VICIfast
Glossary

DNC (Do Not Call)

The numbers your dialer must never call, and the three places VICIdial stores them.

DNC stands for Do Not Call: the set of phone numbers your dialer must skip. In VICIdial the check happens before a lead ever reaches the hopper, so a suppressed number is never staged, never dialed and never shown to an agent.

Three separate lists, two separate tables

This is the part that trips people up. VICIdial keeps system-wide and campaign-scoped suppression in different tables:

  • vicidial_dnc - the internal, system-wide list. One column, phone_number. A number here is blocked on every campaign on the dialer.
  • vicidial_campaign_dnc - the campaign-scoped list, keyed on phone_number plus campaign_id. A number here is blocked on that campaign only and remains callable from others.

Federal and state registry data is a third category. It is not something VICIdial ships or refreshes for you: you subscribe to the registry, get the data, and load it into whichever of the two tables matches how you want it enforced. Load a national registry file into vicidial_dnc and it suppresses everywhere; load a state file into vicidial_campaign_dnc against a state-specific campaign and it suppresses only there.

Turning the check on

use_internal_dnc on the campaign accepts Y, N or AREACODE, and the schema default is N. A campaign will happily dial straight through a fully populated DNC table if this is left off - always confirm it on a new campaign rather than assuming.

Real-time opt-outs

The other way numbers land on the list is agents. A disposition whose status has the dnc flag set in vicidial_statuses writes the number to the DNC table when it is applied. If you have created a custom "do not call" code and numbers are not being suppressed, that flag is the first thing to check - the code will otherwise record perfectly and suppress nothing.

Operational advice

Treat the DNC table as append-only and keep the registry refresh on a schedule rather than doing it by hand. Suppression is cheap; a call to a listed number is not.

See also