Dial method

The dial method is a campaign setting in VICIdial that tells the system how to place calls. It is one of the first decisions you make when building a campaign, because it shapes everything from how busy your agents are to how careful you need to be about your drop rate. Every dial method trades agent productivity against control and compliance in a slightly different way, so it pays to understand the spectrum before you pick one.

At the slow, careful end you have manual dialing, where an agent triggers each call by hand, and preview dialing, where the agent sees the lead first and then chooses to dial. These give the most control and the least risk, since the agent decides exactly when each call goes out. That suits high-value or sensitive lists where every conversation matters and a dropped call would be embarrassing or costly.

Faster, automatic methods

At the busy end, ratio dialing places a fixed number of calls per agent, while predictive dialing and adaptive dialing let the system calculate the pace for you. Adaptive methods adjust the auto dial level on the fly based on how the campaign is performing, which keeps idle time low but demands attention to your drop percentage limit. The faster you dial, the more answered calls may land with no agent free, so these methods reward good list data and enough agents to absorb the volume.

There is no single best dial method. A debt-collection team chasing a small, valuable list may prefer preview, while a high-volume lead-generation campaign leans on predictive to keep dozens of agents busy. The good news is that the method is just a dropdown on the campaign, so you can change it as your needs shift through the day or the week. Many teams even run different campaigns with different methods at the same time. Start conservative, watch your numbers — answer rate, drop rate, and how often agents sit idle — and step up the pace only once you trust the data in front of you.