How to set Local GMT on a VICIdial phone

Local GMT is a field on each VICIdial phone entry that records the time difference between the phone's location and Greenwich Mean Time, the zero reference for world time zones. VICIdial uses it so the campaign can accurately display both the current time and the customer's local time.

Get this offset right and your agents see correct clocks. Get it wrong and times across the dialer drift, which can confuse anything that depends on the GMT offset (lead).

Finding the right offset

The value is the number of hours the phone's location sits ahead of or behind GMT. Locations west of Greenwich use negative numbers, locations east use positive numbers.

• US Eastern is -5.
• US Central is -6.
• US Pacific is -8.
• London at standard time is 0, India is +5.5.

Setting it on the phone entry

1. Open the phone in the admin under the phones list and click Modify.
2. Find the Local GMT field, which sits near the other location and protocol settings.
3. Enter the offset for the location where that physical phone actually sits, not where your server lives.
4. Save the phone entry.

How the offset flows into the agent view

flowchart LR
  A[Phone location] --> B[Set Local GMT offset]
  B --> C[Phone entry saved]
  C --> D[Agent logs in on this phone]
  D --> E[Campaign reads the offset]
  E --> F[Shows local time]
  E --> G[Shows customer time]

Because the offset is tied to the phone and not the server, a remote Agent in a different zone still gets correct times once their phone entry carries the right value. This matters when you run a single Campaign across several regions.

The base offset never changes through the year, which trips people up, because daylight saving is handled elsewhere in the dialer. The wider field set is in the phones and aliases guide, and if you are still setting up agents who dial in, see the call-in phone article.

If you would rather not hand-tune offsets per phone, VICIfast sets sane defaults out of the box, so see pricing.