Troubleshooting: why isn't it calling?
Work down this list — it's ordered by how often each one is the answer.
1. Check the campaign's readiness chip
On the Campaigns page, every non-draft campaign shows Ready to dial or Not ready — see why. Click it. It checks the whole chain in one place: campaign turned on, agent assigned, that agent's voice provider connected and accepting calls, caller ID set, an active buyer, a buyer free to take a transfer right now, leads waiting, and whether it's inside calling hours at this moment.
2. Check the lead itself
- Ineligible — missing consent: the lead arrived without consent evidence. Fix your form or vendor to send it; only leads captured after the fix are callable.
- Ineligible — DNC or litigator hit: the scrub said no. That lead stays uncalled — that's the product working.
- Suppressed: the number opted out at some point. Also working as intended; check your Do-not-call list.
- No campaign: the lead came in without one and your API key has no default campaign, so nothing owns it. The lead drawer says so in amber.
3. Check the clock
Calls only go out 8am–9pm in the lead's local time (earlier close in Florida and Oklahoma, later start in Texas) AND inside your campaign's own calling window. A lead whose time zone can't be determined is never dialed. Retries also wait out their gap — a new campaign is 3 tries, 4 hours apart, and the first call counts as one of the three.
4. Check pacing, caps, and your balance
- By default a campaign dials one call at a time — that's not a stall, it's the default. See Campaign settings.
- If every number in your rotation pool has hit its calls-per-day cap, dialing pauses until midnight Eastern.
- If your buyers are at capacity or outside their accepting hours, nothing is dialed — deliberately, so you never generate a transfer nobody can take.
- If your prepaid platform-fee balance has run out, calling pauses until you add funds and the Dashboard says so. Auto-recharge under Settings → Plan & billing avoids it.
- If the account is suspended over billing, dialing and new leads both stop and a red banner explains it. See Billing.
5. Calls happen but no stats come back
That's almost always the voice provider's webhook. On Retell, the webhook address from Settings → Integrations & API has to be in the agent's own webhook settings. On ElevenLabs, the post-call webhook has to exist in their dashboard and its shared secret has to be saved on our card — without the secret we ignore everything they send. The Integrations page shows both addresses any time.
6. Calls go out but nobody answers
If the dialer is placing calls and they all end in a few seconds or log as missed on the lead's side, that's usually phone screening and caller-ID reputation, not your setup — see Why phones don't ring for the fix checklist, and check each number's health chip on the Phone numbers page.
7. A lead rang the number back and got nothing
Numbers get an inbound AI agent when you buy or rotate them, and Import from Twilio wires up any that are missing one. If you bought numbers before you had an agent, run that import once.
Still stuck?
Use the contact form on lead2inbound.com — include the campaign name and a lead's phone number and we can trace exactly what the dialer decided and why.