VICIdial for collections — operational playbook

Collections is the highest-volume, highest-regulated VICIdial use case in the US. The hosting + compliance + carrier choices on day one decide whether your floor scales or pulls support tickets weekly.

If you want the full feature pitch + per-trunk TCPA setup, the deep page is /for/debt-collection. This page is the operational shortcut.

Plan sizing

| Floor size | Plan | Notes | | -------------- | ---------------------------------- | ------------------------------ | | 20–50 agents | Growth (4 vCPU, 8 GB) | Most starting BPOs land here | | 50–100 agents | Pro (2 dedicated vCPU, 8 GB) | Dedicated CPU kicks in here | | 100–200 agents | Business (4 dedicated vCPU, 16 GB) | Predictive throughput improves | | 200+ agents | Scale + custom regions | Talk to us — regional splits |

Memory is the bottleneck for predictive dialing. vicidial_live_agents + vicidial_auto_calls carry ~200 MB per concurrent agent on top of base. If you scale agents without scaling RAM, the dialer slows down before it errors.

Carrier choice (US outbound)

Attestation matters more than per-minute price. Direct-route carriers beat aggregators on answer rate over time as their reputation is the one being scored, not yours.

• Bandwidth — direct US carrier, A-attestation on owned DIDs, best wholesale tier above ~500K min/mo.
• Skyetel — wholesale-focused, US-only, competitive at scale, IP-auth only.
• Telnyx — moderate volume sweet spot, IP or credentialed.

For Europe / LATAM outbound, Voxbeam is the path. Mixing US + international on one VICIdial server works; route via separate trunks with the dialplan prefix allocator.

Per-trunk TCPA scrubbing

Different debt portfolios have different compliance contracts. Server-wide TCPA settings are too coarse — set the BLA mode per trunk:

Inherit   — use the server-wide BLA API key (default)
Custom    — this trunk has its own BLA key + failure mode
Disabled  — skip BLA on this trunk

See /features/tcpa-compliance for the AGI implementation. Every check writes to AuditLog with the dialed number + the result + the cache state — your discovery defense is already prepared.

VICIdial settings that matter

| Setting | Value | | ---------------------- | ----------------------------------- | | Local Call Time | 8am-9pm called-party local | | Drop SLA | ≤ 2.0s (FCC 3% drop cap) | | Recording Override | ALLFORCE (litigation defense) | | Internal DNC | Y | | Calls per Day per Lead | 1 (FDCPA harassment ceiling) | | RND check | Enable (reassigned-number database) |

Two-party-consent states (CA, CT, FL, IL, MD, MA, MT, NV, NH, PA, WA) require an announce-beep before recording — VICIdial ships the audio file; set RECORDING_ANNOUNCE = Y in the campaign.

Recording retention

State + federal collection regs typically demand 2–7 year retention. Storage math:

• ~250 KB per minute mono
• 100 agents × 4 recorded-hours/day × 250 days/year ≈ 360 GB/year

Two paths, usually run together:

1. Platform Managed Backups — daily Hetzner snapshot, 7-day rolling. Short-term rollback only; doesn't satisfy a 3-year retention rule.
2. External Backups — push recordings + DB to your own S3-compatible bucket (Backblaze B2, AWS S3, Wasabi). Your bucket, your lifecycle policy, your retention compliance.

See /features/external-backups for setup.

Common mistakes

1. Loading federal DNC with campaign_id='COLLECTIONS' instead of 'all' — only applies to that one campaign. The fix: load with 'all' so it scopes globally.
2. Failing to register settled accounts in the DNC — invites repeat-call complaints + the FDCPA suit that follows. Wire your billing system's settled-account webhook into a VICIdial DNC upsert.
3. Calling reassigned numbers without an RND check — TCPA litigators specifically target this. The Reassigned Numbers Database costs ~$0.0002 per check at FCC's rates; cheaper than one settlement.
4. One BLA key for all outbound — different debt portfolios need different compliance contracts; per-trunk override matters.
5. No recording retention path — daily snapshots aren't a 3-year strategy. Wire External Backups before scaling.

What VICIfast handles

| Concern | Who deals with it | | ------------------- | ------------------------------------ | | OS patches | Platform | | Asterisk security | Platform | | VICIdial CVEs | Platform (within 48h) | | Daily snapshots | Platform | | TCPA AGI hook | Platform (you BYO API key) | | Recording retention | Both (snapshot + your S3) | | Carrier choice | You | | Campaign tuning | You | | Lead acquisition | You | | Settlement handling | You (we mirror DNC updates if wired) |

Start a free trial → — 7 days, no card. Or talk to us first for floor sizes above 100 agents so we can scope region + plan.