Outbound Campaign Not Progressing
Your outbound campaign isn’t making calls or is stuck without progressing through the contact list.
Symptoms
- The campaign is active but no calls are being made
- The call count isn’t increasing after several minutes
- Some numbers are attempted but most are skipped
- The campaign was paused and won’t resume
- The contact count is lower than the number of rows you uploaded
Start here: it’s usually the calling window
Most “stuck” campaigns aren’t stuck — they’re outside their permitted calling window and waiting.
A campaign only dials on its configured calling days, within its calling hours, in its configured timezone. The defaults are Monday–Friday, 09:00–20:00.
Open the campaign and check all three:
| Check | Common mistake |
|---|---|
| Calling days | Launched on a Saturday with the Mon–Fri default |
| Calling hours | Started at 21:00 with a 09:00–20:00 window |
| Timezone | Set to your own timezone instead of your contacts’ |
The timezone is the one that catches people. If you’re in the US targeting UK contacts and you left the timezone on US Eastern, the campaign dials during US hours — which may be the middle of the night where your contacts are, or outside the window entirely.
A campaign waiting for its window shows no progress and no errors, because nothing has gone wrong. It will start dialing when the window opens.
Check the campaign status
Campaigns move through: draft, scheduled, active, paused, resumed, completed, stopped, canceled.
- Draft — created but never started. This is the state a campaign is in right after you create it, including one Studio built for you. Start it from the campaigns dashboard.
- Scheduled — waiting for its start time.
- Paused — resume it from the dashboard.
- Completed — every contact has been attempted.
Check the contact group
Open Contacts and look at the group the campaign targets.
If the contact count is zero, the campaign has nobody to call. If it’s lower than the rows in your CSV, the difference was skipped on import — almost always a blank first name or an unparseable phone number.
CSV format
The contacts CSV needs a header row with these four columns:
firstName,lastName,phone,email
John,Doe,+14155550132,johndoe@gmail.comThere’s a download a sample CSV link on the upload dialog — use it rather than building the header row from memory.
Header names are matched loosely (First Name, first_name, and firstname all work), but all four columns must be present or the upload is rejected outright.
Phone number format
Dialora parses and normalizes numbers, so (212) 555-1234 and +1 212 555 1234 both work. What doesn’t work is a number with no country code — 2125551234 is ambiguous, and rows that can’t be resolved are skipped rather than dialed wrongly.
Standardize on E.164 and the problem disappears:
- US:
+12125551234 - UK:
+447911123456
Also remove duplicates, test numbers, and anything obviously invalid before uploading.
Check the account and the number
If the window, status, and contacts all look right:
- Account balance — a campaign with no credits can’t place calls
- The from-number — confirm it’s active and not suspended (see Phone number suspended or not working)
- The agent — confirm it exists and has a published version
Campaigns cannot be edited
If the campaign was created with the wrong contact group, from-number, schedule, or calling window, you can’t fix it in place — campaigns are immutable after creation. Stop it, delete it, and create a new one with the right settings.
Prevention Tips:
- Set the timezone to your contacts’ location, not yours — this is the single most common cause
- Check the calling days and hours cover when you actually want to dial
- Download the sample CSV instead of writing headers by hand
- Standardize on E.164 numbers (
+and country code) across your whole contact database - Test with 5–10 contacts first before launching to a full list
- Compare the group’s contact count to your CSV row count after every upload
- Check your balance before launching