In-group vs campaign: what's the difference

New VICIdial admins hit this question early: do I set up a campaign or an in-group? The short answer is that they do opposite jobs. A Campaign (a configured group of settings that controls outbound dialing) sends calls out to your leads. An Ingroup (an inbound queue that holds callers waiting for a free agent) takes calls coming in. You usually need both, and they connect through your agents.

What a campaign does

A campaign is the outbound engine. It decides which lead lists to dial, how fast to dial, and which dispositions agents can pick. When an Agent (a person logged in to take or make calls) logs in, they choose a campaign, and the dialer starts pushing connected calls to them. The campaign owns the pacing logic, the caller ID rules, and the script the agent sees. If you are placing calls, a campaign is doing the work.

What an in-group does

An in-group is the inbound queue. A phone number, called a DID (direct inward dialing) (Direct Inward Dialing, the number a carrier points at your system), or a phone menu sends an incoming caller into an in-group, where they wait for a free agent. The in-group owns everything about that wait: the hold music, the welcome message, what happens after hours, how long before a call is treated as dropped, and which agent gets the next call. Inbound and closer calls cannot reach an agent at all unless an in-group exists to route them.

One rule trips people up: an in-group ID has to be unique from every campaign ID, and both must be two to twenty characters with no spaces. You cannot name an in-group the same as a campaign.

How they work together

The link between the two is the agent. An agent logs into a campaign for outbound work, then selects which in-groups they will also take calls from. That is how one agent can both dial out and pick up inbound calls in the same session, a setup often called blended. The campaign decides outbound behavior; the in-group decides inbound behavior; the agent sits in the middle taking whatever comes.

flowchart LR
  A[Lead list] --> B[Campaign]
  B --> C[Agent session]
  D[DID or menu] --> E[Ingroup]
  E --> C
  C --> F[Outbound call]
  C --> G[Inbound call answered]

Which one do you set up first

If your team only makes outbound calls, you may not need an in-group at all. If your team only answers calls, you still need a campaign for agents to log into, but the in-group does the routing. Most real call centers run both. When you are ready to build the inbound side, walk through adding a VICIdial inbound group, then read our full inbound call handling guide for the rest of the queue settings.

The mental model that sticks: campaigns point outward, in-groups point inward, and agents bridge the two. Keep their IDs distinct, allow the in-group in the right campaign, and the rest follows. If you would rather not stand up the server yourself, our managed VICIdial hosting provisions a ready dialer in under a minute.