Dial Statuses: which dispositions get redialed

Every call in VICIdial ends with a result code, a Disposition. Sale, no answer, busy, not interested, and so on. The Dial Statuses setting on your campaign is where you decide which of those outcomes the dialer is allowed to call again. Get this list right and you re-work exactly the leads worth re-working. Get it loose and you waste dials, or worse, call people you shouldn't.

What the setting does

On the campaign screen you'll find a list of selected statuses with a menu to add more and a REMOVE link to drop them. Only leads whose current status is in that list, and which sit in an active Lead list, are eligible to enter the Hopper. You can select over 50 statuses if you really need to, but quantity is not the goal here, the right few are.

Which statuses to include

Start with the obvious good ones. NEW is leads never called. The no-answer family, no answer, busy, disconnected line, machine, are worth retrying because you simply haven't reached the person yet. Callback-type statuses belong in here too if you want the dialer chasing them rather than agents handling them manually.

What you keep out matters just as much. Do not select a sale status unless you have a deliberate reason, like a quality-control re-call. Never put a do-not-call style status in the list, those leads are off-limits, and your DNC (do not call) settings exist precisely to keep them out. A clean dial-status list is half the job of staying compliant.

A useful habit is to review your dial statuses whenever you add a custom campaign status. New rooms tend to invent their own result codes over time, and it is easy to create one and forget to decide whether it should be redialed. If a status describes a finished outcome, leave it off the list; if it describes a person you still haven't reached, it probably belongs on. The list only does its job if it stays in sync with the statuses your agents are actually using.

The NEW-lead gotcha

Here's a trap that catches people. Some List order options, the ones that say things like "insert a NEW lead every other lead" or "every third lead," are built to weave fresh leads into a stream of already-called leads on a cadence. Those options only work if you do NOT have NEW selected in your dial statuses. If you select NEW and also choose one of those orderings, they fight each other. So when you use a NEW-insertion list order, leave NEW out of the dial status list and let the ordering bring the fresh leads in.

A simple way to think about it

Ask of each status: "Do I want to spend another dial on this outcome?" If the answer is yes and it's legal, include it. If it's a finished outcome or off-limits, leave it out. Dial statuses decide what is eligible; the list order decides the sequence; and features like recycling and alt-number dialing handle the finer retry behavior. The whole picture is in the VICIdial dialing strategies guide, and since dialing too aggressively on the wrong statuses inflates abandoned calls, it's worth reading how to lower your VICIdial drop rate alongside this.

If you'd rather not hand-curate status lists for every campaign, a managed dialer comes tuned with sensible defaults out of the box. See our pricing to get going.