Broadcast dialing

Broadcast dialing is dialing without agents. VICIdial calls a list of numbers and, when someone answers, plays a recorded message — an appointment reminder, an alert, a notice. No live person is on the line at the moment of pickup. It's sometimes called "voice broadcast."

It overlaps heavily with robo dialing and is closely related to survey dialing. Some broadcast setups add a press 1 step: the recording says "press 1 to speak to someone," and only those who do get routed to an agent. That keeps agents off dead-end calls but still raises the same legal questions as any recorded outbound message.

Why it matters — and why to be careful: broadcasting a recorded message to phones, especially mobiles, is one of the most heavily regulated things you can do with a dialer. You generally need clear prior consent, and you must honor your dnc list. If you do connect people to a recording rather than a person, a safe harbor message is often required so the called party isn't left in silence wondering who called.

In practice you set this up as its own campaign type and keep it well away from your live-agent work, both so the reporting stays clean and so a pacing change on one doesn't accidentally touch the other.

Before you turn it on, talk to someone who knows the rules in the regions you're calling — the technology is the easy part, and the fines for getting consent wrong are not. Many teams that could technically run broadcast campaigns choose not to, or limit them strictly to people who have explicitly opted in, simply because the risk isn't worth the reach.

Where broadcast does shine is for messages people actually want and have agreed to receive: a reminder of tomorrow's appointment, an alert that an order has shipped, a notice that a payment is due. In those cases there's no agent to occupy and no sales pitch involved, just useful information delivered at scale. The line to keep in mind is consent — a customer who asked for reminders is happy to get one, while a cold list of strangers is exactly the kind of campaign that gets dialers in trouble.