What dead time is and why it inflates talk time

If you read agent reports in VICIdial and the talk numbers look higher than they should, dead time is usually the reason. Dead time is the stretch of a call after the customer has hung up but before the agent has finished with the record. The call leg looks closed to the caller, yet the agent is still in a connected state on the system. That gap is small per call, but it adds up across a shift and it lands inside the talk number unless you account for it.

What counts as dead time

VICIdial splits the connected portion of a call into two pieces. DEAD is the time the agent is in a call after the customer has hung up. CUSTOMER is the time the agent is in a live call with a real person on the line. Add those two together and you get the TALK column you see on agent reports. So talk time is not pure conversation time. It is conversation plus the dead tail at the end.

This matters because talk time is really counting how long the customer record sits open on the agent screen, not how long the phone was connected to a person. If you want the clean number, you take talk time and subtract dead time from it. What is left is the CUSTOMER value, the actual live conversation. The same logic shapes how you read Wrap-up time and the Disposition step that follows.

How dead time fits the call cycle

flowchart TD
  A[Call connects] --> B[CUSTOMER live talk]
  B --> C{Customer hangs up?}
  C -->|Still on line| B
  C -->|Yes| D[DEAD time begins]
  D --> E[Agent closes record]
  E --> F[TALK = CUSTOMER + DEAD]

The diagram shows where the dead segment slots in. The customer leaves the line, but the agent is still attached to the record, often because they are reading notes or reaching for the Disposition menu. That window is dead time, and it rolls straight into the talk total.

Where to see it in your reports

Dead time gets its own DEAD column on the agent time reports, sitting right next to TALK and CUSTOMER. That column is the lever you pull when a coach asks why one agent shows a long talk average but a normal contact count. High dead time usually points at slow record handling, not long conversations, and it is a different fix than a slow Pause code habit or a Wrap-up problem. For the full map of which report carries which column, read our guide to VICIdial reports.

If you want to walk through every column on the report where these times live first, see the Agent Time Detail columns explained. Reading dead time on its own is a quick habit that keeps your talk averages honest and stops you from chasing a number that is partly an artifact of how the record closes.

Keep your agent numbers clean

Dead time is one of those small VICIdial details that decides whether a coaching conversation is fair or off-base. Subtract it before you compare agents, and the talk gap between your best and your slowest closer often shrinks to something you can actually act on. A clean dialer makes this easy because the columns are right where you expect them. VICIfast provisions a tuned VICIdial box in under 40 seconds, so you can start reading honest agent time on day one. See pricing to get started.