The UK 72-hour drop-lockout rule and how to set Drop Lockout Time

What the rule requires

Ofcom (UK) regulations in the UK include a requirement that has no direct equivalent in US law: if a call is abandoned — meaning the contact answered but there was no available agent to connect them to, resulting in a Drop rate event — the company must not attempt to contact that person again for at least 72 hours.

This is the drop lockout rule. An Abandoned call in this context is a live person who picked up the phone, heard silence or a message, and then hung up because no agent was ready. From that moment, the 72-hour clock starts. Dialing them again before the window expires is a compliance violation.

Why this matters for predictive dialing

Predictive dialing is the mode most vulnerable to this rule. In predictive mode, the dialer places calls in advance of agent availability based on statistical models. When agents are not available fast enough, some answered calls become abandoned calls. Each one of those contacts is now locked out for 72 hours under OFCOM rules.

Without VICIdial's Drop Lockout Time feature, your system has no automatic mechanism to prevent a re-dial within that window. The lead could easily circle back through the Hopper and be dialed again the same day — a direct OFCOM violation.

How to configure Drop Lockout Time in VICIdial

flowchart TD
  A[Call Placed by Dialer] --> B{Agent Available?}
  B -- Yes --> C[Live Agent Answers - Normal Call]
  B -- No --> D[Abandoned Call - DROP event]
  D --> E[Drop Lockout Time field activates]
  E --> F[Lead locked for 72 hours]
  F --> G[After 72 hours: lead eligible to re-enter hopper]
  C --> H[Normal disposition workflow]

The setting is in Campaign Detail. Open the campaign you want to configure, find the Drop Lockout Time field, enter 72, and click SUBMIT. That is the entire configuration. VICIdial will then automatically prevent any lead who received a dropped call from re-entering the dialing queue for 72 hours.

If you run multiple UK campaigns, you need to set Drop Lockout Time on each campaign individually. There is no system-wide default for this field — it is per-campaign configuration.

What counts as a drop event

For the purposes of the lockout, a drop event occurs when a real person answers the call and is not connected to a live agent. Calls that go to voicemail, calls answered by an answering machine (detected by AMD (answering machine detection)), or calls that were never answered do not trigger the 72-hour lockout. Only a live-person answer with no agent available counts.

This distinction is important because AMD false positives — where the system misidentifies a live person as an answering machine — could cause a different kind of compliance problem if not managed carefully. Keep your AMD settings tuned and monitor AMD false positive rates when running UK campaigns.

Related settings

The 72-hour lockout works alongside the Multiple Campaign Drop Rate Group option, which lets you calculate your drop rate across all campaigns rather than per-campaign. Both settings serve OFCOM compliance but address different requirements. For more on how OFCOM's drop-rate calculation works — including the December 2015 change — see how the UK OFCOM drop-rate calculation differs from the US.

For the full picture of UK and international compliance in VICIdial, start with the VICIdial compliance overview.

To get your UK campaigns set up with the correct OFCOM configuration from the start, check our managed hosting plans for hands-on configuration support.