Concurrent Transfers: limiting simultaneous transfers

On a busy outbound campaign, several customers can answer their phones within the same second. The dialer then has a handful of live calls that all need an agent right now. Concurrent Transfers is the setting that decides how many of those can be pushed to agents at the same moment, instead of forming a single-file line. It is one of those knobs you will never think about on a small team and may obsess over on a large one.

What the number actually does

If Concurrent Transfers is set to 5, then up to five recently connected calls can be sent to agents immediately, without each one waiting for the call ahead of it to land first. Think of it as how many checkout lanes are open when a crowd of answered calls arrives at the same time. A higher number means more calls move in parallel; a lower number forces them through more slowly.

This is purely about how connected calls get distributed to agents. It does not change how many calls the dialer places, which is governed by your dial method and Dial level. So it is a delivery setting, not a pacing setting.

Why team size changes everything

On a small setup this setting barely registers. With a handful of agents, you almost never have a pile of simultaneous connects, so the line never gets long. The picture changes once you reach 100 agents and beyond. At that scale you really can have twenty customers answer in the same second, and how those twenty get fanned out to agents starts to have a noticeable effect on efficiency.

That is the only time it is worth tuning by hand. For most teams running a typical Predictive dialing or Ratio dialing campaign, the default does the right thing and you should not lose sleep over it.

Leave it on AUTO

The recommended value is AUTO, and that recommendation holds for the overwhelming majority of campaigns. On AUTO the system manages concurrency based on conditions, and you do not have to guess a number that you would only have to revisit later. Picking a fixed value usually trades a small, conditional gain for the risk of getting it wrong as your agent count moves around. Also note that the MANUAL dial method ignores this field entirely, since the agent is the one placing calls one at a time and there is no burst of dialer-connected calls to distribute.

If you are tempted to change it

Before you touch Concurrent Transfers, make sure the problem you are chasing is actually a delivery problem and not a pacing one. A lot of what looks like calls reaching agents slowly is really too many calls being placed, which shows up as a high Drop rate. Our guide onlowering your VICIdial drop rate sorts those apart, and the dialing strategies guide puts every pacing setting in one place. And if you would rather not tune any of this, you can run a managed dialer that is live in under a minute.