Next Agent Call: how VICIdial picks which agent answers

Picture two agents sitting idle and a live call landing on the queue. Which one rings? That choice is not random luck unless you tell it to be. A single campaign setting called Next Agent Call decides the order, and the option you pick changes whether calls get spread evenly, go to whoever has been waiting longest, or pile onto your strongest closers. Here is what each setting actually does.

The fairness options

Most teams want calls shared evenly so no one burns out and no one coasts. Two settings handle that. oldest_call_start orders agents by the last time each one was sent a call, so over a shift everyone ends up with about the same call count. oldest_call_finish orders by who finished their last call longest ago, which is the classic "agent waiting longest gets the next call" rule and feels the most fair to agents themselves.

fewest_calls is similar but counts the number of calls each agent has taken for that specific Ingroup and sends the next one to whoever has the fewest. If you only care about who has been sitting in the Ready state the longest, longest_wait_time orders purely by waiting time.

The performance options

Sometimes fairness is not the goal — you want your best people on the most calls. campaign_rank orders agents by the rank you assign them for that campaign, highest first, so a top-ranked closer gets first dibs every time. campaign_grade_random is gentler: it uses the agent's grade as a probability weight, so higher-graded agents get more calls but lower-graded ones still see some, which keeps newer agents learning. overall_user_level routes more calls to agents with a higher user level set on their account.

There is also a plain random option, which just shuffles. It rarely beats the others, but it is handy when you genuinely want no pattern at all.

The wait-time tiebreakers

Several options come in a "_wait_time" version: overall_user_level_wait_time, campaign_rank_wait_time, and fewest_calls_wait_time. These behave exactly like their base setting but break ties using who has waited longest. So with campaign_rank_wait_time, two equally ranked agents get sorted by waiting time. These are the quiet workhorses — you get your primary rule plus a sensible secondary order, instead of an arbitrary tiebreak.

Which one should you use?

Start with oldest_call_finish or fewest_calls_wait_time for a balanced inbound team — both feel fair and keep agents fresh. Move to campaign_grade_random when you want results-weighted routing without starving your trainees. Save the hard campaign_rank for situations where one or two closers genuinely should take everything. Remember this is per campaign, so a Blended dialing floor can run different rules side by side. If routing is part of a bigger plan to keep agents busy and connected, the VICIdial dialing strategies guide ties it together, and if abandoned calls are creeping up the way you handle lowering your drop rate matters more than routing does.

If you would rather not manage any of this on your own server, our managed hosting sets sane defaults out of the box — see our plans to get a dialer running in under a minute.