Play Place in Line: telling callers their queue position

Holding for an agent is a lot less frustrating when you know where you stand. VICIdial can announce a caller's spot in the queue with a short audio message, so instead of hearing dead air or endless music, they hear something like "you are currently caller number four." The feature is called Play Place in Line, and it lives in the in-group settings. This walkthrough explains what it does, the two prompts it uses, and how to switch it on.

What Play Place in Line actually does

When a call lands in an Ingroup and there is no free Agent, it joins the Call queue and waits. With Play Place in Line set to Y, VICIdial reads the caller their position the moment they enter the queue, and then again each time the on-hold prompt repeats. As callers ahead of them connect to agents, the announced number drops, which is a quiet reassurance that the line is moving and they are getting closer to the front. That small piece of feedback does a lot of the work of keeping a caller patient.

This is one of two common "set expectations" features. The other is Estimated hold time, which tells callers roughly how long they will wait. Position and wait time answer different questions, and many call centers run both together.

The two prompts you control

Place in Line uses two audio files so the announcement sounds natural at both ends of the queue:

• Caller Number prompt (default -queue-thereare-): the "you are currently caller number" lead-in, which VICIdial follows with the spoken number.
• You Are Next prompt (default -queue-youarenext-): played instead of a number when the caller reaches first in line, so they do not hear "caller number one."

The defaults work fine out of the box. If you record your own files to match your brand voice, drop them on the server and point these fields at the new filenames.

Turning it on

Open the in-group you want to change, find the Play Place in Line setting, and flip it from N to Y. The two prompt filenames sit right below it. Save, place a test call, and let it sit in the queue with no agents free so you can hear the announcement and confirm the timing feels right against your Music on hold.

One thing to keep in mind: the position a caller hears is their spot in this one in-group's queue, not across your whole system. If two in-groups share the same agents, each queue is counted on its own. For the bigger picture of how queues, prompts, and routing fit together, see the VICIdial inbound call handling guide.

When position alone is not enough

Knowing you are fourth in line is comforting only if the line moves. On busy days you may want to pair position with a way for long-waiting callers to bail out gracefully, like a callback. That is what the wait-time options handle, covered alongside the rest of the queue toolkit in our piece on why callers get stuck on hold.

If you want a hosted VICIdial box where these queue prompts are ready to configure out of the gate, take a look at our plans and pricing.