Why VICIdial isn't dialing: the first things to check

Your agents are logged in, the screens look normal, and nothing is dialing. It is one of the most common VICIdial head-scratchers, and the good news is that the dialer is not broken. It is almost always one of a handful of settings quietly telling it to stay quiet. Work this list from the top and you will usually find the culprit in a couple of minutes.

1. Is the campaign Active?

Start at the top of the campaign settings. If Active is set to N, agents cannot even log in, but if it got flipped while they were already on, you can end up with idle screens. Confirm Active is Y. This is the simplest miss and the most common.

2. What is the Dial Method?

If the Dial method is set to MANUAL, the dialer will never auto-dial. Agents have to click to dial each number themselves. That is correct behavior for a Manual dialing (click to dial) campaign, but if you expected the system to dial on its own, MANUAL is your answer. Switch it to RATIO for steady auto-dialing, or one of the adaptive methods for Predictive dialing. In MANUAL mode the Auto dial level is locked at zero by design.

3. Is there anything in the hopper?

The Hopper is the small holding area of leads the system is about to dial. It refills roughly every minute. If it is empty, there is nothing to dial. An empty hopper usually traces back to one of three things: your active lists have no leads left in a dialable status, the statuses you want to dial are not selected, or every list is set inactive.

4. Are your Dial Statuses selected?

Dial Statuses tell VICIdial which leads to call: fresh ones, busies, no-answers, and so on. If a fresh list has only NEW leads but NEW is not in your dial statuses, the hopper stays empty and nothing goes out. Open the campaign, check the dial statuses, and make sure the Status (lead status) of the leads you loaded is actually on the list.

5. Are you inside the call time?

VICIdial respects local calling hours by area code. If it is before your call-time window opens or after it closes, the dialer will sit still on purpose. Check your Call times setting and the local time of the leads, not your own clock. A list of all-East-Coast numbers will go quiet hours before your own evening.

Still stuck?

If all five check out and you still have silence, the next layer is dialing math, agents counted as busy, no waiting agents, or a dial level set too low. That is its own topic, covered in agents idle but no calls coming. For the full picture of how every piece feeds the dialer, see the dialing strategies guide.

On a managed box you can skip a whole category of causes, dead dialer services, broken cron jobs, carrier outages on our side, because the platform keeps the dialer healthy for you. See what managed VICIdial covers so this checklist stays short.