What makes someone a VICIdial expert?
A VICIdial expert has run VICIdial in production - on real call center floors, with real carriers - and can tell you what a setting will do before you change it.
VICIdial is free, open-source call center software built on Asterisk. It has hundreds of settings spread across campaigns, in-groups, user groups, carriers and server records, and most problems come from two of them disagreeing. Reading the manual tells you what each setting is called. Running a predictive dialer through a busy Monday tells you which ones matter. That second kind of knowledge is what VICIdial professional services should be selling you.
Who are the VICIdial experts at VICIfast?
The VICIdial experts at VICIfast are the team that runs our managed VICIdial fleet, led by a founder who has worked with VICIdial for 18 years.
Those years went into running call centres, deploying VICIdial for clients and fixing it at the weekend. The experience covers Asterisk and OpenSIPS, carrier routing, cluster scaling, TCPA and DNC compliance, WebRTC, CRM integration and AI call analysis. Today the team runs VICIdial servers for call centers in six regions, and more than 200 servers have been provisioned on VICIfast. You can read more about who we are and how VICIfast started.
What does a VICIdial expert do day to day?
Most days, a VICIdial specialist does operations work: keeping servers patched, carriers connected, floors sized and lead data clean. On VICIfast it breaks down like this.
| Work | What it involves |
|---|---|
| Patching and security | Server updates, the firewall, the SSL certificate and 24/7 monitoring on every plan, with daily backups as an add-on |
| Carriers | Your SIP trunk from your own carrier or VICIfast Voice, caller ID, failover routes and reading why a call failed |
| Sizing | How many agents and live calls one server carries, and when a floor should move to a cluster |
| Compliance | Calling hours in each lead's time zone, DNC lists, TCPA scrubbing and call recording |
| Migrations | Moving off ViciBox or a self-built server without losing leads or recordings |
| Integrations | CRM screen-pop, lead sync, AGI scripts and data exports, built as custom integrations |
On VICIfast the first row is done for you. That leaves expert time for the rows that change how many calls your agents actually talk on.
What should a VICIdial expert be able to answer?
A real VICIdial expert can answer these questions about your floor in plain terms, without needing a week to find out. Use them to vet anyone you are thinking of hiring, including us.
- How many agents and concurrent calls will one server carry for my dialing mode, and at what point do I need a cluster?
- Why do my agents wait between calls when the lists still have leads in them?
- How do I keep the drop rate under 3% on a predictive campaign without starving agents?
- What happens to calls when a carrier starts failing, and how do I route around it?
- How are calling hours enforced in each lead's own time zone?
- Where do recordings go, how fast do they fill the disk, and how are they backed up?
- What breaks at upgrade time if I customise the agent screen or the dial plan?
If every answer is "it depends" with nothing after it, keep looking.
A good sizing answer, for example, starts from the dialing mode. A predictive floor dialing three lines per agent carries about three live calls per agent, so it needs more cores than the agent count alone suggests. Our agent capacity calculator runs the same model we use to size servers, and you can check any expert's answer against it.
VICIdial expert, freelancer or managed host?
A freelance VICIdial professional suits one well-defined job; a managed host suits problems that keep coming back. Most VICIdial trouble is operational - a full disk, a missed patch, an expired certificate - and a one-off fix leaves the cause in place.
On VICIfast you get your own server with secured VICIdial installed in under 40 seconds, a branded HTTPS address and full root access. It is the same VICIdial: the same /vicidial/admin.php and the same agent screen. Pricing is per server, not per agent, from $49 a month - see pricing. If you would rather keep your own hardware, we install and manage VICIdial on it for $29 a month.
What do VICIfast's VICIdial experts not do?
We do not work on site, and we do not support dialers other than VICIdial. Standard plans include 24/7 monitoring of your server, not round-the-clock human support. If you need a 15-minute response on severity-1 issues and a named technical contact, that comes with VICIfast Enterprise.
Where to start
Tell us your agent count, how you dial and what is going wrong on the contact page. A person reads every message - no autoresponder, no ticket number - and answers by the next business day. To see the platform first, start a free trial; the Setup Wizard builds a campaign, user groups and agent logins with browser phones in about five minutes.