Lost, Routed, and Transfers on the Inbound DID Report

The Inbound DID Report tells you how many calls each phone number received, but the more useful question is what happened to them. Three columns answer that: LOST, ROUTED, and TRANSFERS. They look similar at a glance, but each counts a genuinely different fate, and reading them as one number hides problems.

ROUTED: calls that reached their destination

ROUTED counts calls sent to an in-group, an agent, or a call menu where there is a matching log record showing the outcome. In other words, the call arrived where it was supposed to and the system recorded what happened next. A call that hits an Ingroup, waits in queue, and connects to an Agent is a routed call. So is a caller who steps through a Call menu and lands somewhere with a record.

TRANSFERS: calls sent to a phone, voicemail, or extension

TRANSFERS counts calls that were sent on to a phone number, a voicemail box, or an Extension during the period. This is the bucket for DIDs that point at a forwarding destination rather than the dialer's queue. If a number is configured to ring an after-hours mailbox, those calls land here. A healthy main sales line should show very few transfers; a high count can mean the DID route is sending calls somewhere you did not intend.

LOST: calls with no record

LOST counts calls that were meant to be routed to an in-group, agent, or call menu but left no log record in the table where one should appear. The usual explanation is that the caller hung up before the system could hand the call off and write the record. A LOST call is not the same as an Abandoned call that waited in queue and gave up; LOST sits earlier, before the routing even completed.

A creeping LOST count is worth chasing. It can point to a slow carrier handoff, a misconfigured route, or callers reacting badly to a long opening prompt. Treat it as a signal, not just a statistic.

Why the three differ

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> Received
  Received --> Forwarded: sent to phone or voicemail
  Received --> Handed_off: sent to ingroup or menu
  Forwarded --> Transfers
  Handed_off --> Routed: log record written
  Handed_off --> Lost: caller hung up no record
  Routed --> [*]
  Transfers --> [*]
  Lost --> [*]

Read together, the three columns should roughly account for the total CALLS on the DID. A big gap between CALLS and ROUTED, with LOST climbing, tells you callers are dropping off before they ever reach a queue. For the bigger picture, see the VICIdial reports guide, and to learn how abandons are tallied separately, read calls offered vs answered vs abandoned.

If you would rather not babysit the plumbing behind these numbers, a managed VICIdial server keeps routing and logging tidy for you. Compare options on VICIfast pricing.