Talk Time

Talk time is the duration an agent spends in live conversation with a contact, measured from the moment the call connects to the agent until the call is disconnected. It excludes hold time, wrap time, and idle time between calls. Talk time is a direct measure of productive agent activity — the time spent doing the core work of the call center.

How It Works in VICIdial

VICIdial records talk time for every agent-handled call in the vicidial_agent_log and vicidial_log tables. The timer starts when the ConfBridge or MeetMe conference connects the agent channel with the caller channel, and stops when either party disconnects. If the agent places the caller on hold, that time is tracked separately.

Talk time is reported in VICIdial at multiple levels: individual call records, agent daily summaries, campaign averages, and real-time monitoring displays. The real-time monitoring dashboard shows each agent’s current call duration, helping supervisors identify unusually long or short calls.

VICIdial’s predictive dialing algorithm uses average talk time as a primary input for calculating dial ratios. If the average talk time is 3 minutes and wrap time averages 30 seconds, the system knows agents become available approximately every 3.5 minutes and adjusts the auto dial level accordingly.

Why It Matters

Talk time is the core productivity metric for call center agents. Maximizing the percentage of agent shift time spent in actual conversation (versus idle, paused, or in wrap) is the fundamental goal of predictive dialing and campaign optimization. Top-performing VICIdial campaigns achieve 40-50 minutes of talk time per agent hour with predictive dialing, compared to 15-20 minutes with manual dialing.

However, raw talk time alone does not indicate quality. An agent with high talk time but low conversion rate may be having lengthy unproductive conversations. Talk time must be analyzed alongside conversion metrics and quality control scores to provide a complete performance picture. See the analytics dashboard feature page for talk time reporting.