How to cap a user's inbound calls per day

Sometimes you want a specific agent to take only so many inbound calls in a day and no more. Maybe they are part-time, maybe they are splitting time with outbound work, or maybe a contract caps their daily volume. VICIdial handles this with the Max Inbound Calls user setting.

What the setting does

Set Max Inbound Calls to any number greater than zero and it becomes the maximum number of inbound calls that agent can handle across every Ingroup in a single day. The count is per agent, not per queue, so it follows them no matter which inbound groups they are working. The default is zero, which means no cap.

Once the agent reaches their limit, they can no longer select inbound groups to take calls from. Their access to inbound work simply closes until the next day, when the count resets automatically. This user setting overrides the campaign-level setting of the same name, so a per-agent value always wins.

Think of it as a per-seat throttle rather than a routing rule. It does not change how a call is distributed, which agent is next, or how the Call queue is ordered. It only stops feeding new inbound work to one person after they hit their number. Everyone else on the queue keeps taking calls as normal, so the cap shapes one agent's day without disrupting the rest of the floor or affecting your Service level.

flowchart TD
  A[Inbound call arrives] --> B{Max Inbound Calls set}
  B -->|zero| C[No cap take call]
  B -->|greater than zero| D{Count below limit}
  D -->|yes| E[Take call increment count]
  D -->|no| F[Cannot select in groups]
  F --> G[Resets next day]

Deciding which calls count

A raw count is sometimes too crude. A 4-second wrong number should probably not eat into a daily cap the same way a 12-minute support call does. That is what the Max Inbound Calls Filtering options are for. Turn filtering on and you get three ways to exclude calls from the count:

• Filter Statuses - calls dispositioned with the statuses you pick are left out of the count. Use this to ignore outcomes like a hang-up before the agent could help.
• Filter In-Groups - calls arriving from the groups you select do not count, which is handy if some queues are low-effort.
• Filter Minimum Seconds - any call with customer Talk time under the number of seconds you set is excluded, so the very short calls never burn a credit.

One thing to keep straight: Max Inbound Calls resets every day on its own. There is a separate, similar feature that limits inbound calls without resetting daily and can only be cleared by a manager. If you want a hard lifetime-style limit instead of a daily one, that is the other feature, not this one. For routine daily caps, Max Inbound Calls is the right tool.

The filtering options matter most on Blended dialing floors, where agents flip between inbound and outbound work. There you usually only want substantive inbound conversations to count against the cap, not the quick misdials. Setting a sensible Filter Minimum Seconds value, say ten or fifteen, keeps the count honest so an agent is not locked out of inbound for the day because of a handful of one-ring Abandoned call events that were never really theirs to handle.

Fitting it into your team setup

Per-user caps are an exception tool. If an entire team needs the same ceiling, set it once at the campaign level and only override the few agents who differ. Planning who gets which limit is part of designing your users and groups structure, where team-wide policy and per-seat exceptions live side by side.

Capping inbound volume often goes hand in hand with deciding what else an agent may do. If you are also giving this agent the ability to dial out by hand, read our note on the Agent Call Manual option so the inbound and outbound limits make sense together. The user permission matrix collects every per-user control in one reference if you want the whole list.

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