Inbound calls not reaching agents: what to check

Calls are arriving, you can see them hit the system, but they never land on an agent. This is one of the most common inbound headaches in VICIdial. Assuming the call is genuinely reaching your box from the Carrier and the DID (direct inward dialing) (the number people dial) is routing it correctly, the cause is almost always a setting on the Ingroup (the inbound group, which is the queue that hands calls to agents) rather than a phone-line problem. Here is the order to check things in.

Is the in-group actually live for an agent?

Two things have to line up. The in-group's Active flag controls whether it even appears in the selection box when an agent logs in. And the agent must have selected that in-group after logging in; agents only receive calls from groups they have picked. If the in-group listing shows a red NA, that means it is not allowed in any campaign, so no agent can choose it. Fix that first.

The no-agent settings

Two settings decide what happens when nobody is ready. No Agents No Queueing controls whether a call even enters the queue if no one is logged in. Set to Y, NO_READY, or NO_PAUSED, callers skip the queue entirely and go to the No Agent No Queue Action. In-Queue No Agents Check does the same while a call is already waiting. If either is sending calls off to a message or hangup, your callers will never reach an Agent even when the routing is otherwise correct.

flowchart TD
  A[Inbound call enters in-group] --> B{Any agents logged in and ready}
  B -->|No| C[No Agent No Queue Action]
  B -->|Yes| D{Inside call time}
  D -->|No| E[After Hours Action]
  D -->|Yes| F{Under Max Calls Count}
  F -->|No| G[Max Calls Action]
  F -->|Yes| H[Call queued and offered to agent]

Call time and after hours

Every in-group has a Call Time scheme based on server time. If a call comes in outside that window, the After Hours Action takes over and the default behavior is to play a message, not to ring agents. A mismatch between your real hours and the server's clock, often a timezone surprise, makes perfectly good calls vanish into the after-hours path. Confirm the call time matches when your agents are actually working.

Max calls and search method

If Max Calls Count is set above 0, calls beyond that cap are diverted to the Max Calls Action and logged with a MAXCAL status. And the Agent Search Method Override decides which servers VICIdial looks at for an available agent; setting it to SO restricts the search to the originating server only, which can starve a multi-server setup of agents. Leave it at the load-balanced default unless you have a specific reason.

One more thing worth a glance is the agent themselves. An agent who is logged in but paused is not available to take a call, and the no-agent settings can treat a queue of only-paused agents as having nobody ready depending on how they are set. So before you tear into the in-group configuration, confirm that at least one person is logged in, has the right in-group selected, and is sitting in a ready state rather than paused or on wrap-up.

If calls are reaching the queue but just sitting there, that is a different problem covered in callers stuck on hold forever. For the whole routing chain end to end, read the inbound call handling guide.

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