Drop Exten, Drop Transfer Group, and Drop Call Menu explained

A caller has waited past your patience limit and VICIdial is about to drop them out of the queue. The next question is the important one: where do they go? Hanging up on a real customer is rarely the best answer. VICIdial gives you three routing fields for dropped callers, and which one you fill in depends on the Drop Action you picked.

The Drop Action chooses the field

Drop Action is the menu that decides the fate of a dropped call. It can hang up, play a message, send the caller to voicemail, route them to another in-group, or hand them to a phone menu. Each of the non-hangup choices reads from a matching field. Pick the action first, then fill in the one field it points at. The other fields are simply ignored.

Drop Exten: send them to a recording

When the Drop Action is set to play a message, the Drop Exten field is the dialplan extension the call is sent to. In practice this is usually a short recording, something like "we are sorry, all our agents are busy, please call back later," after which the call ends. It is the gentlest way to close a call without leaving the caller listening to silence. Because it is a dialplan extension, it can also point at a custom application if you have one set up on the box.

Drop Transfer Group: hand them to another queue

When the Drop Action routes to an in-group, the Drop Transfer Group field names which in-group catches the call. This is the field to use when you have a backup queue, maybe a second team or an overflow group with looser staffing, that should pick up callers your main queue could not reach in time. The caller never knows they moved; they just keep waiting in a different line. Setting up that destination queue is covered in our walkthrough on how to create an inbound group and take calls.

Drop Call Menu: hand them to an IVR

When the Drop Action sends the call to a phone menu, the Drop Call Menu field names which Call menu takes over. This is the most flexible option because a menu can offer choices: press 1 to leave a message, press 2 to hear hours, press 3 to be called back. It turns a dead end into a branching point. If you want a dropped caller to have options rather than a single recording, this is the route.

Tying it together

These three fields are the back half of the drop logic. The front half is the timer that decides when a call counts as dropped, which we cover in Drop Call Seconds. There is also an Action Transfer CID setting that controls what caller ID the rerouted call carries, which matters if your message extension or destination Ingroup cares about where the call came from. The full chain of queue controls lives in our inbound call handling guide. A caller who hit the limit still has somewhere to land, and giving them a voicemail box or a menu instead of a hangup keeps the relationship alive. This drop routing sits alongside the DID route choices you make when a number first arrives. Inbound queueing like this comes standard on our hosted plans.