inbound
Skills-based routing
Skills-based routing sends each inbound caller to the agent best equipped to help, matching the caller's need against the specific skills each agent has been tagged with.
Skills-based routing means the caller reaches the agent most able to help them, not just the next person free. If a Spanish-speaking caller needs billing help, the call should land with a Spanish-speaking billing agent. That match is what skills-based routing tries to make.
In VICIdial you build this out of pieces you already have. Each Ingroup represents a kind of call, agents are organized with a User group and tagged for the queues they can handle, and the inbound DID route decides which ingroup a number feeds. Put together, those choices steer the right call to the right desk.
Once a pool of agents can take a given call, two more settings sort out who actually gets it. The Agent rank lets you mark your strongest people so they are picked first, and the Next agent call method decides the order among everyone eligible. So routing happens in two stages: first who is allowed to take the call, then who among them gets it.
Good routing pays off in First-call resolution, since callers reach someone who can actually solve their problem the first time. The danger is over-tuning. If you slice your team into too many narrow skill buckets, a small group can sit idle while one bucket overflows. Start with a few broad skills, watch how calls land, and split a group only when the wait times tell you to.
Related terms
Agent rank
Agent rank is a number you give each agent in a queue so VICIdial offers waiting inbound calls to higher-ranked agents before lower-ranked ones.
DID route
The rule that tells VICIdial what to do with a call arriving on a particular inbound phone number — send it to a menu, an agent group, or a recording.
First-call resolution
First-call resolution is the share of customers whose issue is fully solved on the first contact, with no callback or transfer needed.
Ingroup
An inbound group in VICIdial that routes incoming calls to a pool of agents, the inbound counterpart to an outbound campaign.
Next agent call
Next agent call is the VICIdial setting that decides which free agent gets the next waiting inbound call, picking among methods like longest-idle, fewest calls, or ranked order.
User group
A label you attach to agents and managers in VICIdial that bundles them together for permissions, reporting, and which campaigns or recordings they can reach.