RPC (Right Party Contact)
A call that reached the specific person you were trying to reach.
RPC stands for Right Party Contact: a call that reached the specific person you were trying to reach. Not a machine, not a wrong number, not a housemate, not a receptionist - the named individual on the lead record.
Why it is a separate metric
A dialer produces several numbers that all sound like success and are not the same thing. Answer rate counts anything that picked up, machines included. Contact rate counts calls that reached a live human. RPC is the subset of those humans who were the right human.
The gap between contact rate and RPC rate is entirely a data-quality measurement. Contact rate tells you your numbers are live and your caller ID is getting answered; RPC rate tells you whether those numbers still belong to the people your list says they do. A list that connects well and produces few right-party contacts is an old list, not a bad calling operation.
Measuring it
VICIdial does not compute RPC for you, because only the agent knows whether they got the right person. You get it by building the distinction into your dispositions: a wrong-number code, a not-available code for the right household but the wrong person, and codes that only get used when the agent has the named contact on the line. Then RPC is the share of live contacts dispositioned into that last group.
This is worth doing deliberately. If "not interested" is the only negative code available, wrong numbers land in it, and your list-quality problem shows up as a messaging problem.
Why it drives everything else
Agent time costs the same whether the person on the line can buy or not. Cost per acquisition, conversion rate and revenue per agent-hour all move with RPC rate, and it is usually the cheapest of them to improve because the fixes are list-side rather than people-side: reachable-number checks before loading, appended or skip-traced data on older records, calling at hours the specific person is likely to be there, and a caller ID that is not being flagged.