Human answered vs customer contact: what the difference means in reports

Two phrases show up over and over in VICIdial sales reports: human answered and customer contact. They sound like the same thing, and people use them as if they are. They are not. Each is a separate flag you set on a call status, and each answers a different question about the call. Mixing them up is a fast way to misread your numbers.

Both come from status flags, not from the dialer guessing

Like the Sale attribute, both of these are parameters you configure on each call Status (lead status) in the admin. Whether a given call counts as human answered is determined by the "human answered" parameter on the status. Whether it counts as customer contact is determined by the separate "customer contact" parameter on the status. VICIdial does not infer either one at runtime, it simply reads the flag on whatever status the agent's Disposition maps to.

Because they are independent flags, a single status can carry one, both, or neither. That independence is the whole point.

What each flag actually means

• Human answered: a real person picked up, as opposed to an answering machine, fax tone, or dead air. It is the wider bucket. A Live answer that goes nowhere useful is still human answered.
• Customer contact: the agent actually reached and spoke with the intended customer, not a gatekeeper, a wrong number, or someone who hung up immediately. This is the narrower, more meaningful bucket.

Think of it as two rings. Human answered is the outer ring of "a person was there". Customer contact is the inner ring of "the right person engaged". Every customer contact is also human answered, but not every human-answered call is a customer contact.

How the two flags relate

flowchart TD
  A[Call ends, status assigned] --> B{Human answered = Y?}
  B -->|No| C[Machine, fax, or no person]
  B -->|Yes| D{Customer contact = Y?}
  D -->|No| E[Person reached, but not the customer]
  D -->|Yes| F[Real conversation with the customer]

The chart shows why the order matters. The customer-contact question only makes sense once a human answered. So when you set up a Called status, a status flagged customer contact almost always wants human answered set too, or the math underneath your reports gets strange.

Why this drives your sale rate

Here is where it pays off. VICIdial expresses sale rates two ways, and each uses one of these flags as its denominator. One figure is the percentage of human-answered calls that resulted in a sale. The other is the percentage of customer-contact calls that resulted in a sale. The numerator in both is the same count of Sale=Y calls.

Those two rates tell you different stories. The sale rate over human-answered calls reflects everything that happened after a person picked up, including all the gatekeepers and wrong numbers. The sale rate over customer-contact calls strips those out and shows how well agents close once they actually have the right person on the line. The second is usually the fairer measure of agent skill, and it is closer in spirit to your Conversion rate.

This is also why Contact rate and Answer rate are worth tracking alongside the sale rates. They describe how the funnel narrows from "someone answered" down to "we talked to the customer", and the sale-rate denominators sit right on top of that funnel.

To get the most out of these flags, pair this with our companion post on how VICIdial decides a call is a sale, and see them put to work in the Sales per Day report. The broader context lives in our guide to VICIdial reports.

Want a dialer where these reports are tuned and ready out of the box? Check our managed VICIdial pricing and skip the setup work entirely.