Set Up Preserve-Place-In-Line in VICIdial

A short setup checklist for VICIdial's Preserve-Place-In-Line: the campaign flag, the in-group trigger, and the callback settings to review before you go live.

To set up Preserve-Place-In-Line you flip one campaign flag, point one Ingroup trigger at the callback option, and review the related callback settings. Here is the order to do it in.

Step 1: set the campaign flag

The agents who will take these calls must be on a campaign whose In-Group Manual Dial setting is MANUAL_DIAL or BOTH. That is the prerequisite that lets the callback be dialed back out the way this feature needs. If your agents are on a pure auto-dial campaign with manual dial off, fix this first or nothing else will fire.

Skip the campaign flag and the rest of the setup looks fine but never produces a callback. Confirm MANUAL_DIAL or BOTH before you go further.

Step 2: pick a trigger on the In-Group

Open the in-group (the routing bucket that decides which agents take a call). You need at least one of these three options set to PRESS_CALLBACK_QUEUE: Wait Time Option(s), Estimated hold time Option(s), or Closing Time Action. Each one offers the press-1 callback at a different moment.

Wait Time Option(s) offers it once a caller has waited a set amount of time.
Estimated Hold Time Option(s) offers it based on the estimated-hold-time figure, the dialer's running guess at how long a new caller will wait.
Closing Time Action offers it to everyone still queued when the in-group reaches its closing time for the day.

Set whichever one matches how you want callers offered the option. Setting one of these to PRESS_CALLBACK_QUEUE is what turns the in-queue-callback on for that in-group. You can use more than one if you want both a wait-time offer and a closing-time offer.

Step 3: review the callback settings

Still on the in-group, walk through the settings that govern how the callback-queue behaves. There are three groups to check:

The Callback queue settings, which control how long a place-in-line entry survives and when it is dialed.
The CID Callback Number settings, which decide what caller ID the outbound callback uses.
The Closing Time settings, which set when the in-group closes for the day and how queued callers are handled at that point.

The Callback Queue Expire Hours value matters most for behavior: an entry waits until its place reaches the front or until those hours pass, whichever comes first. Set it short enough that you never dial a stale record.

What happens after you save

sequenceDiagram
  participant C as Caller
  participant G as In-Group
  participant P as Backend Process
  participant A as Agent
  C->>G: Waits past your trigger
  G->>C: Press 1 to keep your place
  C->>G: Accepts and hangs up
  G->>P: LIVE entry created
  P->>P: DNC and call-time checks
  P->>C: Callback when next up
  C->>A: Reaches an agent

Once the in-group is configured, a background process takes over. It watches each entry's Place in line and dials the callback when the spot reaches the front. Before it dials, it confirms the entry is inside your allowed call-time window and checks it against the Internal and Campaign DNC lists, the do-not-call lists you are barred from dialing. Entries that age past the expire hours are marked expired instead of dialed. A separate once-a-day job archives old sent, expired, and orphaned records and resets the closing-time trigger from the previous day.

To verify it is working, open the Real-Time report and look for the Callback Queue Calls header in the HTML view. The SHOW IN-GROUP STATS link tells you which in-groups hold the live entries.

Note that this is its own queued-callback model, not the same as a scheduled-callback an agent books for a specific later time, and it is not music-on-hold either. The caller is off the line entirely while their place is held. If you want the full picture of why this matters for an inbound queue, read what Preserve-Place-In-Line does for inbound callers, and for the meaning of each entry status see VICIdial callback-queue statuses explained. The full set of phone-driven controls is in the VICIdial phone-based functions guide.

If you do not have a box to try this on yet, VICIfast provisions a dedicated VICIdial server in under 40 seconds with your own subdomain over HTTPS, so you can build the in-group and test a real callback the same day. See our pricing to spin one up.