How to set Drop Call Seconds for Safe Harbor compliance

The Drop Call Seconds field in a VICIdial Campaign determines how many seconds after a consumer answers that the system will wait before declaring the call a drop. Set it correctly and your dialer stays inside FTC Safe Harbor. Leave it at the wrong value and you may be counting drops differently than the FTC does — which puts you at risk even when the real-time report looks fine.

Why the number is 5

The FTC rule says a call must be transferred to an agent within 2 seconds of the consumer finishing their greeting. A typical greeting — "Hello, this is Bob" — takes roughly 3 seconds to say. So the full timeline from the moment of answer is: 3 seconds for the greeting plus 2 seconds for transfer equals 5 seconds total. Setting Drop Call Seconds to 5 means VICIdial will count a call as a Drop rate event only after 5 seconds with no agent connected, which maps directly onto the FTC's definition.

**Heads up:** Setting this value lower than 5 makes your system more aggressive about labeling calls as drops. You may appear more compliant on paper while actually hanging up on consumers who haven't finished speaking — which can itself be a problem. Setting it higher gives consumers more breathing room but means an agent must still connect within the FTC's 2-second post-greeting window, which VICIdial cannot enforce on the carrier side.

Where to set it in VICIdial

1. Log in to the VICIdial admin interface and open the Campaign Detail screen for the campaign you want to configure.
2. Locate the Drop Call Seconds field. It is in the dialing settings section of the campaign form.
3. Enter 5 and save the campaign.
4. Repeat for every Campaign that uses Predictive dialing or Auto dial level dialing.

The complete drop-handling flow

flowchart TD
  A[Consumer answers] --> B[VICIdial starts 5-second timer]
  B --> C{Agent connects before 5s}
  C -->|Yes| D[Live call - not a drop]
  C -->|No| E[Classified as DROP]
  E --> F{Drop Action set to MESSAGE}
  F -->|Yes| G[Play safe harbor message]
  F -->|No| H[Silence - second violation]
  G --> I[Drop counted in 30-day tally]
  H --> I

The timer and the drop action work together. Drop Call Seconds controls when the drop is declared. The Drop Action field controls what happens next. Both must be configured.

Configuring Drop Action and Safe Harbor Exten

Once Drop Call Seconds is set to 5, also verify the Drop Action campaign field is set to MESSAGE. Then set the Safe Harbor Exten field to the extension number in your Asterisk dial plan that plays your Safe Harbor message recording. That recording must state your company name, why you are calling, and a phone number consumers can call back.

Without a valid Safe Harbor Exten, dropped calls go silent. The FTC provision requires the message to play on every dropped call. A campaign that drops 2% of calls but plays silence instead of a message is still out of compliance.

Other campaign fields that affect compliance

• Dial Timeout: Set above 15 seconds to satisfy the Safe Harbor requirement that calls ring at least 15 seconds or 4 rings before hanging up.
• Use Internal DNC List: Set to Y so consumers who opt out are not called again by this campaign.
• Monitor the Abandonment rate in the real-time report. Drop Call Seconds affects how that rate is calculated — a correctly set value gives you an accurate compliance picture.

See the full compliance picture

Drop Call Seconds is one setting in a larger compliance stack. For the complete breakdown of every Safe Harbor requirement and the VICIdial fields that satisfy it, start at VICIdial compliance overview. To understand how the 3% cap is calculated across your campaigns, read what FTC Safe Harbor means for auto-dialers. To run a fully configured compliant dialer without building it yourself, see VICIfast pricing.