What the Default List ID does for new chat customers

The Default List ID on a VICIdial Chat Group decides where a brand-new chat visitor lands. When someone starts a chat and VICIdial cannot find a matching record, it has to create one somewhere. The Default List ID is the list that new customer is put into. Set it well and your fresh chat leads stay organized; ignore it and they pile up in whatever default the system reaches for.

What it solves

Inbound chat does not always match a known customer. A first-time visitor on your website has no history in the dialer, so there is no existing record to pull up. Rather than refuse the chat, VICIdial creates a new lead on the spot. The Default List ID tells it which list to file that new lead under, so a chat from a stranger still produces a usable record the agent can work and disposition. Without a sensible value here, those new records still get created, but they land wherever the system defaults, which makes them harder to find and report on later.

Found versus not found

The Default List ID only comes into play on the not-found branch. If the visitor's details already match a record in the system, VICIdial uses that existing lead and the Default List ID is never touched.

flowchart TD
  A["Visitor starts chat"] --> B{"Matching lead in system?"}
  B -->|Yes| C["Use existing lead and its list"]
  B -->|No| D["Create new lead"]
  D --> E["File new lead in Default List ID"]
  C --> F["Lock agent and show record"]
  E --> F

Pick a list with intent

Because every new chat visitor flows into this one list, it pays to choose a list that fits how you want to handle fresh inbound contacts. A common pattern is a dedicated list for website chat intake, kept separate from your outbound dialing lists so the new records do not get pulled into a predictive campaign by accident. Whatever you pick, make sure the list actually exists before you save the group, because a missing list ID leaves new chat customers with nowhere clean to go. It also helps to give the list a name that signals where the records came from, so a month later you can tell at a glance which leads walked in through chat versus which were loaded from a file.

The Default List ID is a small field that quietly shapes your data hygiene. Every unknown visitor becomes a Lead in that list, ready for an Agent to handle and Disposition, and from there it follows the same rules as any other inbound record. Pair it with a sensible Queue priority so those new chats reach an agent in the order you want.

Set the Default List ID once, point it at a clean intake list, and new chat customers sort themselves the moment they arrive. For the rest of the Chat Group fields, read how to modify an existing VICIdial Chat Group, and for how chat fits beside email and voice see the VICIdial inbound email and chat guide. If you would rather not wrangle lists and modules yourself, our managed VICIdial plans arrive ready to route inbound chat.