Dead Call Trigger: handling silent connections

You have seen it on a floor: an agent stares at the screen, headset on, talking to nobody because the customer hung up a minute ago and they did not notice. That is a dead call, and every second of it is paid time the dialer thinks is a live conversation. VICIdial's Dead Call Trigger is built to catch exactly this — to poke the agent when a call has gone quiet for too long.

What counts as a dead call

A dead call is a connected call where the customer side is gone but the agent has not hung up or dispositioned it. The dialer still sees the Agent as in a call, so it does not send them the next one. Their Talk time keeps climbing on a conversation that ended, and your Occupancy numbers quietly lie to you.

This happens more than you would think on outbound work — customers hang up without a word, lines drop, and a distracted agent simply does not catch the silence.

Setting up the trigger

You will find these on the campaign's detailed view. The main pair is Dead Call Trigger Action and Dead Call Trigger Seconds:

• Dead Call Trigger Action — set it to AUDIO to play a sound to the agent, or URL to fire a back-end request. Default is DISABLED, so nothing happens until you change it.
• Dead Call Trigger Seconds — how many seconds the agent can sit in a dead call before the action fires. Set it above zero to arm it.
• Dead Call Trigger Repeat — if YES, the action fires again every time that many seconds pass, so the agent keeps getting nudged until they act.
• Dead Call Trigger Audio / Dead Call Trigger URL — the sound file to play, or the address to ping, depending on which action you chose.

A small chime at fifteen seconds is usually enough. The point is a gentle reminder, not a punishment — you want the agent to glance up and hit the Disposition button.

The harder backstop

If a nudge is not enough, there is a stricter set of options. Dead Call Max Seconds will, after the customer hangs up, automatically hang the call up for the agent once that many seconds pass — then it stamps a status (Dead Call Max Status, default DCMX) and puts the agent on pause. Dead Call to Dispo Only sends them to the disposition screen instead of auto-closing the lead, so they still pick a real outcome.

There is also Dead Call Stop Recording, which cuts the recording when the customer hangs up. Be cautious here: if your agents have shaky connections, the system can mistake a glitch for a hangup, so a false positive could clip a recording short. When connections are unreliable, lean on the plain audio trigger and skip the auto-stop.

Dead-call time is one of those leaks that does not show up as dropped calls but still wrecks your numbers — the same kind of hidden waste covered in how to lower your VICIdial drop rate. For the bigger picture on how pacing and agent state fit together, the VICIdial dialing strategies guide walks through it. And if you would rather have these defaults set sanely out of the box, see our pricing.