Call Count Limit vs Daily Call Count Limit

Two VICIdial settings sit right next to each other and sound almost identical: Call Count Limit and Daily Call Count Limit. They do very different jobs. One is the ceiling on how many times you ever dial a lead. The other is the ceiling on how many times you dial it in a single day. Getting them confused either annoys the person you are calling or quietly leaves good leads under-worked. Here is how to tell them apart.

Call Count Limit: the lifetime cap

Call Count Limit puts a hard ceiling on the total number of attempts a lead receives in this campaign. Set it to 6 and once a lead has been dialed six times, it stops being loaded into the Hopper for more attempts. Default is 0, which means no limit at all. One small caveat: a lead can creep slightly past the number if you also run Lead recycling or Alternate phone number dialing, because those features count attempts a little differently. Think of this setting as "how hard do we chase a lead before we give up on it for good."

Daily Call Count Limit: the per-day cap

Daily Call Count Limit is about pacing, not lifetime. It limits how many times one lead can be dialed within a single day. When a lead hits that day's limit, VICIdial flips its called-since-last-reset flag to Y and skips it for the rest of the day. Tomorrow, after your normal list activity, it is fair game again. Default is 0, disabled. This is the setting you reach for when you do not want to hammer the same person three times before lunch but you are happy to try again on another day.

One gotcha: if you raise the daily limit partway through the day, leads that already hit the old limit stay frozen until your lists reset. You may need a manual list reset to free them up the same day.

What about manual dials?

Each limit has a partner setting for manual dialing. Call Count Limit Manual Restrict decides whether agent-initiated dials — callbacks, lead searches, the call log — also obey the lifetime cap. Even with it off, clicking Dial Next Number will never dial a lead that already hit the campaign limit. Daily Call Limit Manual works the same way for the daily cap, letting you choose whether manual dials are counted, restricted, or ignored. Both default to leaving manual dials out of the count, so if you rely heavily on manual dialing and want it policed, you have to switch these on.

Using them together

These two play nicely as a pair. A common setup is a lifetime Call Count Limit of around 6 to 8 with a Daily Call Count Limit of 2, so you work a lead persistently across several days without ever calling them more than twice in one day. That spreads your attempts out, respects the person on the other end, and keeps your list from being burned through in an afternoon. If you also dial alternate numbers, test the combination carefully — auto-alt-dialing can interact with the daily counter in ways that surprise you.

Call counts are one piece of a healthy outbound setup. The VICIdial dialing strategies guide walks through how limits, list order, and pacing fit together, and our explainer on Call Count Target clears up a third setting that looks like a limit but is not one. If you want all of this preconfigured and managed, see our plans to skip the setup entirely.