System Statuses vs Campaign Statuses in VICIdial

VICIdial has more than one place a Status (lead status) can come from, and that trips up a lot of operators. There are system-wide statuses that exist everywhere, and there are scoped statuses that belong to a single Campaign or to a Status Group. Knowing which set an Agent is actually seeing is the difference between clean reporting and a mess of duplicate codes.

System statuses: the global layer

System statuses are defined once in the System Statuses section of Admin and exist for every campaign and in-group on the box. The default set is familiar: NEW for a lead that has not been called, QUEUE for a lead about to be sent to an agent, INCALL while an agent is talking, and DROP when a call was dropped while the customer was waiting for an agent. These are the statuses the dialer itself sets as a call moves through its lifecycle.

A system status carries the same building-block fields you see elsewhere: a 1 to 6 character code, a 2 to 30 character description, an Agent Selectable flag, and a human_answered flag that feeds the drop percentage and Abandonment rate calculation. It also carries the category flags: sale, dnc, customer contact, not interested, unworkable, scheduled callback (Callback), completed, plus an answering machine flag and a Category for reporting.

Campaign and group statuses: the scoped layer

Campaign statuses are the dispositions you define for one campaign. A Status Group goes one level finer: it overrides the campaign statuses for calls placed within a specific list or handled by a specific Ingroup where a group is set. The fields are the same shape as system statuses, including the MIN SEC and MAX SEC call-length gates, but their reach is limited to that campaign, list, or in-group.

The practical difference is scope. A system status is a constant across the whole platform; a campaign or group status is local. You add a system status when an outcome is universal, and you add a campaign or group status when an outcome only makes sense for part of your traffic.

How VICIdial resolves which set applies

When a call ends, the agent's disposition menu is built from the most specific scope that applies. If the call's list or in-group has a Status Group set, those statuses win. Otherwise the campaign statuses apply. System statuses sit underneath all of it as the platform-wide baseline that the dialer uses to track the call itself.

flowchart TD
  A[Call ends] --> B{List or In-Group has a Status Group?}
  B -->|Yes| C[Use Status Group statuses]
  B -->|No| D[Use campaign statuses]
  C --> E[Agent disposition menu]
  D --> E
  F[System statuses: platform-wide baseline] --> E

Why the distinction matters in practice

• Change a system status and you change behavior everywhere; change a campaign or group status and you change one slice of traffic.
• Keep universal codes (a NEW lead, a DROP) at the system level so they stay consistent across reports.
• Push outcome codes that only fit one program (a particular sale type, a survey result) down to a campaign or a Status Group.

The human_answered flag deserves a closer look because it lives at both layers and directly drives your Drop rate. Set it consistently, or your abandon numbers will drift depending on which scope handled the call.

For the global set and its flags, read what VICIdial system statuses are; for the scoped override, see what VICIdial Status Groups are. The agent screen configuration guide shows where all of this surfaces for the agent.

Both layers are fully available on every VICIfast dialer from the moment it boots. See our pricing and have a managed VICIdial server running in under 40 seconds.