Allow Inbound and Blended: turning a campaign blended

By default a VICIdial campaign is one-directional: agents dial out, and that is it. Allow Inbound and Blended is the single switch that opens the door the other way, letting the same agents also answer incoming calls. It is the first thing to set when you want a blended floor instead of a pure outbound one, and it quietly reveals the rest of the inbound configuration. If you are running a busy floor and tired of inbound calls going nowhere while agents grind through dials, this is where the fix starts.

What the switch does

When you set Allow Inbound and Blended to Y, agents logged into the campaign can take calls from inbound sources. That includes calls passed over by a Fronter on another campaign and calls arriving from an outside line through one of your queues. Set it to N and the opposite is true: agents on this campaign cannot receive inbound calls in any form, no matter what else is configured. So this is the gate that decides whether inbound is even possible here.

The Allowed In-Groups list

Setting it to Y and submitting reveals an Allowed In-Groups section at the bottom of the campaign screen. This is where the real control happens. An Ingroup is an inbound queue, and the Allowed In-Groups list is how you say which queues this campaign's agents may handle. You are not forced to let everyone take every call type; you pick the ones that fit the team's skills.

When an agent logs in, they then choose which of the allowed in-groups to actually take calls from for that shift. So the flow is two layers: the admin allows a set on the campaign, and the agent selects from within that set at login. That split means you can let a campaign cover several queues while still letting individual agents listen to only the ones that match their training on a given day.

How it relates to Allow Closers

People confuse this with Allow Closers, which sits nearby. Allow Closers is about whether agents can hand a call to another agent on the system, the Closer in a fronter-closer setup. Allow Inbound and Blended is about whether agents can receive inbound calls in the first place. They often go together on a blended floor, but they answer different questions: one is about transfers out, the other about calls in.

What to do after you flip it

Turning the switch on is step one, not the whole job. You still need a working in-group with a DID (direct inward dialing) or transfer feeding it, active leads for the outbound side, and a sensible plan for which calls take priority. There is a full walkthrough in our piece on blended inbound/outbound dialing, and the dialing strategies guide puts it in context with the rest of your pacing decisions.

If you would rather have inbound queues, DIDs, and blended pacing set up for you, our managed VICIdial plans get a blended-ready dialer running in under a minute.