Drop percentage limit

The drop percentage limit is the ceiling you set on how many calls a VICIdial campaign is allowed to drop. A dropped call is one where someone answers but there is no agent to greet them, which is also called an abandoned call. The limit is expressed as a percentage of answered calls, and it is the main lever for keeping your campaign on the right side of the rules while still dialing fast enough to keep agents busy.

This setting exists because regulators care a lot about dropped calls. Many regions enforce an 3% abandonment limit — commonly around three percent — and crossing it can bring penalties or complaints. The drop percentage limit is how you encode that rule into the dialer, so the system itself helps you stay compliant rather than relying on you to watch the numbers by hand and slam the brakes when things slip. It turns a legal obligation into an automatic guardrail.

How adaptive dialing uses it

When you run Adaptive dialing, the algorithm treats this limit as its target. The various methods react to it differently: ADAPT_HARD_LIMIT refuses to cross it at all, while gentler modes ease toward it and may briefly drift over before correcting. The dialer constantly compares your live Drop rate and Abandonment rate against the limit and slows the pace when it gets close, then speeds back up once there is room. That feedback loop is what makes adaptive dialing work.

Set the limit at or just under whatever rule applies where you dial, never above it, and leave yourself a little headroom for the swings that come with real traffic. Note that in many places, playing a recorded Safe Harbor message when no agent is available can keep a connection from counting as a true abandon, which changes how your effective rate is measured. Whatever your situation, the drop percentage limit is the setting that ties your pacing ambitions to your legal obligations, so treat it as a firm guardrail rather than a target to push against. Most trouble comes from setting it too high and hoping nobody checks.