Populating lead fields from inbound caller ID

An inbound call that creates a new lead starts out nearly blank. You have a phone number and not much else. VICIdial can fill in a surprising amount of that record on its own, using the caller's number and the DID (direct inward dialing) they dialed. The Populate Lead settings on the in-group are where you turn that on, field by field.

Filling in the state from the area code

Populate Lead State Areacode is the most popular one. When it is on, the system reads the area code of the caller's phone number, looks up the state it belongs to, and writes that into the lead's state field. So a caller from a 305 number gets tagged as Florida without anyone typing it. By default it only fills a blank field, but an overwrite option will redo the lookup every time the call passes through the group.

Tracking where the call came from

Two settings handle attribution. Populate Lead Source fills the lead's source field, and you can set it to use the inbound number that was dialed or the DID the call routed through last. Populate Lead Vendor does the same for the vendor code field, again with the option to use the inbound number or the DID. These are how you tell later which marketing number or campaign drove a given lead, straight from the Ingroup settings rather than by hand.

There are also Populate Lead Province and Populate Lead Owner settings that look up the original DID and copy one of its fields into the province or owner field on the lead, again with optional overwrite behavior. These are handy when a single dialer serves several regions or several clients.

Saving the caller's name

Populate Lead Comments is enabled by default and uses the caller ID name supplied by the carrier on the incoming call. So if the network delivered a name with the call, it lands in the comments field automatically. The Agent sees a hint of who is calling before the conversation even starts, and you keep that name on the record afterward.

One more in the same family: Populate Lead In-Group, on by default, writes the group's own ID into the show field of the new Lead, so you can always see which queue created it.

Overwrite or fill-once

The thing to watch across all of these is the overwrite behavior. Most default to filling a field only when it is empty. The options whose names include OVERWRITE or OW will redo the work every time the call enters the group, which means they can stomp on a value an agent edited by hand. If your agents correct these fields during calls, leave the plain fill-once behavior on.

These settings pair well with the webhook that announces a new lead. To push the freshly populated record into another system, read the Add Lead URL guide, and for the full inbound flow see the inbound call handling guide.

Want a dialer where inbound leads arrive already tagged with state, source, and name? See our plans.