Survey dialing: press-1 campaigns in VICIdial

Survey dialing, often called a press-1 campaign, is an outbound mode where the dialer plays a recorded question when someone picks up and then routes the call based on which key they press. Press 1 to be connected to an agent, press another digit to opt out, and so on. It is a way to qualify interest with a recording before a live person ever joins the call.

Know the rules before you dial

This is the part people skip and regret. In the US, calling consumers with a pre-recorded prompt is tightly restricted and generally requires prior express written consent from each person you call. In practice, press-1 fits B2B, political, and non-profit calling far more cleanly than consumer outreach. This is practical guidance, not legal advice, so confirm your own obligations under TCPA and check your DNC (do not call) handling before a single call goes out. Building consent and suppression into the workflow from day one is much easier than retrofitting it.

How the survey fields fit together

The Survey sub-section of the campaign holds the pieces. The flow reads like a small script:

• Survey First Audio File plays the moment the person answers.
• Survey DTMF Digits lists which keys you accept as valid responses.
• Survey Opt-in Audio File plays when they press an interested key, then the Survey Method runs.
• Survey Not Interested Digit, Status, and Audio File handle the opt-out path and the call hangs up.

Survey Method is the key decision. AGENT_XFER sends an interested caller to the next free agent. EXTENSION drops them at a dialplan extension, VOICEMAIL routes to a mailbox, CALLMENU sends them to another menu for a follow-up question, and HANGUP just ends the call. Survey No-Response Action decides what happens when someone says nothing: OPTIN only forwards people who press a key, while OPTOUT forwards them even if they stay silent.

The audio file fields are not limited to plain recordings. If you have Cepstral text-to-speech installed, you can use a TTS prefix to generate the prompt on the fly and read information from the lead back to the caller, such as their name or an account detail. You can also use a DYN prefix to pull a lead field, like a province or region, and play a matching recording. For either of those tricks you must run the survey through one of the text-to-speech routing extensions rather than the basic one. Most shops start with simple static recordings and reach for TTS only once the basic flow is proven.

Expect a low response rate

Here is the operational reality nobody warns you about: response rates on a recorded prompt are far lower than when a live person says hello. A lot of people hang up before pressing anything. To keep your agents busy on the back end, you often need to dial many more lines than you would on a normal Predictive dialing run. Plan your list size and your Lead supply with that multiplier in mind, or your agents will sit idle waiting for press-1s that never come.

Because the dialer is fanning out so many calls, watching your Drop rate matters even more than usual. The guide to lowering your VICIdial drop rate applies directly, and the dialing strategies overview explains how survey mode sits next to the other dial methods.

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