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Per-contact gates, immediately before every dial
Cheapest and most legally significant first. Any gate can stop a dial; each records why.
1
Kill switch — stop the whole campaign.
2
Daily cap reached — sleep until tomorrow’s window.
3
Spend ceiling reached — pause the campaign and notify.
4
Do Not Call, opted out, or unavailable — skip permanently. Reuses the same compliance service as human dialing.
5
Inside the contact’s own local calling window — outside it, requeue for the next window in that contact’s timezone. The federal 8 AM to 9 PM floor cannot be widened; a workspace may narrow it.
6
Already called by this campaign — skip, or retry if the attempt policy allows.
7
A live call already in flight for this contact — skip.
8
Dispatch.
Gate 5 is the one the engine cannot do and the CRM can. Contact timezone is already populated from the area code precisely for this, so one campaign dials a Californian at 9 AM Pacific and a New Yorker at 9 AM Eastern, automatically.
Pacing calculator
Set a campaign up here before you set it up for real. Everything is computed locally; nothing is sent anywhere.
Audience size
Dial rate, per minute
Total lines on the plan
Lines reserved for inbound
In-flight cap you want
Calling window, hours per day
Answer rate, percent
Average answered call, minutes
Average unanswered call, minutes
Cost per minute, dollars
Daily dial cap
Gate simulator
Pick a situation and see which gate stops the dial, and why. Fictional: nothing is called.
Evaluate
Choose a situation and select Evaluate.
Operating procedure
Before the first campaign in a workspace
- Confirm the agent is built, tested in the browser, and its prompt is written for outbound. An inbound greeting on an outbound call is the most common cause of instant hangups.
- Confirm the caller ID. A cold number burns answer rate; use caller-ID intelligence if the workspace has it.
- Set the workspace calling window in Settings. The legal floor cannot be widened; narrow it if the client wants that.
- Confirm you know where the kill switch is and that you can reach it.
- Run one campaign of exactly one contact, to a phone you own, and listen end to end.
Building a campaign
- Pick the agent, then Deploy, then Reach out, then New campaign.
- Build the audience from contacts. Read the compliance preview. Do not proceed while anything in it surprises you.
- Set pacing. Start at 2 dials a minute with an in-flight cap of 3 for a first real campaign, whatever the list size.
- Set the daily cap and the spend ceiling deliberately. The ceiling is what stops a mistake becoming an invoice.
- Set the attempt policy. Two attempts, 24 hours apart, retrying only on no-answer and voicemail, is a sane default.
- Save as a draft, then read the whole thing again.
Starting, and the first ten minutes
- Start inside your own business hours so somebody is watching.
- Watch the first five calls. Check that answers sound right and that warm transfers reach a human.
- Only then raise the rate, one step at a time.
While it runs
- Check answer rate and average duration hourly. A collapsing duration usually means the opening line is wrong.
- Check that transfers are being accepted. An unstaffed transfer is worse than no transfer.
- Pause, do not stop, for anything you intend to resume. Stop is for mistakes.
Stopping
- The kill switch stops every campaign in the workspace immediately. Use it without hesitation; nothing is lost but the calls currently ringing.
- A campaign paused mid-list resumes from the ledger, in order, with attempt counts intact.
Four things that stop a call
In the order they take effect. The first two are off by default, which is the point: nothing dials until someone deliberately turns it on.
| Stop | Where it lives | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voice Agent Studio access | Workspace feature flags | Off | Reach out is a stage of the studio and shares its switch. Without it the stage does not appear, the campaign API refuses every request, and the underlying tables are unreachable from a browser. |
| The same check again, in the dialer | Workspace feature flags | Off | The background dialer re-reads your workspace’s own permission before every batch of calls, so switching a workspace off stops it within a minute even mid-campaign — and a software release for unrelated work can never start a campaign phoning people. |
| Workspace kill switch | Workspace settings | Not set | Turn it on and every campaign in that workspace pauses within a minute. Calls already connected are left to finish. |
| Send everything to one number | Per campaign, or environment | Not set | Every dial goes to the number you nominate instead of to your contacts, one call per minute. The safest way to hear a live campaign end to end. |
Alongside those, each campaign has its own daily limit and an optional spend ceiling. Reaching the daily limit stops calling for the day and resumes tomorrow. Reaching the spend ceiling pauses the campaign rather than cancelling it, so the decision to continue stays with you.
Risks, and what contains each
| Risk | Containment |
|---|---|
| Calling someone at 2 AM their time | Gate 5, per-contact local window, with the federal floor as a hard bound |
| Calling someone who opted out by text last week | Gate 4 reuses the same compliance service as human dialing |
| One click costing thousands | Spend ceiling, daily cap, dial rate, in-flight cap, kill switch |
| A stuck campaign nobody can restart | Our ledger is the state and is resumable by design; the engine’s Start is never used |
| Test calls polluting client reports | Already handled: ingest excludes tagged and browser calls |
| Drifting counters in front of a client | All reporting derives from the ledger and canonical call records |
| Breaking the connector path that dials 28,000 times a month | The connector is untouched; migration is opt-in |
| A flow dialing without gates | The native action runs the same gates as a campaign |
Channel Automation · Help · Last updated 2026-09-07. Questions? Ask your account manager, or open Help Docs inside the app — the same guidance lives there.