Journeys: what happens after a call ends

A journey is a sequence of things that happen to a lead after an agent saves a disposition — a text an hour later, a voicemail the next morning, a callback booked in the dialer. Triggers, steps, conditions, branches and quiet hours, in detail.

A journey is what happens to a lead after a call ends. An agent saves a disposition — Callback, No Answer, Not Interested — and a sequence you designed starts running: a text an hour later, a voicemail drop the next morning, the lead moved to a different list, a callback booked in the dialer. It runs in the lead’s own timezone and stops the moment they reply.

The shape of one

Every journey is two halves. The trigger decides who enters it. The steps decide what happens to them, in order, with waits in between.

Triggers: who enters

A journey starts when a call is dispositioned with one of the codes you pick. You can narrow that further:

Dispositions — one or more codes. The picker shows every status on your dialer, split into the ones agents can select and the system ones VICIdial sets itself, because those are two different kinds of thing and mixing them makes the list unreadable.
Campaigns — leave empty for every campaign, or name the ones this journey applies to. The same disposition often means different things on different campaigns.
In-groups — the same, for inbound.
Direction — outbound, inbound, or both. Starting an outbound follow-up for somebody who rang you is worse than starting it a minute later, so a call whose direction we cannot prove only matches journeys set to Both.

Starting instantly

By default a journey starts within a minute: a sweep reads your dialer’s call log and enrols anyone who matches. It can also start in under a second, if your dialer calls us the moment the disposition is saved.

Rather than have you paste a 900-character URL into the VICIdial admin by hand, use the Set this up for me button on the journey. It reads what is currently in each campaign’s and in-group’s disposition URL field and shows you, per target, whether it is empty, already ours, or something of yours. Anything belonging to your own integration is skipped unless you explicitly tick to replace it — and if you do not, those journeys still start within a minute via the sweep.

Steps: what happens

Wait — the only step that schedules rather than acts. Minutes, hours or days.
Send SMS — a text, rendered from a template with the lead’s own fields.
AI call — an assistant rings the lead. The opening line is required, because without one the agent opens with whatever its prompt happens to say, which is rarely something you would choose to say to a stranger who just picked up.
Voicemail drop — rings, waits for the beep, leaves a recording or spoken message. Optionally does something different if a human answers instead.
Move to list — moves the lead into another list on your dialer, and marks it callable again so it can actually be dialed there.
Add to DNC — writes the number to your dialer’s do-not-call list, system-wide or for one campaign.
Create callback — books a callback in the dialer, snapped into the lead’s waking hours, because a callback scheduled for 3am is one an agent sees at 3am and nobody makes.
End — stops the journey cleanly.

Variables in your messages

Message and greeting boxes show the available lead fields beside them as click-to-paste. The values come from a snapshot of the lead taken when the journey started, so a message says what it would have said at the time even if somebody edits the lead an hour later.

Conditions: whether a step runs at all

Any step can be gated. Conditions are checked when the step comes due, against live data from your dialer as well as the snapshot — "only if we have not already called them twice today" means today, not the day they enrolled.

A step held back is skipped with the reason recorded, and the journey carries on to the next one. That is the difference between a rule and a stop: "not this one" is not "abandon this lead".

If your dialer cannot be reached, a condition that depends on live data fails as unknown and the step is held back rather than fired. A rule that exists to hold something back must not fire because a box was briefly unreachable.

Branches: reacting to a reply

A text step can branch on what comes back. STOP always ends the journey and adds the person to your suppression list. Beyond that you can branch on a keyword, or on intent — "is this a booking?" — and send the lead down a different path.

Any reply that does not match a branch stops the journey by default, so a person who engages gets a human rather than the next scheduled text.

Quiet hours and timezones

Steps that reach a person — texts, AI calls, voicemail drops — are held until the lead’s local waking hours. The timezone comes from what your dialer knows about the lead, falling back to the area code. Steps that reach nobody, like a list move or a DNC entry, run whenever they are due; holding those would stall the journey for no benefit.

Quiet hours are re-checked when a step actually comes due, not when it was scheduled. A step scheduled at 8pm for "tomorrow" is checked again when tomorrow arrives.

Re-entry: what if they come back

Once ever — the lead can enter this journey one time and never again.
Ignore while active — a second disposition while they are mid-journey is ignored.
Restart — the running journey is cancelled and a fresh one starts.

Which number it sends from

Each sending step picks its own number, and you choose it — the system does not decide for you. Tick the numbers this step may use and pick a strategy:

Fixed — always the first. What a one-number account wants, and what keeps a conversation on the thread it started on.
Random — spread statistically. Cheap and stateless, and uneven at the small volumes most journeys actually run at.
Round robin — each in turn. Even by construction.

Only numbers that can actually send are offered, and a number you release later is reported by name rather than as a generic failure.

Recordings for voicemail drops

Three ways to get audio onto a drop, all landing in one shared library:

Upload — an MP3 or WAV under 5 MB. The file is checked by its contents, not its name, so a renamed file is refused now rather than discovered as silence on somebody’s answerphone.
Generate from text — type the words, pick a voice.
From my dialer — the prompts already in your server’s audio store. Picking one copies it into the library, so re-recording the campaign prompt later does not silently change what your journey has been leaving on answerphones.

GSM prompts are listed but cannot be used. Telnyx plays MP3 and WAV, and GSM is what VICIdial stores beside every prompt — so they are shown with the reason rather than hidden, which would just look like the file was missing.

Advanced: enrolling from a web form or CRM

A journey can also be started over the API, for the case where somebody fills in a form and is not yet a lead in your dialer at all.

Turn it on per journey, nominate the list new leads should land in, and POST the phone number to the journey’s enrol endpoint. The lead is created on your dialer with its own DNC check applied, then enrolled exactly as a disposition would have enrolled it — same re-entry policy, same timezone handling, same quiet hours.

It is off unless a journey says otherwise. A journey is a sequence of calls and texts that happen to a real person over days; opening a public door to one should be a decision somebody made, not a property every journey has.

Reading the results

Each journey has an analytics page that answers four questions in the order people actually ask them:

Is it working? — enrolled, how far they got, how it ended.
What is broken? — per step: skipped and failed, with the reasons.
Is it worth it? — what it cost against what it produced.
What happened to one person? — the lead log, searchable by number or lead id.

A journey is a sequence of things that happen to a real person over days. Everything below exists so that it stops when it should.

Safety rails worth knowing

Somebody who texts STOP is dropped from every journey they are in, and no later step will text or call them.
A lead on your dialer’s DNC list is not contacted by a journey step either.
A journey accidentally wired into a loop is stopped rather than left running.
A step that fails stops that one lead, not the journey and not anybody else in it.