What Drop Lockout Time does

Drop Lockout Time is one of those campaign fields most people never touch until a regulation forces them to. It sets a cooling-off window after a dropped call: for a number of hours you choose, VICIdial will not dial that same number again. It is a small setting, but it changes how dropped leads flow back into your dialing, and in some countries it is effectively required.

What the setting actually blocks

When a call gets marked as a drop, the lead does not disappear. Under normal list rules it can become dialable again. Drop Lockout Time inserts a delay: for the number of hours you set, that dropped number is held back from being dialed. After the window passes, the lead returns to the normal flow and can be picked up by the Hopper again. To disable the feature entirely, set the value to 0.

The lockout is measured in whole hours and applies per campaign, so a UK campaign and a US campaign on the same box can run different windows. It only matters for outbound dialing, since drops are an outbound concept.

Why the UK cares so much

This setting is most useful in places like the UK, where rules prevent re-attempting a customer within 72 hours of an abandoned, or dropped, call. To comply, operators set Drop Lockout Time to 72 so the system enforces the gap automatically instead of relying on a person to remember it. The dialer simply will not place that call until the clock runs out, which also keeps you from stacking up what a regulator would read as a Nuisance call pattern.

If you call in the US, the rules around drops focus more on your overall Drop rate and the message you play, so you may leave the lockout at 0 or use a short window of your own choosing. The point is the same in both places: do not punish a person who already had a confusing dropped call by calling them right back.

How it interacts with lead recycling

VICIdial has several ways to put dropped numbers back into play, including recycle features and list resets that re-select DROP statuses. Here is the part that trips people up: even when one of those features would happily call a dropped lead again, Drop Lockout Time is still honored. The lockout wins. So you can run aggressive recycling and still trust that no dropped number gets re-dialed inside the window you set.

One caution: features that re-select DROP leads do not always check whether the lists were reset first, so without a lockout you can accidentally call recently dropped people. Setting a sensible Drop Lockout Time is the cheapest guardrail against that mistake.

If you are tuning this because drops feel out of control, the lockout treats the symptom rather than the cause. Pair it with the pacing work in our guide to lowering VICIdial drop rate, and read the wider context in the VICIdial dialing strategies guide. If you would rather run on a managed box with these regulatory fields ready to go, check our pricing.