What the Agent Recording Override does on a user

Most of the time you decide whether agents record their calls at the campaign level. But sometimes you need one specific user to behave differently from everyone else on the same campaign. That is what the Agent Recording Override does: it lets you pin a single user's recording behavior so the campaign setting no longer applies to them.

First, a quick distinction. A Call recording is the saved audio of a conversation, usually written to disk in a Recording format (WAV/MP3) like WAV. Whether a recording starts, and whether the agent can stop it, depends on a chain of settings. The override sits at the top of that chain for one user.

The five modes

The Agent Recording Override field on a user has five possible values:

• DISABLED - the override does nothing. The user simply follows whatever the campaign recording setting says. This is the value to use when you do not want a per-user exception.
• NEVER - recording is turned off for this user. No on-screen record button works for them, no matter what the campaign wants.
• ONDEMAND - the default. The agent gets a start and stop button and decides for themselves when to record. This is the same behavior as On-demand recording at the campaign level.
• ALLCALLS - recording starts automatically every time a call reaches the agent, but the agent can still stop it if they need to (for example, to honor a PCI pause request).
• ALLFORCE - recording starts automatically on every call and the agent has no stop button at all. Use this where compliance demands every conversation be captured end to end.

How the decision is made

flowchart TD
  A[Call sent to agent] --> B{Override value}
  B -->|DISABLED| C[Use campaign setting]
  B -->|NEVER| D[No recording]
  B -->|ONDEMAND| E[Agent starts and stops]
  B -->|ALLCALLS| F[Auto record agent can stop]
  B -->|ALLFORCE| G[Auto record no stop]

A useful detail for the two automatic modes: ALLCALLS and ALLFORCE can pair with the campaign's Recording Delay. That delay holds off the start of capture for a few seconds so that very short calls never produce a tiny audio file, which keeps clutter and system load down on a busy box.

When to use a per-user override

Reach for the override only when one user genuinely needs to differ from their team. A quality analyst doing silent review might be set to NEVER so they never generate audio. A new hire on a regulated campaign might be set to ALLFORCE while the rest of the floor runs ONDEMAND. For everything else, leave it DISABLED and manage recording at the campaign level so your config stays readable.

Because this is a user-level setting, it interacts with how you structure teams. If you find yourself overriding the same value for a whole group of people, that is a sign the split belongs in a separate campaign or user-group structure instead. Overrides are for exceptions, not for whole teams.

If you are mapping out which permissions belong to which role, it helps to read the override alongside the other per-user toggles. Our walkthrough of the VICIdial user permission matrix shows how recording, transfers, and lead access fit together on a single user record.

Want a managed VICIdial box where these settings already work the way they should, provisioned in under 40 seconds? See our pricing plans to get started.