What the VICIdial Dial Method setting does

Open a campaign in VICIdial's detailed view and you'll find a dropdown called Dial Method. It looks like one field among dozens, but it's the one that decides the whole personality of your campaign: whether agents tap a button for every call, whether the system fires a steady multiple of lines, or whether it hands the wheel to a predictive algorithm. Get this right and the rest of the tuning falls into place.

The two simple options

MANUAL is the gentlest setting. The dial level locks at 0 and agents click to dial each number themselves. Nothing fires automatically. It's slow, but you get a person on every call, which suits compliance-sensitive work. See manual dialing for the full picture.

RATIO is the next step up. You pick a fixed dial level, say 2.0, and the system dials that many lines per active agent and holds it there. It never second-guesses you. This is ratio dialing, and it's predictable, which is exactly why small teams like it.

The number you can choose is bounded by a system-wide Auto Dial Limit, set under System Settings, which controls how high the dial level dropdown goes. If you can't pick a high enough ratio, that's the setting to raise. There's also an Auto Dial Level Threshold that protects you from over-dialing when the floor thins out: drop below a minimum agent count and the dial level falls back to 1.0 until people return, so a thin team doesn't keep firing the same line counts a full crew was handling.

The ADAPT family: predictive pacing

Choose any method starting with ADAPT and you've entered predictive territory. The dial level snaps to 1.0, the field locks, and from then on only the dialer moves it. The four flavors differ in how strictly they police your drop rate:

• ADAPT_HARD_LIMIT dials aggressively up to your drop percentage, then refuses to push harder until the rate falls back down.
• ADAPT_TAPERED lets you run hot early in the shift and tightens as your stop time approaches, using the Latest Server Time you set.
• ADAPT_AVERAGE aims to hold your drop rate around the limit on average rather than slamming a hard ceiling on it.
• ADAPT_PERCENTMAX uses a percentage of your Maximum Adapt Dial Level to decide what to fall back to once the drop limit is hit.

Whichever you pick, you can't hand-edit the dial level while an ADAPT method is active unless you tick the ADAPT OVERRIDE checkbox next to it. That override is handy when the contact rate of your lead list shifts dramatically and you want to force a change. All four ADAPT methods share the same supporting fields: a drop percentage limit they steer toward, a maximum adapt dial level that caps how far they can push, and an adapt intensity modifier that controls how fast they climb and back off.

The blended option

INBOUND_MAN is the odd one out. It lets an agent place manual calls from a campaign list while still being able to catch inbound calls in between. Set the dial level to 1.0 with this method so inbound calls reach agents; no auto-dial calls are placed regardless. It's the bridge between outbound work and an ingroup.

Not sure which to pick? The VICIdial dialing strategies guide compares them head to head, and if your drops are creeping up under a predictive method, start with how to lower your drop rate. Want it all preconfigured on a managed box? Check our pricing.