Power Dialer: Run a Session

What it is

A session is one stretch of calling through one list. You start it from a Power Dialer list, and the dialing screen takes over: it rings the next contact, connects you the moment a real person answers, hangs up on answering machines by itself, and lines up the next number. Your job is to talk, take a note, and pick what happened.

You get to it from the left menu: More›Power Dialer, then open a list from the Lists tab and press Start Dialing. The screen that opens is headed Dialing: followed by your list name.

Calls placed this way are recorded. Depending on how your account is set up, the customer may hear a short spoken notice before you are connected — that is normal and it plays before your voice reaches them. Calls only go out between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM in your company's time zone; outside those hours the dialing screen tells you so and waits.

When to use it

• Working a follow-up list where you have twenty, fifty or five hundred numbers to get through.
• Calling back everybody who did not answer yesterday, without picking through the list by hand.
• Ringing round past customers for a seasonal offer or a service reminder.
• Any block of calling where the dialling itself is the slow part, not the conversation.

Use the ordinary phone in Joby instead when you only need to ring one person, or when you are calling somebody back about a specific job. Use Bulk SMS when a text would do the job better than a call.

Before you start

• Power Dialer has to be switched on for your company. It is a paid extra. If Power Dialer is not in the More group of the left menu, nobody in your company has it yet — ask Joby support to turn it on.
• Your role needs Power Dialer access. An owner or admin ticks Power Dialer under Settings›Team Roles (it sits in the Industry Modules group). Without it the menu item is hidden for that person even though the company has the feature.
• At least one number must be approved as caller ID. No numbers are approved to begin with. An owner or admin opens More›Power Dialer›Settings›Allowed Caller IDs, presses Add number, and picks one of the company's numbers. Until that is done the Call from box reads No caller ID enabled and a session cannot start. (The Settings tab only appears for owners and admins, and only they can change the list.)
• The list needs contacts in it. The Start Dialing button is greyed out on an empty list. Fill it first with Add Contacts›Add one manually, Add Contacts›Upload CSV, Add Contacts›Add from Leads or Add Contacts›Add from Clients — the Build a List guide covers all four.
• A headset and a working microphone. The call comes into the phone window inside Joby, so your browser must be allowed to use the microphone. Before the first call goes out, the dialing screen checks two things: that the microphone is not blocked for this site, and that your browser phone is connected. If either check fails you get a message — Microphone access is blocked for this site… or Your browser phone isn't connected yet — wait a moment or reload — and nothing is dialled until it is fixed. If you have never taken a call in Joby on this computer, expect a Microphone Access Needed prompt the first time.
• Calling hours. Dialer calls only go out between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM in your company's time zone (the one set for your organization, not your own computer's clock). Press Start outside that window and the screen shows Outside calling hours with the local time — pause the session and come back later.
• Stay on the dialing screen while you work. The countdown between calls and the jump to the next contact both run on that page. If you do close or reload it mid-call, nothing is lost — reopening the session reconnects you to the call in progress, and the Power Dialer page shows an Active session banner with a Resume button — but the next call only goes out while the page is open.

Step-by-step

1. Start the session

1. Open More›Power Dialer from the left menu.
2. On the Lists tab, click the list you want to call through.
3. Click Start Dialing at the top right of the list.
4. The Start Dialing Session window opens. Fill in four things:
   • Call from — the number your customers will see. Only numbers an admin has approved for Power Dialer appear here; a number reserved for call masking is never offered.
   • No-answer timeout — how long to let it ring before giving up and moving on. Choices are 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60 seconds; it starts at 30 seconds.
   • Wrap-up time — your breathing space between calls. Choices are No wrap-up, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30 or 60 seconds; it starts at 5 seconds.
   • Re-dial contacts that didn't answer last time — a tick box, on by default. With it on, everyone marked No answer, Busy, Failed, Voicemail or Skipped goes back into the queue for this session. Untick it to only ring the contacts nobody has tried yet.
5. Click Start. You get a Session started message and the dialing screen opens, headed Dialing: your list name, with a line underneath reminding you which number you are calling from and the two timings you chose.

2. Make the first call

1. The big card in the middle says Ready to dial. Click Start. The page runs its microphone and browser-phone checks, then the button briefly reads Dialing….
2. A blue RINGING badge appears with the contact's name and number underneath, plus any tags they carry. If the contact has no name saved you will see (no name) and just the number.
3. When a person answers, the badge turns green and reads ON CALL. The call is already connected — start talking. The phone window inside Joby shows the contact's name and the call timer.
4. Type into the Call notes box while you talk. It saves as you type — the label next to it flicks from Unsaved to Saving… to Saved — and the same notes follow the call into the wrap-up screen, so there is only ever one place to write.

Numbers the dialer cannot ring are passed over without a call: a number on your Blocked Numbers list, an invalid number left over on an old list, or one Twilio rejects. You see a short summary — Skipped 1 number: on Do Not Call list (+1…), or Skipped 3 numbers: 2 invalid, 1 rejected by Twilio — and the next contact is dialled straight away.

3. Use the four buttons while you are on the call

4. Fill in the wrap-up between calls

When the call ends, the card switches to Wrap-up with a countdown in big numbers and the line Auto-advancing to next contact…. While that is ticking:

1. Pick a Disposition (optional) from the six buttons: Answered, Voicemail, No Answer, Callback, Not Interested, DNC. Each one is applied the moment you click it — you see Disposition saved, and the countdown keeps running.
2. Add anything else in the Notes (optional) box. It is the same notes box you had during the call, still saving as you type.
3. Save is there for reassurance: it is enabled once you have picked a disposition or typed a note, and pressing it saves anything still pending (you see Notes saved if the disposition was already applied). Nothing is lost if you never press it.
4. Press Next Now if you are ready before the countdown finishes. If you do nothing, the next contact is dialled when it reaches zero.

5. Take a break, or stop

1. Pause at the top right pauses the session and gives you a Session paused message. A Paused badge appears next to the list name, and the card reads Session paused. Nothing further is dialled until you resume.
2. To carry on, press Resume (top right, or on the card) and then Start — or simply press Start, which resumes and dials the next contact in one go. If you have wandered off to another page, the top of the Power Dialer page shows a banner — You have a paused session on … — with a Resume button that brings you straight back here.
3. End Session closes it for good — you get Session ended and land back on the list page.
4. When there is nobody left, the card shows a green tick, No more contacts and Every pending contact in this list has been dialed. Press End Session to finish up.

How to check it worked

• While you dial: the seven counters across the top of the dialing screen — Called, Answered, Voicemail, No Answer, Missed, Busy, Failed — climb on their own as each call finishes.
• The last few calls: the Recent attempts panel underneath lists them newest first with a coloured badge, the time, how many seconds it lasted, the disposition you picked and the first line of your notes. Before your first call it reads No calls yet in this session.
• Your notes stuck: the little label beside the notes box reads Saved. If it reads Not saved — will retry your connection dropped for a moment; it tries again on its own.
• Back on the list: each row's Dial Status badge shows how that contact finished, the status chips above the table count them up, and the column with the repeat arrows counts how many times they have been tried.
• One contact in detail: click the clock-arrow button at the end of a contact's row (View call history). A panel slides in with counts for Attempts, Answered, Voicemail and No Answer, then a Call History list, ten calls a page. Each entry has a note button to read your full notes and a play button to listen to the recording. If nobody has ever rung them it reads No calls placed to this contact yet.
• Your Callback task exists: open Tasks — a task headed Call back <name>, due tomorrow, is assigned to you.
• The whole team's calling: the Call History tab on the Power Dialer page. Filter by Outcome, agent, List, From number and a date range, flip on My calls only, and pull it into a spreadsheet with Export CSV.
• Everywhere else: every dial is also listed on the regular Calls page as an outbound call, and for contacts that came from Add from Leads it shows in the lead's own timeline too.

Common mistakes

• Expecting DNC to only affect this list. Both DNC buttons add the number to Settings›Blocked Numbers, which every list and every future import honours. To reverse it, remove the number there, then remove the contact from the list and add them again — the existing row stays marked Do not call.
• Wandering off the dialing screen. The countdown and the jump to the next contact live on that page. Open the lead or the client record in a second browser tab if you need to look something up mid-session. Reloading the page mid-call is safe — you see Reconnected to the call in progress — but the browser will ask before letting you leave while a call is live.
• Expecting Start Dialing to work on an empty list. The button is greyed out until the list has at least one contact.
• Trying to dial in the evening. Calls only go out between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM in the company's time zone, wherever you happen to be sitting. The screen tells you the local time it is using.
• Odd or foreign-looking numbers get passed over. New contacts have to be US or Canadian numbers to get onto a list at all. A leftover from an older list that is not usable is skipped automatically with a short Skipped 1 number: invalid message naming the number. Fix it on the list rather than in the session.
• Starting a second session to "split the list" with a colleague. Each person can only have one session open, and starting a new one closes whatever you had running. To share the work, split the contacts into two lists first with Move to list.
• Running out of trial minutes. If your company is still on a trial and its call minutes are used up, dialing stops with a message saying so. Nothing is lost — the list carries on where it left off once the account is on a plan.
• Assuming a "Completed" badge means somebody spoke to you. It only means the call finished normally. Look at Answered versus Voicemail versus Missed (no agent), and at the duration, to know whether there was a conversation.