How to Retry Numbers that Don’t Pick Up

It’s common that in an Auto Dialer or Predictive Dialer campaign you’ll want to retry calling someone if they didn’t pick up the first time. If you’re looking to call back people that didn’t pick up, then you’ll need to create two dispositions, which luckily is quick and painless!

First things first: we need to create a disposition that sets the number of call retries we want to perform for machine answers. We’ll do this by going to Setup > Campaign > Call Dispositions and then clicking the Add button to add a new disposition. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be on our Disposition editor screen. You’ll want to make sure you set the “Choose Status” field to “Machine Answered”. After doing that, you’ll need to set the retried calls to the desired amount. It should look something like this:

The above picture shows a disposition named “Retry Five Times” which does just what we want: retry any calls that ended up being machine answer a total of five times. Now, with this disposition set up, it will call that number back a total of five times, regardless of what the outcome of those calls are. This means we need to setup another disposition so that if the call is a live answer, we will not try and call this person again (inside the same campaign).

Lets create that second disposition. Go back to Setup > Campaign > Call Dispositions and then click Add once more. Now, we’ll want to select “Human Answered” for the “Choose Status” field. Afterwards, select “Any Confirmation” to make sure any live answered call triggers this disposition. Now simply select “No Retry” under the retries drop-down field. It should look something like this:

The disposition above will effectively stop any call retries once a contact has picked up the phone. Now don’t forget, when you create your campaigns you’ll need to select these dispositions for them to take effect, which will be done in the last step of the campaign wizard:

Now you’ve learned how to setup dispositions to retry calling a certain number that hasn’t picked up yet, and how to deploy those dispositions in campaigns.