What an inbound in-group is in VICIdial

If you just set up VICIdial and you want a phone number to actually ring someone on your team, the piece you are looking for is the in-group. It is the small but important bridge between a call arriving at your server and a live person picking it up. Without one, an inbound call has nowhere to land.

The bucket calls wait in

Think of an Ingroup as a labeled bucket. Calls drop into the bucket, agents reach into it, and VICIdial decides who gets the next one. Each bucket has its own name, its own rules, and its own queue behavior. You might have one bucket for sales, one for support, and one for billing, all running on the same server at the same time.

Two kinds of traffic flow into in-groups. The first is real inbound calls coming from a phone number you own, which arrive through a DID (a DID (direct inward dialing) is the actual telephone number people dial). The second is transferred calls handed off by a fronter on another campaign, which is why in-groups are sometimes called closer groups. A Closer takes those warm hand-offs.

What lives inside one

Each in-group carries a short ID, a friendly name, a ranking priority that decides which bucket gets served first when several have calls waiting, an active flag, and a display color. The color is handy on the floor because it tells agents at a glance which line a call came in on without reading the fine print.

The in-group also stores the logic for picking who answers. When two agents are free, the Next agent call rule breaks the tie, choosing for example the person who has waited longest or the one with the fewest calls so far. You set this per bucket, so sales can route differently from support.

How agents reach the calls

An agent does not log directly into an in-group. They log into a campaign and check a box for each in-group they are allowed to take calls from. That is why a brand-new in-group can show a red NA in the list: it exists, but no campaign has been told to use it yet. Once a campaign allows it, the agent's Status (lead status) flips to waiting and calls start flowing.

If you are still mapping out how the inbound side fits together, the inbound call handling guide walks through the whole chain, and once you understand the concept the next practical step is adding your first in-group.

The good news is that none of this requires you to babysit a server. On our managed VICIdial hosting, you get a working box in under a minute and spend your time on in-groups and routing instead of installs.