Dialing Without Agents to Play a Message in VICIdial

Sometimes you do not need an agent at all. A customer reminder, an appointment notification, or a political or non-profit broadcast just needs to dial a list and play a recording when the other side picks up. VICIdial does this with an auto-dial campaign that has no live agent logged in, and once you know the pieces it is quick to stand up.

The two pieces that make it work

This is broadcast dialing (Broadcast dialing) in spirit: dial many numbers, play one message. To run a campaign with nobody logged in, you use a remote agent (Remote agent). A remote agent is a stand-in seat that lets the dialer place calls and route them somewhere fixed instead of to a human. For a message campaign, that fixed destination is your recording.

The other piece is a Campaign loaded with a Lead list of the numbers you want to reach. Point the campaign at the leads, attach the remote agent, and the dialer handles the rest, calling down the list and playing your message on connect.

flowchart LR
  A[Lead list] --> B[Auto-dial campaign]
  B --> C[Remote agent seat]
  C --> D[Carrier places call]
  D --> E{Customer picks up}
  E -->|Yes| F[Play recorded message]
  E -->|No| G[Mark busy or no answer]

Choosing how the message plays

You pick how the recording starts once the customer side answers. The simplest option plays the message immediately, with no dialplan editing: you point the remote agent's External Extension field at your recorded prompt and the call hangs up when the recording finishes. The trade-off is that the message starts before the person even says hello, and on answering machines the start gets clipped.

The other approaches wait a set number of seconds or wait for silence on the line before playing, which is gentler and gives a little machine detection. Those need a small dialplan edit. There is also full answering machine detection (AMD (answering machine detection)) as an admin-only fourth method when you need the most accurate machine handling. The full comparison lives in our piece on the three message playback methods.

What you will see on the leads

With the play-immediately method, the list modification page only shows a handful of statuses, because there is no agent to disposition the call. Expect these:

• B - the line was busy
• NA - no answer, including ring-no-answer, disconnect, and invalid
• NEW - the lead has not been called yet
• QUEUE - the call was picked up and the message started playing

Note that play-immediately gives no Status (lead status) change when the full message plays the way the other two methods do, so QUEUE is as specific as it gets. If you need a cleaner Disposition per lead, the wait-based methods are the better fit.

Recording tips that save you reruns

Whichever method you choose, record the message twice in the same file so any clipped start gets a second, complete pass. On play-immediately recordings, wait two to three seconds before you start speaking, so the customer gets a moment of greeting before your message begins.

For the wider context of detection and message drops, read the AMD and CPD complete guide. When you want this built and hosted without wrangling the dialplan yourself, see VICIfast pricing and we will get your message campaign live.