What the user-group webphone overrides change

A User group in VICIdial is a bucket of agents that shares settings and reporting boundaries. Most of the time every agent on the system rings through the same Webphone — the browser-based Softphone that registers their extension and handles audio inside the agent screen, with no desk phone to plug in. But sometimes one team needs a different phone than everyone else, and that is exactly what the three user-group webphone overrides are for. They live on the user-group modify screen and only affect agents who belong to that one group.

The reason these settings exist at the group level rather than the individual user level is practical: editing one field per agent across a thirty-person team is slow and error-prone, and the group is already the unit VICIdial uses to scope nearly everything else. Setting a webphone behavior once on the group and letting every member inherit it is the pattern the whole product leans on.

Note: these three settings only appear on the user-group screen if a webphone has already been configured under Admin then System Settings. If you do not see them, set up the system-wide webphone first and they will show up. An empty override always means the group falls through to the system-wide default, so there is no harm in leaving any of them blank.

The three overrides

• Webphone URL Override — point this group at a different webphone address than the system default. Empty means they fall through to the system-wide URL.
• Webphone System Key Override — set an alternate system key for just this group's webphone. Pair this with the URL override when a team's phone authenticates against a separate key.
• Webphone Dialpad Override — turn the on-screen dialpad on or off for this group. DISABLED hides it. TOGGLE lets the agent show and hide it with a link, which is handy when you need DTMF entry only some of the time.

How VICIdial decides which webphone an agent gets

flowchart TD
  A[Agent logs in] --> B[Read agent user group]
  B --> C{Webphone URL Override set}
  C -->|Yes| D[Use group webphone URL]
  C -->|No| E[Use system webphone URL]
  D --> F{Dialpad Override}
  E --> F
  F -->|Disabled| G[No dialpad]
  F -->|Toggle| H[Agent shows or hides dialpad]
  F -->|Default| I[System dialpad behavior]

The decision is per-agent, driven entirely by the group the agent belongs to. An agent who moves between groups picks up the new group's webphone behavior the next time they log in. Nothing is wired to the individual user record, so you never have to edit agents one at a time. The URL override is read first to decide which webphone address loads, and then the dialpad override is applied on top of whichever webphone the agent ended up with.

When you actually need these

The common cases are a branded webphone for one client's agents, a separate webphone server for a remote team that registers against its own key, or hiding the dialpad from a campaign where you never want manual digit entry. The dialpad TOGGLE value is the underrated one: it keeps the dialpad out of the way during normal predictive dialing but lets an agent pull it up with a click when they genuinely need to punch DTMF digits into an IVR or a phone tree. DISABLED removes it entirely, which is the right move on a pure inbound queue where agents should never be entering digits at all.

These overrides also pair naturally with the other agent-screen controls; if you want to go further, see the alter-agent-interface options for what else a group can reshape on the agent screen. For the full picture of how groups slot into a multi-team setup, read our guide to VICIdial users and groups.

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