What the human_answered flag does on a VICIdial status

Of all the checkboxes on a system status, human_answered is the one that quietly moves your compliance numbers. It does not change anything on the agent screen. Instead, it tells VICIdial whether a given Disposition should be counted as a call a real person picked up, which is exactly the figure your Drop rate math depends on.

What the flag does

Every system Status (lead status) carries a human_answered field. Setting it to Y means VICIdial uses that status when counting human-answered calls, and those calls are what feed the drop percentage, also called the abandon rate. The drop percentage is essentially dropped calls divided by the calls a human actually answered. So when you mark more statuses as human_answered, you grow the denominator of that calculation, and a larger denominator pushes the measured percentage down.

That is why this flag deserves respect: it directly shapes a regulated number. A status set to Y is saying, on the record, that a live person was on the line. The pillar agent screen configuration guide covers the surrounding status fields if you need the full map.

Keep human_answered separate in your head from two flags it is easy to confuse it with. Customer Contact indicates the call was answered by a person and feeds the total human-answered-calls count in its own right, and the Sale flag decides whether a status rolls into total sales. They overlap conceptually but they are distinct checkboxes, and human_answered is the specific one the drop-percentage formula reads. A status can be a sale and human-answered, or human-answered without being a sale, depending on the outcome. The point is that you set human_answered to describe what physically happened on the call, a person answered, rather than to describe the business result.

How it feeds the drop math

flowchart LR
  A[Call gets a status] --> B{human_answered}
  B -->|Y| C[Counted as human answered]
  B -->|N| D[Not counted as human answered]
  C --> E[Adds to denominator]
  E --> F[Drop percentage calculated]
  D --> F

The diagram shows the path: a call's status decides whether it joins the human-answered pool, that pool becomes the denominator, and the denominator sets where your drop percentage lands.

The common gotcha

The temptation is to flip human_answered to Y on extra statuses to make the abandon rate look healthier. Do not game it. If you tag answering-machine or carrier-defined results as human-answered, you inflate the denominator with calls no person took, and your reported number stops reflecting reality, which is exactly the wrong move under TCPA scrutiny. Set Y only where a human genuinely answered, like a sale or a not-interested taken by a live rep. Leave it N for machine outcomes such as AA for a dialer-defined answering machine or AB for a carrier-received busy signal. A useful habit is to review human_answered every time you add a custom status, because a new disposition that should count as a live answer but is left at N will quietly understate your contact volume and skew the drop rate in the other direction. The related Sale flag works the same low-key way on a different report; see how to modify a VICIdial script for the broader pattern of editing these agent-facing settings without breaking your numbers.

Treat human_answered as a reporting truth flag, not a dial. Get it right and your Real-time report and your compliance exports agree with each other, which keeps every Agent and supervisor working from the same numbers. If you would rather start on a hosted platform tuned for accurate drop reporting out of the box, check VICIfast pricing.