Dial timeout
How long VICIdial lets an outbound call ring before giving up and marking it no answer.
Dial timeout is how long VICIdial lets an outbound call ring before it gives up, hangs up and dispositions the lead as NA (no answer). It is the dial_timeout column on the campaign, expressed in seconds.
Where it sits
dial_timeout is a small integer on vicidial_campaigns; the schema default is 60. Manual dialing has its own override, manual_dial_timeout, which falls back to the campaign value when it is left empty.
The timer starts when the carrier signals ringing, not when the dialer starts the attempt. Call setup across a SIP trunk adds a second or two before that point, so wall-clock time from dial to hangup is always a little longer than the number you set.
What you are actually trading
Ring time is dead air that the dialer is paying for in channel capacity and pacing headroom:
- Short (roughly 15–20s) - more attempts per hour, but you cut off answers that were about to land. Slower-to-answer demographics suffer most.
- Long (40s and above) - you catch late answers, at the cost of channels tied up on numbers that were never going to pick up, and more calls that ring straight into voicemail.
Most US mobile carriers send an unanswered call to voicemail somewhere around 25 to 35 seconds. Ringing much past that point mostly buys you voicemail greetings for AMD to classify, not conversations. That is why operators tend to settle in the high twenties to low thirties for consumer outbound, and higher for B2B where a receptionist or a desk phone may take longer to pick up.
Reading the effect
Change it one campaign at a time and watch two numbers together: the share of calls landing on NA, and the share landing on AM. Cutting the timeout moves calls from AM into NA; extending it does the reverse. If your AM count climbs without conversions following, you are paying ring time to reach voicemail.