VICIdial CPD Unknown Action: Routing Calls That Defy Classification

Call progress detection (CPD (call progress detection)) tries to put every answered call into a clear bucket: a live human, an answering machine, a fax, or a disconnect tone. Most of the time it succeeds. But some calls come back with no confident label at all. The CPD Unknown Action setting on a campaign decides what happens to those leftover calls instead of dropping them on an agent who has nobody to talk to.

What Unknown means here

When a CPD engine analyzes the audio at the front of a call and cannot match it to human, machine, or fax with enough confidence, the result is Unknown. By default these calls still go to an agent, on the theory that an unclear result is more likely a person than a machine. That default is fine for many campaigns, but if your lines produce a lot of Unknown results, you may not want agents fielding silence or dead air.

CPD Unknown Action lets you override that behavior. It applies only when you are running a CPD engine and you specifically want Unknown-result calls sent somewhere other than a live agent. It is DISABLED by default, which means Unknown calls keep flowing to agents until you change it.

The four routing options

When you do enable it, you pick one of four destinations for an Unknown call:

• DISPO sets the call's Disposition to AA and hangs it up, but only if the call is still being processed and has not already been sent to an agent.
• MESSAGE sends the call to the Answering Machine Message defined for this campaign, so the lead hears your pre-recorded prompt.
• INGROUP routes the call to an inbound group (Ingroup), which you point at using the AMD Inbound Group field.
• CALLMENU hands the call to a call menu (Call menu), an IVR-style branch you configure separately and select in the AMD Call Menu field.

How the decision flows

flowchart TD
  A[Outbound call answered] --> B[CPD engine analyzes audio]
  B --> C{Result classified}
  C -->|Human| D[Send to agent]
  C -->|Machine or Fax| E[Handled by CPD AMD Action]
  C -->|Unknown| F{CPD Unknown Action}
  F -->|DISABLED| D
  F -->|DISPO| G[Set AA and hang up]
  F -->|MESSAGE| H[Play AM message]
  F -->|INGROUP| I[Route to inbound group]
  F -->|CALLMENU| J[Route to call menu]

Choosing the right action

DISPO is the cleanest choice if you simply want Unknown calls off the table without bothering anyone. It marks the call and ends it, keeping your agent pool clear. MESSAGE makes sense if you would rather leave a short statement than waste the contact entirely, though remember an Unknown call might be a real person who hears your machine prompt mid-sentence.

INGROUP and CALLMENU are for teams that want a second chance at the contact. Sending Unknown calls into an inbound group lets a different queue or skill set pick them up, while a call menu can ask the lead to press a key and confirm a human is there. Both keep more contacts in play at the cost of more moving parts to maintain.

Watch the interplay with your main CPD AMD Action. CPD Unknown Action is a separate lever for the Unknown bucket only, and it does not change how confirmed machines or faxes are handled. If you route both buckets to the same inbound group, size that group for the combined load so calls do not stack up.

For the full picture of how detection and routing fit together, read our AMD and CPD complete guide, and for the destinations themselves see the AMD Inbound Group setting.

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