Drop Call Seconds and Drop Call Action explained

When you run a predictive or ratio campaign, the dialer sometimes connects a live person at a moment when every agent is still busy. That gap is unavoidable in any system that dials ahead of its agents. Two campaign settings decide how VICIdial handles that gap: Drop Call Seconds sets how long the contact can wait, and Drop Call Action decides what happens when the clock runs out. Getting both right keeps your numbers clean and your callers from sitting in dead silence.

What Drop Call Seconds counts

Drop Call Seconds is the number of seconds from the moment the customer line is answered until VICIdial decides the call is a drop. The clock starts at pickup, not at dial. So if you set it to 2, a live person who says hello has roughly two seconds for an agent to grab them before the campaign treats the call as abandoned. This only applies to outbound calls.

Most operators running consumer calls keep this at 5 seconds at most. A short window pairs with the FTC safe-harbor framing. Setting it too high lets callers stew in silence; setting it too low can mark calls as drops before an agent has any real chance to answer. Every call that crosses this threshold counts toward your Abandonment rate.

What Drop Call Action does

Once a call passes Drop Call Seconds with no free agent, Drop Call Action decides where it goes. You pick one behavior per campaign:

• HANGUP — the call simply ends. Fast, but the caller hears nothing.
• AUDIO — plays the Safe Harbor audio file so the caller hears a short recorded message.
• MESSAGE — routes the call to a dialplan extension you define (the Drop Exten).
• VOICEMAIL — drops the call into a voicemail box where the person can leave a message.
• CALLMENU — sends the call into a call menu you have built.
• IN_GROUP — forwards the call to an inbound group so a queue can pick it up.

For US consumer campaigns, AUDIO is the common choice because it gives the caller the identifying message that the safe-harbor rules expect. IN_GROUP is handy if you would rather try to rescue the call by sending it to a live Ingroup queue instead of letting it go.

How the two work together

Think of Drop Call Seconds as the trigger and Drop Call Action as the result. The seconds value decides when a connected call becomes a drop; the action decides what the caller experiences at that instant. Both fields live on the campaign detail screen, so they are set per campaign rather than system-wide. A telesales line and a customer-care callback line can use completely different timing and behavior.

If your drops are climbing, these two settings are downstream of the real cause, which is usually pacing. Tightening them changes what happens to a dropped call, not how many you produce, and it never moves your underlying Drop rate on its own. For the upstream fix, walk through how to lower your numbers in this guide to lowering VICIdial drop rate, and see the bigger picture in our VICIdial dialing strategies guide. When you want a hosted box where these defaults are already sane, see our plans.