.

Match your coverage to your real call curve and the rest of the metrics tend to fall in line. To run a managed VICIdial server that is reporting from the first call, see VICIfast pricing.