Hopper VLC Dup Check: stopping duplicate dials

Calling the same person twice in a few minutes is the fastest way to annoy a prospect and waste an agent's time. VICIdial has a small setting built to prevent exactly that on the way into the dialing queue: Hopper VLC Dup Check. It's off by default, it solves a narrow problem well, and it has one foot-gun that can quietly grind your campaign to a crawl. Here's the plain-English version, with no jargon you don't need.

What the setting checks

Every minute, VICIdial loads fresh leads into the dialing Hopper — a small, fast holding area for the leads it's about to dial. When you set Hopper VLC Dup Check to Y, every lead headed into that holding area is checked against the Vendor lead code field. If two leads carry the same code, only one of them is allowed in. The other waits.

Think of the vendor lead code as your own ID for a person or account. The same human might appear in your data three times — home phone, cell, work line — each as a separate Lead row, but all tagged with one vendor code. Dup Check uses that shared code to keep the system from queuing all three of that person's numbers at once.

When it earns its keep

The setting was built mainly for one scenario: alt-number dialing in MULTI_LEAD mode, where a single contact has several phone numbers spread across separate lead records. Without Dup Check, those records can all land in the hopper in the same minute, and you end up calling one person's three numbers back to back. With it on, only one of that person's records dials at a time.

If your lists don't have that one-person-many-numbers shape, you probably don't need this. A cleaner approach for plain double-entries is to run a Duplicate check when you load the list, so the dupes never make it into the system at all. That keeps your data tidy before VICIdial ever has to sort it out at dial time.

The mistake that starves your dialing

Here's the trap. If you turn this on but your leads have a blank vendor lead code, every lead looks identical to every other lead — they all share the same empty value. The check then concludes the whole batch is one big duplicate and lets just a single lead into the hopper per minute. Your agents sit idle, the queue looks empty, and nothing seems broken in the obvious places.

So the rule is simple: only switch Dup Check to Y if you actually populate the vendor lead code on your leads. If that field is empty, leave the setting at its default of N. For the broader context on how the queue fills and what controls its size, the VICIdial dialing strategies guide ties these knobs together.

Quick checklist before you flip it on

Walk through these three questions before changing the setting:

• Do my leads have a filled vendor lead code? If not, stop here and leave it off.
• Am I running multi-lead alt-number dialing where one contact owns several records? That's the case this was made for.
• After turning it on, is the hopper still filling normally? If it suddenly holds one lead, your codes aren't set — switch back.

Used in the right spot, this is a clean way to keep one person from getting hammered with calls. Used blindly, it's a silent throttle. If a list that should be full somehow never seems to dial, our walkthrough on fixing an empty VICIdial hopper covers the usual suspects. And if you'd rather not babysit settings like this at all, our managed VICIdial hosting comes pre-tuned — see our plans for what's included.