How to set your Minimum Hopper Level

Minimum Hopper Level is one of those settings that quietly decides whether your floor stays busy or keeps stalling. It tells VICIdial how many leads to keep staged and ready to dial. Get it right and you never think about it again. Get it wrong and agents sit waiting every minute. Here is how to pick a number that fits your campaign without resorting to trial and error.

What the setting does

The Hopper is the short list of leads VICIdial keeps ready to dial in the next few minutes. Minimum Hopper Level is the target size of that list. Every minute the refill script checks the Hopper and tops it back up toward this number using leads from your active lists. It only applies to outbound campaigns, so on an inbound or Blended dialing setup it does nothing.

The guiding rule is simple: set it slightly higher than the number of leads you burn through in one minute. The refill runs once a minute, so the hopper has to carry you across that gap without running dry. A small safety margin on top means a brief surge in pace does not empty it before the next refill arrives.

Estimating your per-minute burn

Your burn rate depends on agent count and how hard you dial. Roughly, multiply your active agents by your Dial level by the number of calls each line attempts per minute. Ten agents at a dial level of 2.0 with a 30-second Dial timeout means each line cycles about twice a minute, so you might consume around 40 leads a minute. A Minimum Hopper Level of 50 or 60 gives comfortable headroom.

You do not need to be exact. Round up. A hopper that runs a little large costs almost nothing, while one that runs short costs you idle agents every single minute. If you are unsure of your real pace, the VICIdial dialing strategies guide walks through how dial level and timeout combine to set your call volume.

When to leave it to the system instead

If your agent count or dial level swings a lot during the day, a single fixed number is a compromise. In that case the Automatic Hopper Level feature can recompute the target for you each minute. The trade-off between a fixed value and the automatic one is covered in Automatic Hopper Level versus a fixed hopper level, which is worth a read before you lock in a number.

One thing to know: by default VICIdial trims the hopper back down to your Minimum Hopper Level, so it will not let an oversized hopper sit there indefinitely. A too-high number is harmless; a too-low number is the one that hurts, because every minute the hopper empties before the refill catches up is a minute your agents spend waiting on calls that have not been placed yet. If the hopper keeps emptying anyway despite a generous number, that points to a supply problem rather than a sizing one, meaning the leads themselves are not eligible to load, and how to fix an empty hopper covers the usual causes there.

Want a box where the hopper is already sized for your team on day one? Check the plans and pricing.