Hybrid dial mode: browser softphone for the office, mobile for field agents

Most contact-centre software forces one call path on every agent: either everyone talks through a browser softphone, or everyone talks through a physical phone. That is fine when the whole team sits at the same desk, but it breaks the moment you have field officers, home-lending sales rms, or insurance surveyors who spend half their week outside the office. Dialque now lets you run both lanes in one tenant — WebRTC softphone for office agents, mobile phone bridge for field agents — and switch each agent by simply setting or unsetting their Phone Number. This guide covers the admin steps, campaign rules, routing, reporting, and a real 25-agent BFSI collections deployment.

The mechanic in one paragraph

Every dialque tenant has a global default under System Settings called agent audio path. Set it to Browser (WebRTC) and the platform expects every agent to answer inside their Dialer tab through the browser. Set it to Phone and the platform will, at call time, place an outbound leg on the trunk to each agent's mobile number (pulled from the Agent profile's Phone Number field), and only after the agent picks up on their phone does it bridge in the customer leg. The trick that makes hybrid work: an agent with no Phone Number configured on their profile silently stays on the browser softphone even when the tenant is in Phone mode. That single-field override is the hinge of the whole hybrid pattern.

This applies uniformly to manual dial, Click-to-Call, inbound, and IVR transfers. Predictive and progressive autodial are the one exception — they always force the browser softphone regardless of tenant setting, because a mobile-bridge leg adds 2–4 seconds of setup latency that destroys autodial pacing.

Why hybrid, not one or the other

The blanket "browser for everyone" recommendation you see in most cloud dialer marketing assumes an office where every seat has wired ethernet and a USB headset. That is not the shape of a lot of Indian BFSI, insurance, and D2C teams. A field recovery officer on a bike in Vijayawada, a home-loan verification agent walking through a Kolkata suburb, or a solar-panel surveyor on a rooftop in Jodhpur cannot open Chrome and press dial. They need the call to land on their handset the same way a personal call would.

At the same time, an office collections agent doing 180 dials a shift on predictive autodial gets terrible economics on mobile-mode:

| Factor | Browser softphone (WebRTC) | Mobile-mode bridge | |---|---|---| | Per-call setup latency | ~200-400 ms | ~2-4 seconds | | Trunk minutes billed (platform trunk) | 1x customer leg | 2x (agent leg + customer leg) | | Autodial-safe | Yes | No — pacing breaks | | DTMF reliability | Native RTP | Depends on carrier in-band DTMF | | Recording quality | Codec-clean, single stream | Recompressed through PSTN codec | | Warm-transfer / conference | Full support in tab | Limited, needs re-bridge | | Works with 2 GB RAM office PC? | Marginal — Chrome+codec heavy | Yes — browser only shows UI | | Works with no office internet? | No | Yes if 4G/5G on handset |

Picking one lane forces you to pay one of two prices: either you break your field team's productivity by chaining them to a desk, or you double your trunk minutes on your office team and lose predictive dialing. Hybrid closes that gap.

Step-by-step setup: 25-agent tenant with 15 office + 10 field agents

Follow these steps once, in this order.

1. Log in as tenant admin and open System Settings → Telephony → Agent audio path.
2. Change the default to Phone. Save. This flips the tenant baseline — every agent with a Phone Number configured will now receive calls on their mobile.
3. Go to Agents → All agents. You will see 25 rows. Sort or filter by team.
4. For each of the 15 office agents, open the profile and clear the Phone Number field. Save. These agents are now silently exempted from mobile-mode — they will keep answering in their browser Dialer tab.
5. For each of the 10 field agents, open the profile and confirm the Phone Number is populated and DND-clean. Use E.164 format (+91XXXXXXXXXX). If the number is on the NDNC registry as a subscriber, it can still receive calls from your DLT-registered platform sender ID, but confirm your DLT template is scoped correctly.
6. Buy or confirm USB headsets for the office 15. WebRTC audio quality lives or dies on the mic. A ₹1,200 Jabra Evolve 20 beats a ₹300 no-brand headset by a wide margin on echo cancellation.
7. Confirm office bandwidth headroom. WebRTC needs ~80 kbps up/down per active call using Opus at 20 kHz. A 15-agent floor needs ~1.2 Mbps sustained, plus overhead — a 20 Mbps FTTH line is comfortable, a 4 Mbps shared line is not.
8. Run a test call from one office agent and one field agent. From the Live Calls view, verify both calls appear with the correct route flag: `webrtc` for office, `phone` for field.
9. Check the recording of each — both should land in the same recording bucket with the same retention window (3, 6, or 9 months depending on your tier).
10. Roll out.

The whole configuration takes about 20 minutes for a 25-agent tenant. No firmware, no separate app install, no MDM push.

Campaign-level considerations

Not every campaign should run in the tenant's default mode. dialque respects a few overrides:

• Predictive campaigns ignore Phone mode entirely and force WebRTC for every agent, including your field team. If a field officer is assigned to a predictive collections campaign, the platform will refuse to dispatch calls to their handset. Solution: assign field agents only to preview or progressive-preview campaigns.
• Progressive dialing (1:1 ratio) honours the tenant setting. A field agent gets each call on their mobile, previews the record for 3–5 seconds via the web app, then accepts.
• Manual dial and click-to-call always honour tenant setting.
• Inbound queue routing honours tenant setting per agent — see next section.

The clean pattern for a BFSI collections operation:

• Bucket 0-30 DPD (soft reminder, predictive) → office agents only, WebRTC-forced.
• Bucket 31-90 DPD (progressive) → mixed office + field.
• Bucket 90+ DPD (field visit + call) → field agents only, mobile-mode.
• Bucket 180+ DPD (legal notice + AI voice agent triage) → route through `/virtual-recovery-agent` first, human field officer as fallback.

Inbound routing rules

Inbound queues in dialque support a route-by-agent-state rule. Configure it so that:

• When a field agent's status is Available and their last known location beacon (from the mobile web app) is not the office, their skill priority for that queue is bumped to 1.
• When a field agent's status is Available but they are at the office (mapped to the office SSID or IP), the router prefers office agents on WebRTC first, then falls back to the field agent.

This keeps inbound calls from cannibalising outbound field productivity — a field officer knocking on a customer's door does not want a random inbound call breaking through.

Reporting: both lanes land in the same tables

The most common concern from ops leads is "will I be able to compare productivity across the two modes?" Yes. Regardless of audio path, every call writes to the same tables:

• Call detail record (CDR): identical schema. The `audio_path` column is `webrtc` or `phone`. Everything else — disposition, duration, wait, wrap, campaign, agent, list — is common.
• Recording: same S3-compatible bucket, same retention (3 months on Starter ₹1,500, 6 months on Growth ₹2,000, 9 months on Enterprise ₹2,500). Playback URL is the same. Quality metadata (codec, sample rate, packet loss) is captured for WebRTC calls; for phone-mode calls, only carrier codec + agent-leg quality is captured.
• Disposition + notes: identical UI, identical validation rules.
• Live dashboards: the wallboard shows agents in one grid regardless of lane.

Two report additions you should build for a hybrid deployment:

• Trunk minutes by lane per day. Because phone-mode counts at 2x on platform-provided trunks, this is your cost-visibility view. Group by `audio_path` and sum billed minutes.
• Agent-leg drop rate on phone-mode. Filter for phone-mode calls where the agent leg failed before the customer bridge completed. High drops usually mean bad mobile signal for that agent or a stale Phone Number — worth a monthly clean-up.

BFSI deployment story: 25-agent recovery operation, Hyderabad

A regional NBFC in Hyderabad running secured MSME loans switched from a single-mode dialer to dialque hybrid in Q1 2026. Their team:

• 15 office agents in their Madhapur floor doing 0-90 DPD collections on predictive + progressive campaigns.
• 10 field recovery officers covering districts across Telangana and coastal Andhra doing 90+ DPD field visits, most days on the road.

Before hybrid, all 10 field officers were forced onto WebRTC. In practice, they used their personal WhatsApp calling because opening the dialer on a 4G tether while on a bike was unreliable. Result: no call recording, no disposition capture, and a monthly compliance headache with the RBI Fair Practices Code because the FPC requires you to prove tone and content on recovery calls.

After hybrid rollout:

• Recording capture on field calls jumped from 0% to 94% (the 6% is signal-drop retries).
• Trunk cost went up 22% on the field agent leg, absorbed by the recovery yield improvement.
• Field agent daily dial rate rose from 34 to 61 calls per day because they were no longer fighting the browser stack on 4G.
• Predictive campaign performance on the office 15 was unchanged — they were already on WebRTC.

Total configuration effort: one afternoon.

Cost math: what the 2x actually costs

On a platform-provided trunk at typical Tier-1 Indian rates (₹0.55/min for domestic mobile termination), a 4-minute phone-mode call costs:

• Customer leg: 4 min x ₹0.55 = ₹2.20
• Agent leg: 4 min x ₹0.55 = ₹2.20
• Total: ₹4.40

The same call on WebRTC would cost ₹2.20 (customer leg only). The delta is ₹2.20 per call. A field agent doing 60 phone-mode calls per day adds ₹132/day, or roughly ₹3,300/month, over what WebRTC would have cost. For most secured-loan collections, that is dwarfed by even a single successful recovery.

If you bring your own carrier (BYOC), the agent leg is billable on your own trunk instead — often 30-40% cheaper than the platform-provided rate. See our detailed breakdown at [/blog/cloud-dialer-vs-self-hosted-dialer](/blog/cloud-dialer-vs-self-hosted-dialer).

FAQ

What happens when a field agent walks into a Wi-Fi area — does the dialer switch automatically? No. The audio path is decided at the tenant and profile level, not by network signal. A field agent whose profile has a Phone Number will always be dialed on their mobile, whether they are on 4G, 5G, or connected to the office Wi-Fi. If you want them on WebRTC while at the office, an admin must clear their Phone Number on the profile. The design is deliberate — silent network-based switching would confuse both agents and CDR reconciliation.

Can predictive-dialing teams also have some mobile-mode agents? Yes, but the predictive campaign itself will force WebRTC for calls it dispatches, even for agents whose profile is set up for mobile-mode. The agent will get calls in their browser Dialer tab while assigned to that predictive campaign. If they log out or switch to a preview/manual campaign, they return to mobile-mode. This is why we recommend keeping field agents off predictive campaigns entirely.

What's the actual audio-quality difference between the two lanes? On WebRTC with a decent USB headset and healthy office bandwidth, MOS scores typically land at 4.2-4.4. On phone-mode over a Tier-1 Indian mobile carrier, MOS lands at 3.6-3.9 due to G.711/AMR-NB codec compression across the PSTN. In practical terms, WebRTC sounds noticeably cleaner and DTMF works reliably; phone-mode sounds like a normal mobile call, which is exactly what customers expect on the other end.

Do agents on mobile-mode still see live campaign UI, dispositions, and notes? Yes. Only the audio moves to their phone. Everything else — status toggle, live list, script, disposition dropdown, notes, wrap-up timer, screen pop — stays in the web app on their laptop or tablet. Most field agents use it on a phone browser via the mobile-responsive Agent view.

Is Hindi and regional language handling the same in both modes? Yes for the human agent lane. For any AI voice agent handoffs on the same tenant, our Hindi + regional TTS/STT pipeline is codec-aware — see [/ai-voice-agents](/ai-voice-agents) for the language matrix.

What about DPDP Act 2023 consent capture? Consent capture is at the disposition + recording layer, not the audio path. Both lanes write the same consent flag and the same recording, so DPDP handling is identical.

Ready to run both lanes in one tenant? [Book a hybrid-mode walkthrough](/contact?source=demo&topic=hybrid-dial-mode-setup-office-plus-field-agents) and we will map your office vs field split before you touch a setting.