Drop Statuses: choosing which leads a Drop List gathers

A Drop List gathers leads, but it does not gather every ended call. Two fields decide exactly which calls qualify: Drop Statuses and Inbound Groups. Get them too broad and you will sweep up calls you never meant to dial back. Get them too narrow and you will miss real abandoned callers. This is the targeting layer, and it is worth setting deliberately.

The Drop Statuses field is a list of the statuses that count as a drop worth recovering. The default is DROP, the standard status VICIdial assigns when a caller hangs up in an inbound queue before an agent answers. For many setups, that single status is all you need.

Why you might add more than DROP

Plenty of contact centers run custom statuses for different abandonment scenarios. A caller who hangs up during the welcome message, one who bails after a long hold, one routed to an after-hours message, and one who drops mid-queue might each land on a distinct status. If you want to recover several of those, list each one in Drop Statuses.

The key is that every status you add is a status whose callers you are committing to dial back. Each ended call carries one Disposition, and only the ones matching your Drop Statuses list become leads. Think of it as a filter on intent: which kinds of hang-up actually represent someone you want to reach.

Inbound Groups narrows the source

Drop Statuses says which kind of call; Inbound Groups says which queue. The Inbound Groups field is the set of Ingroup queues the job watches. A call must drop in one of these groups and land on one of your drop statuses to be gathered. The two conditions are an AND, not an OR.

flowchart TD
  A[Call ends in a queue] --> B{In a selected Inbound Group?}
  B -->|No| C[Ignored]
  B -->|Yes| D{Status in Drop Statuses list?}
  D -->|No| C
  D -->|Yes| E[Qualifies as a drop]
  E --> F[Inserted as new lead]

The diagram makes the AND explicit. A call only becomes a lead if it cleared both gates: it dropped in a watched group, and it ended on a status you listed. Either gate alone rejects it. This is what keeps the job from grabbing drops out of queues you did not intend.

Scoping in practice

Start narrow. Pick the one or two queues where dropped callers genuinely represent lost business, like a sales line, and leave DROP as the only status. Run it, look at what landed in the target list, and widen only if you are clearly missing recoverable calls. It is far easier to add a status later than to call back a batch of people you should not have touched.

Remember the broader picture too. A high Abandonment rate is a sign your queues are dropping more than they should, and a Drop List recovers the fallout but does not fix the cause. If you are constantly recovering large batches, the real fix is more agents or better routing on the inbound side. Each recovered Abandoned call is a second chance, not a substitute for answering the phone in the first place.

For the rest of the Drop List fields and where this sits in lead management, the lists and leads guide ties it together. If you build a lot of custom statuses, list statistics helps you see how leads break down by status afterward.

Target the right callers, automatically

Drop Statuses give you precise control over which abandoned callers get a second call. On VICIfast you get the full status and Drop List toolkit on a box provisioned in under 40 seconds. See our pricing to start.