Agent Pause Max Status: capping pause time

Agents drift. Someone clicks PAUSE, gets pulled into a side conversation, and forty minutes later they are still parked there doing nothing. Agent Pause Max Seconds is VICIdial's answer: if an agent sits paused past a limit, the system logs them out. Its companion, Agent Pause Max Status, decides how any call they left dangling gets dispositioned. The two settings only make sense together, so this post covers both.

The timer: Agent Pause Max Seconds

Set Agent Pause Max Seconds above 0 and you give VICIdial a hard limit on pause time. If an agent has not come out of paused status within that many seconds, the system automatically logs them out of the agent screen. The default is 0, which means the limit is off entirely and agents can stay paused indefinitely.

This is a blunt tool, and that is the point. It is not a warning, it is a logout. So set the number high enough to cover legitimate long pauses but low enough to catch genuinely abandoned sessions. Many floors land somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 minutes.

The status: what gets stamped on the call

When the timer fires, there may be a call the agent never finished. Agent Pause Max Status is the Disposition applied to that call. The default is PAUSMX. You will most often see this with manual alternate-number dialing, where an agent can still be working a lead when the pause-max logout hits. Rather than leave the call un-dispositioned, VICIdial labels it with your chosen status so it does not silently disappear from your reports.

Pick a status you can spot later. A dedicated code like PAUSMX is good precisely because it stands out. If you reuse a normal status, those auto-closed calls blend into your real outcomes and you lose the signal that an agent was timed out mid-lead.

The related controls worth knowing

Two more fields sit right next to these. Agent Pause Max Exceptions lets you list specific pause codes that should not trigger the logout, defined in a settings container, one code per line. Use it for legitimate long pauses like training or an approved meeting so those agents are not booted mid-session. There is also a Pause Max URL field, which fires a back-end web request when the limit is hit, handy if you want to log the event in your own systems.

If you are already using Pause code tracking, the exceptions list and the pause-max limit work hand in hand: the codes label why someone paused, and the limit decides which of those reasons gets a pass.

When to use it

Pause-max is most useful where idle agents quietly cost you, either on seat licensing or by skewing your Occupancy and Shrinkage numbers. Forcing an auto-logout means a parked session shows up as a real logout rather than a phantom available agent. For how that feeds into pacing the whole floor, see our dialing strategies guide. And because a dialer that thinks it has more agents than it really does will over-call and abandon people, our piece on lowering your VICIdial drop rate is a useful companion.

Both fields live on the campaign detail screen of any VICIdial box you control. If you are still shopping for a host, see our plans and get a configured dialer in under a minute.