What a list is in VICIdial

A list in VICIdial is a container for phone numbers you want to call. Each phone number you load lives inside a list as a Lead — a single record holding the number plus details like name, state, and time zone. A list, then, is just a labeled bucket of those records, and it is the thing you attach to a Campaign so the dialer knows what to call.

If you are new to the dialer, this is the first concept to get straight. You do not point a campaign at a raw spreadsheet of numbers. You load those numbers into a list, then assign the list to a campaign. Everything else — reset rules, call times, overrides — hangs off that one idea.

How a list holds leads and feeds a campaign

Picture the flow as a chain. Numbers go into the list. The list belongs to a campaign. When the campaign runs, eligible leads are pulled into a staging area and handed to agents one at a time.

flowchart TD
  A[Phone numbers] --> B[Leads in a List]
  B --> C[List assigned to Campaign]
  C --> D[Dialer pulls eligible leads]
  D --> E[Hopper queue]
  E --> F[Agent talks to lead]
  F --> G[Disposition saved on lead]

That staging area is the Hopper. A list can only be dialed on one campaign at a time, so if you move a list to a different campaign, the leads sitting in the hopper for it are cleared out first. That keeps the same person from being called twice from two places. After every call, the result is written back to the lead as a Disposition, which is how the system decides whether that number gets called again.

The list ID and list name rules

Every list needs two things before it will save: a list ID and a list name. The rules around the ID trip people up, so here they are:

• The list ID must be numbers only — no spaces, letters, or punctuation.
• It must be 3 to 8 characters long, greater than 99, and it cannot start with a zero.
• IDs must be unique. You cannot reuse one already in the system.
• The list name is just a short description, 2 to 20 characters long.

What else a list controls

A list is more than a name and a pile of numbers. A few settings live at the list level so you can tune one batch of leads without touching the whole campaign:

• Active — a simple on or off switch for whether the list can be dialed.
• Reset times — times of day, in 24-hour format, when the system resets the list so its leads become callable again.
• Expiration date — a cutoff after which the list will no longer be dialed. The default is far in the future, so it only matters if you set it.
• Local call time — narrows the calling hours for this list inside the campaign's own hours. It can shrink the window but never widen it.

There are also overrides that let a single list use its own settings instead of the campaign's. For example, a list can carry an Agent script override, so agents see a different script when the lead came from that list. That is handy when one campaign mixes business and consumer numbers that need different talk tracks.

Calling through a list more than once

Once the dialer has called through a list, those leads are marked as already handled for that pass. To call them again you reset the list, which flips eligible leads back to a not-called state. You can do this by hand or set automatic reset times. This is different from Lead recycling, which only retries a specific result like a busy signal. And of course any number on your DNC (do not call) list stays off the call queue no matter how many times you reset.

Once the concept clicks, the next step is building one. Walking through it end to end is covered in our guide on how to add a VICIdial list. For the bigger picture of how lists, leads, resets, and loaders fit together, start with the VICIdial lists and leads guide.

Setting all this up means standing up a VICIdial server first. If you would rather skip the install and have a secure dialer ready in under a minute, take a look at our managed VICIdial hosting plans.