Contact Rate

The percentage of dialed leads that result in a live conversation with a human.

What it means in practice

Contact rate = (calls connected to a live human) / (total dials). It's the single most important top-of-funnel metric in outbound. Typical B2C consumer contact rates run 8–18%; B2B cold runs 5–12%. Contact rate degrades when CIDs get flagged, AMD misclassifies live answers, or the list goes stale.

VICIPanel UI showing Contact Rate — How Contact Rate surfaces in VICIPanel

In VICIPanel

VICIPanel charts contact rate per campaign, per CID, per list, with drill-down to the leads that did and didn't connect. Alerting fires when contact rate drops more than 20% week-over-week.

Related terms

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Telephony

Caller ID

The phone number shown on the recipient's phone when an outbound call arrives, set at the carrier or dialer layer.

Telephony

Answering Machine Detection

Audio analysis at the start of a connected call that decides whether a human or a voicemail answered.

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