How to troubleshoot a Remote Agent that isn't getting calls

You added a Remote agent — an entry that forwards dialer calls to a phone number instead of a logged-in softphone — and nothing is arriving. Most of the time the record is fine and one of four settings is quietly blocking the flow. Walk them in the order below and you will usually find the gap within a few minutes.

Check 1: status and the one-minute delay

The Status field is the on switch. As soon as it is ACTIVE the system assumes it can send calls. The catch that trips people up: changing the status can take up to a minute to take effect. If you just flipped it to ACTIVE, give it a full minute before deciding it is broken — and remember that switching back to INACTIVE has the same lag, so a remote agent can keep receiving calls for up to a minute after you turn it off.

Check 2: campaign and in-group wiring for inbound

If the remote agent should take inbound calls, the Campaign field must point at a CLOSER campaign, and you must then select the in-groups it should receive from. An Ingroup is the queue an inbound call lands in before routing to an agent. If the Inbound Groups list is empty, or the campaign is an outbound one, the queue has no path to this agent and calls go nowhere. Confirm both the campaign type and the selected in-groups.

Check 3: server IP and external extension

A remote agent entry is only valid for one specific server, set by the Server IP field. If that does not match the box the calls are being dialed from, the entry is effectively invisible to the campaign. Then there is the External Extension — the full dialplan number calls are forwarded to. It must be a complete dialable string, including a leading 9 if your dialplan needs one to reach an outside line. A missing prefix is one of the most common reasons calls leave the dialer but never connect.

Check 4: on-hook ring time on inbound

If On-Hook Agent is set to Y, the system calls the remote agent first and only sends the customer once the line is answered. The On-Hook Ring Time controls how many seconds each attempt rings — effectively a Dial timeout, the cutoff for how long an unanswered call keeps ringing. Set it a few seconds below the point where the phone rolls to voicemail — otherwise voicemail answers, the system counts the call as taken, and the agent never hears it ring. The default is 15 seconds.

flowchart TD
  A[No calls arriving] --> B{Status is ACTIVE}
  B -->|No| C[Set ACTIVE and wait one minute]
  B -->|Yes| D{Inbound campaign is CLOSER with in groups}
  D -->|No| E[Fix campaign type and select in groups]
  D -->|Yes| F{Server IP matches the dialer}
  F -->|No| G[Correct the Server IP]
  F -->|Yes| H{External extension is a full dialplan number}
  H -->|No| I[Add the prefix and retest]
  H -->|Yes| J[Check on hook ring time vs voicemail]

If all four pass and calls still do not land, the problem has moved downstream to the path itself rather than the record. For the full picture of how these entries behave, start with our remote agents guide, and if the issue is the forwarding number itself, work through setting the external extension. If you would rather have provisioning, in-group wiring, and routing set up correctly from the start, our managed plans ship a working dialer in under a minute.