What VICIdial Quality Control is and when to use it

Quality Control, or QC, is the part of VICIdial that lets an admin review calls after they happen. A reviewer pulls up a finished call, listens to the recording, checks that the agent followed the script, and confirms the customer details were captured correctly. It is how a call center turns a pile of dialed calls into a measured, scored, and verified record of agent work. This post is the hub for the whole QC subsystem. It walks through every moving part once, plainly, and links out to the focused guides for each piece.

If you have never touched QC before, the thing to understand first is that it is a multi-step pipeline. You do not flip one switch and start scoring calls. You enable the feature, build a couple of small settings objects, attach them to the campaigns or queues you want audited, and then your reviewers claim calls and grade them. Each of those stages is simple on its own. The work is mostly in knowing the order and where each setting lives.

What QC is actually for

On a busy Campaign, agents handle hundreds of calls a day and disposition each one with a Status (lead status) that describes the outcome. A sale, a callback, a no-answer, a wrong number. Those dispositions drive your reports, but nobody has confirmed that a call marked as a sale was actually a clean sale. QC closes that gap. It lets a second person review the recording and the lead record after the fact, against a fixed checklist, and assign a pass or fail.

That matters for two reasons. First, compliance: in a lot of industries you have to prove that the agent read a disclosure, confirmed consent, or verified the customer's identity. QC gives you a recorded, scored audit trail. Second, coaching: when you score the same checkpoints across every reviewed call, you can see which agents miss the same step over and over, and fix it. QC is review plus verification, built into the dialer instead of bolted on with a spreadsheet.

Step 1: the master enable switch

Nothing in QC works until you turn it on. The switch is a single System Setting called "QC Features enabled," found under Admin then System Settings. Until that is active, none of the QC menus, links, or per-entity settings appear anywhere in the admin. This trips up a lot of people, so it is the first thing to check if QC seems to be missing.

Two related settings sit on the same page and shape how the review queue behaves. The first is "QC Claim Limit." When a reviewer takes a call to score, that call is claimed and held in their personal queue until they finish it. The claim limit caps how many unfinished calls one reviewer can hold at once. It stops a single person from grabbing the whole queue and sitting on it, and it nudges reviewers to actually finish what they claim before taking more. The full breakdown is in the guide on the QC Claim Limit setting.

The second is "QC Expire Days." A call that qualifies for review does not stay claimable forever. Expire Days sets how many days an unclaimed call remains available in the queue before it drops off. Important detail: this clock only applies while a call is unclaimed. Once a reviewer claims a call, it does not expire while they hold it. The guide on the QC Expire Days setting covers the edge cases. If you just want the fastest path from off to working, the how to turn on QC Features enabled walk-through is the place to start.

Step 2: a QC status template decides which calls qualify

Not every call should land in the review queue. You do not want to review every no-answer. A QC status template is how you pick which call outcomes are worth reviewing. It is a small settings object that holds nothing but a comma-separated list of dispositions. A call whose final disposition matches one of those listed statuses becomes eligible for QC; everything else is ignored.

Under the hood a QC status template is a Settings container of the type QC_TEMPLATE. You create it, list your dispositions inside it, activate it, and from then on it is available to attach anywhere a status template can be set. A common setup is to list only the outcomes that close or commit a lead, like sales and verified callbacks, so reviewers spend their time on the calls that matter. The full picture is in the QC status template explained guide, and the build steps are in how to create the QC template settings container.

Step 3: a scorecard is the checklist reviewers grade against

The status template decides which calls show up. The scorecard decides how they get graded. A scorecard is a list of checkpoints, and each checkpoint is one thing the reviewer checks, with a point value attached. "Agent read the recorded disclosure." "Customer confirmed their address." "Agent stated the price clearly." The reviewer scores each checkpoint as they listen, and the points add up to a result for the call.

You create scorecards on the QC Scorecards page under the Quality Control menu. The "ADD NEW SCORECARD" button opens a short form: an ID, a name, and an active checkbox. A scorecard must have at least one checkpoint and be active before it can be selected when you attach QC settings to a campaign or queue. After it exists you can activate or deactivate it just by toggling the Active checkbox, with no form to submit, and the how to add a QC scorecard guide walks the form field by field.

The checkpoint fields

Clicking MODIFY on a scorecard reveals its checkpoints and a form to add more. Building good checkpoints is most of the craft in QC, so it gets its own build a QC scorecard from checkpoints guide. Each checkpoint has these fields:

• Order: where the checkpoint appears in the list on the review screen.
• Active: whether the checkpoint shows up. Deactivate it and it disappears from the scoring page; reactivating it does not retroactively add it to calls already claimed.
• Checkpoint text: the wording the reviewer reads.
• Points: the maximum a checkpoint is worth. The reviewer enters any whole number from zero up to that max.
• Instant kill: if set, failing this one checkpoint fails the entire record no matter how the others scored.
• Admin notes: private guidance for admins that the reviewer never sees.

Changes to checkpoints save automatically, with no submit button. The complete reference is in the QC checkpoint fields explained guide. The instant kill field is powerful and easy to misuse, so it has a dedicated QC instant kill explained write-up. Use it for the non-negotiable items, like a missing legal disclosure, and nothing else.

Step 4: apply QC settings, and mind the priority order

A status template and a scorecard do nothing on their own. You have to attach them to the things you want reviewed. QC settings can be applied to a campaign, a Lead list, and an Ingroup. For a campaign you open its settings in Detail view and click the "QC" link in the upper right. For lists and ingroups the QC settings sit among their other settings. None of these appear until the master feature is enabled. The how to apply QC settings to a campaign and how to apply QC settings to a list or ingroup guides cover each path.

Because the same call can belong to a campaign, a list, and an ingroup all at once, the three sets of QC settings can disagree about which scorecard applies. VICIdial resolves that with a fixed priority: ingroup wins over list, and list wins over campaign. When a reviewer claims a call, the dialer assigns the scorecard from the highest-priority entity that matches, regardless of which menu the reviewer claimed it from. This catches people out constantly, so it has its own QC priority of ingroup, list, campaign guide.

Step 5: claiming and reviewing a call

With everything attached, qualifying calls start collecting in the review queue. Reviewers reach them through three menu links: "QC Calls by Campaign," "QC Calls by List," and "QC Calls by Ingroup." Each link lists the QC-enabled entities you are allowed to see, the statuses that qualify, and a live count of how many calls are waiting. That count is shaped by both the dispositions in the template and the Expire Days setting. The full sequence is in how to claim a QC call.

Clicking a record claims the call, assigns the correct scorecard by the priority rule, and opens the review screen, provided the reviewer is under the claim limit. The review screen has four sections you toggle between. The scorecard section is the default: it shows each active checkpoint, a place to enter the score and comments, and a link to play the Call recording. The recording is matched by linking the uniqueid in the Agent session log to the recording log, and if there is no exact match the closest recording by time is used.

The other three sections are the lead information, where you can view and correct the standard fields on the Lead; the callbacks section, which shows any Scheduled callback for that lead and can re-open it; and a read-only log section that records who viewed the call and what changed. Scores and comments save as you enter them. When you are done, FINISH marks the call complete and returns you to the queue. The red RELEASE button does the opposite: it hands the call back to the queue and wipes the scorecard data you entered, which is what you want if the scorecard was changed since you claimed the call and you need a clean re-claim.

The QC pipeline, end to end

flowchart TD
  A[Enable QC Features in System Settings] --> B[Create status template and scorecard]
  B --> C[Apply both to campaign, list, or ingroup]
  C --> D[Agent dispositions a call with a listed status]
  D --> E[Call appears in the QC queue]
  E --> F[Reviewer claims the call]
  F --> G[Score each checkpoint and play recording]
  G --> H{Done with the call?}
  H -->|FINISH| I[Call marked complete, scored]
  H -->|RELEASE| E

Step 6: the QC Report and QC codes

Once calls are being reviewed, the QC Report is where you read the results. It lists reviewed calls within the date range and filters you choose, with the call date, agent, campaign, call status, the scorecard used, and the QC result. View it as HTML to see each checkpoint broken out as its own row, or download it as CSV to drop into a spreadsheet, where each call becomes one row with the checkpoint scores appended. The QC Report explained guide covers each parameter, including filtering by finish date and showing scores as percentages.

One related piece worth knowing: the QC result on a call is itself a code, and the Modify QC Codes screen is where you define those codes. Each QC code carries a category that tells the system what the result means, one of PASS, FAIL, CANCEL, or COMMIT. That is how a graded call rolls up into a clean outcome you can count. A reviewer's per-checkpoint scores feed the detail; the QC category gives you the headline.

When you should use QC

QC pays off the most on calls with consequences. Sales that have to be verified before they are billed. Calls where consent or a disclosure has to be on record. Any Campaign where a wrong Disposition costs you money or breaks a rule. If your agents are mostly chasing a higher Contact rate on low-stakes outreach, QC may be more overhead than it is worth. The honest answer is that you should review the calls where being wrong is expensive, and let the rest flow.

It also helps to remember that QC works on a per-call basis. A lead might carry a Called status today that is not in any QC template, but if an earlier call to that same lead was dispositioned with a qualifying status while a template was applied, that historical call can still be claimed and reviewed. QC follows the calls, not the lead's current state.

If you want the full sit-down version of this build rather than the tour, the set up VICIdial QC step by step walk-through and the QC scorecard explained guide go deeper on the two stages people get stuck on most.

Getting QC running without the setup tax

None of QC is hard, but it is a lot of small, ordered steps, and a single missed switch leaves you staring at an empty queue wondering why. The enable flag, the templates, the scorecards, the priority rules, the claim limits — getting them all consistent is the kind of work that is easy to start and easy to half-finish. A managed VICIdial box with the System Settings tuned and a sane starting scorecard already in place saves you the trial and error.

VICIfast runs a hardened, fully managed VICIdial server that is live in under 40 seconds, with the admin already set up so QC is one configuration away instead of an afternoon of guessing. See our plans and pricing for what is included.

If you are weighing whether to host VICIdial yourself or have it run for you, compare the time you would spend on setup and upkeep against what a managed plan costs. For most teams, the dialer being someone else's problem is the whole point.