How call recording works for a Remote Agent

A common question when setting up a Remote agent is whether the call gets recorded the same way it does for a standard desk agent. The short answer: yes. VICIdial records calls to a Remote Agent through the same Call recording infrastructure it uses everywhere else. You just need to confirm two settings are in place.

The two settings you need to check

Recording a Remote Agent requires two things to be true at the same time:

• The Campaign Recording field must be set to ALLFORCE. This tells VICIdial to record every call in that campaign regardless of what the agent or manager does, so there is no way to opt out.
• Recording must be enabled on the User page for the Remote Agent's user account. If the user record has recording turned off, that overrides the campaign setting.

How the recording is captured

flowchart TD
  A[Call arrives at Remote Agent] --> B{Campaign Recording = ALLFORCE?}
  B -->|No| C[Recording depends on other campaign setting]
  B -->|Yes| D{User page recording enabled?}
  D -->|No| E[No recording captured]
  D -->|Yes| F[Recording starts on the server]
  F --> G[Audio saved in configured recording format]

Because the call is bridged through the VICIdial server — the external phone number just acts as the audio endpoint — the recording happens on the server side, not on the remote phone itself. The resulting file is stored in whatever Recording format (WAV/MP3) your system is configured to use. This is identical to how a recording is made for an agent sitting in the office.

If your compliance setup requires Stereo recording — caller on one channel, agent on the other — the same stereo recording configuration applies to Remote Agents automatically. No extra steps needed.

What about on-demand recording?

[[On-demand-recording]] — where the agent or manager manually starts and stops the recording — is normally triggered from the agent screen or via the agent API. Remote Agents that use the VICIdial agent web screen (vdremote.php) can trigger on-demand recording through that interface. Remote Agents that are purely phone-line entries with no screen access cannot trigger it interactively, which is why ALLFORCE is the recommended approach for those setups.

For the full overview of how Remote Agents operate, read VICIdial Remote Agents explained. To understand the differences from a regular agent account, see Remote Agent vs standard agent.

If you want a managed VICIdial host where recording is configured out of the box, see our pricing page.