Is the Outbound Contact List API the same one used for digital channels?
We want to create a contact list that includes email addresses and WhatsApp numbers alongside phone numbers. Can a single contact list drive campaigns across voice, email, and messaging, or do we need separate lists per channel?
Of course it can’t do that. Because nothing in this platform works the way you expect.
I inherited an org where the previous admin created 47 contact lists with no naming convention and no documentation. Half of them have custom fields like region_code_v2_FINAL_FINAL that nobody can explain. The API to create them programmatically is POST /api/v2/outbound/contactlists, but good luck figuring out the exact column definition schema from the docs - it took me 3 days of trial and error.
From a workforce planning perspective, be very deliberate about the custom fields you add to your contact lists.
Every additional field increases the payload size when the predictive dialer fetches the next record. At 5,000 agents, if each contact record contains 30 custom fields, the dialer’s internal queue can lag. Our BPO saw a measurable 2-second increase in preview time when we went from 10 to 25 custom fields per record.
From a strategic standpoint, I need to understand the cost implications.
If we are creating contact lists programmatically via the API, does that count against our API usage tier? Our finance team is already scrutinizing the platform’s total cost of ownership, and hidden API consumption costs could undermine the business case.
The API calls for contact list creation are trivial compared to the dialing throughput.
I A/B tested two identical campaigns: one with a 10-column contact list and one with a 30-column list. The 30-column list had a 4% lower connection rate because the dialer took slightly longer to hydrate each record before placing the call, causing timing misalignment with the predictive algorithm.