What the NANPA Batch Updater Does in VICIdial

The NANPA batch updater is one of those VICIdial pages most operators never open until a compliance review forces them to. It does one specific job: it lets you manually scrub a list for cellphone numbers. NANPA is the body that hands out North American phone-number blocks, and a cellphone scrub checks each number against known mobile ranges so you know which records are mobiles before you dial them.

There is one hard requirement before any of this works: the DNC.COM batch cellphone filter service has to be configured on your system. That paid service is what actually classifies each number. The NANPA page is just the control panel that feeds your leads to it and writes the answer back. If the service is not set up, the page sits there doing nothing.

Why a manual scrub even exists

Most cellphone filtering in a dialer happens at load time. When a Lead loader or import touches a list it can scrub on the way in, applying whatever Cellphone calling rule you have configured. But lists drift. You import data over months, vendors change formats, and a Lead that was a landline last year can be reassigned to a mobile. The NANPA batch updater gives you a way to re-check an entire list after the fact instead of trusting whatever happened at load time.

This matters for the same reason your DNC (do not call) and Internal DNC hygiene matters: calling a cellphone you should not have called is a different risk class than calling a landline. The batch updater is your tool for catching mobiles that slipped through.

The three things on the page

The page breaks into three areas. At the top is a log called Currently running NANPA scrubs. It shows you every scrub in flight with its Start Time, Leads Count, Filter Count, a Status Line, Time to Complete, the Field Updated, and the Field Excluded. That last column matters because a scrub can be told to skip certain leads, which we cover in a separate post.

Below that is the Inactive Lists picker. This is where a lot of people get stuck. The picker only shows you inactive lists, and a Lead list is only eligible to be scrubbed if Active is set to N. You cannot scrub a list that agents are dialing right now. So the normal flow is: set the list Active to N, come to this page, and only then will it appear in the picker.

flowchart TD
  A[List is Active Y] --> B{Set Active to N}
  B --> C[List shows in Inactive Lists picker]
  C --> D[Pick list and Field to Update]
  D --> E[Set Time until Activation]
  E --> F[Scrub runs and writes result]
  F --> G[View Past Scrubs log]

The third area is Time until Activation. Instead of firing the scrub the instant you click, you can tell VICIdial how far in the future to start it. That lets you queue an overnight scrub so it does not compete with daytime dialing for resources. A scrub on a large list is not instant, and pushing it off-hours keeps your live campaigns responsive.

Once a scrub finishes you can open View Past Scrubs at the bottom of the page for a full history. It records the same columns as the live log plus the total leads landing in each category, so you can see exactly how many records came back Cellphone, Landline, or Invalid.

Where this fits with the rest of VICIdial

The NANPA batch updater sits alongside the other admin utilities for working on whole lists at once. For the wider picture of which page does what, read our overview of VICIdial's admin bulk tools. A common companion task is forcing a fresh dial pass after a scrub, which is what a reset of active lists gives you, since a List reset clears called statuses so the cleaned records get worked again.

All of this assumes you have a healthy VICIdial install to run it on. If you would rather not stand up and maintain that yourself, VICIfast provisions a managed dialer in under 40 seconds. See VICIfast pricing for what that looks like.