Agent Ready Max Seconds Logout explained

Picture an agent logged in, marked READY, waiting for the dialer to send a call. Minutes pass. Then more minutes. If that stretches into half an hour, something is almost certainly wrong: an empty Hopper, a paused campaign, a carrier hiccup, or an agent who walked away without logging out. Agent Ready Max Seconds Logout is the safety net that catches this case and logs the agent out so the problem surfaces instead of hiding.

What the setting does

Set Agent Ready Max Seconds Logout above 0 and you tell VICIdial: if an agent stays in READY (or CLOSER for inbound-closer agents) for this many seconds without a call, log them out of the agent screen automatically. The default is 0, which leaves the feature off.

Note the difference from the pause-max setting. Pause-max watches agents who are paused on purpose. This one watches agents who are available and getting nothing. An agent stuck in READY is the more worrying of the two, because it usually means the dialer itself is not feeding them, not that the agent stepped away.

Why a long READY is a warning sign

On a healthy auto-dial campaign, agents do not wait long between calls. So when one sits in READY for a long time, the cause is usually upstream:

• The hopper ran dry and there are no leads to dial.
• The campaign got toggled inactive without anyone noticing.
• The carrier or trunk is failing, so no calls are connecting.
• The agent left their desk but never logged out.

Logging the agent out does not fix any of these, but it stops a broken setup from masquerading as a working one. An empty session that auto-logs out is a louder signal than a screen that just sits there green all afternoon while you assume calls are flowing.

Choosing the limit

The risk is setting it too low and booting agents during a normal quiet patch. Look at your real worst-case wait. On a slow inbound queue or a small team on a cold Lead list, legitimate READY stretches can run several minutes. Set the limit comfortably above that worst case, so it only triggers when something is genuinely broken, not when business is merely slow.

On a fast Predictive dialing campaign where agents normally get a call within seconds, you can be tighter. The healthier your normal wait time, the lower this limit can safely go, because anything beyond it really is abnormal.

Where it fits

Think of this as a backstop, not a primary monitor. You should still watch your real-time report for stuck agents. But the auto-logout protects your Occupancy figures from being inflated by idle-but-logged-in seats and keeps a quietly broken campaign from looking staffed. For how READY wait times relate to dialer pacing overall, our dialing strategies guide is the place to start, and if the opposite problem is biting you, where the dialer connects calls faster than agents free up, our walkthrough on lowering your VICIdial drop rate covers the other side of pacing.

This is one number on the campaign screen of a dialer you control. If you do not have one yet, see our plans and get a ready-to-run VICIdial install in under a minute.