Retry policy
A retry policy is a set of rules that determines whether, when, and how often a system makes another call attempt after a specific unsuccessful or incomplete outcome.
The policy should be outcome-specific. No answer, busy, voicemail, temporary network failure, wrong number, live completion, and opt-out do not mean the same thing. A temporary condition may justify another attempt after a delay. A completed conversation, invalid number, or request to stop should close or suppress further calls instead of entering the same retry loop.
A complete policy defines the maximum number of attempts, delay between attempts, permitted days and hours, time zone, expiration date, and stopping conditions. It should also state whether a new event can reopen contact after the original sequence ends. Without those boundaries, repeated attempts can create duplicate work, reach people at inappropriate times, and make campaign results difficult to interpret.
For an AI phone agent, the call disposition is the input to the retry decision. That makes accurate classification important. If a short live conversation is incorrectly marked as no answer, the system may call again after the person already responded. If voicemail is marked as a live completion, a required follow-up may never happen. Technical failures should be kept separate from contact outcomes so operators can fix infrastructure problems rather than repeatedly call the same list.
Retry policy is part of campaign control, not a substitute for eligibility checks. Every attempt should still respect current consent, suppression, do-not-call, and quiet-hours rules. The system should recheck those conditions at attempt time because a contact's status or the underlying appointment, lead, or account may have changed since the previous call.
Teams should evaluate retries by incremental value. Report how many additional contacts or completed actions came from the second and later attempts, along with opt-outs, complaints, wrong-number reports, and repeated technical failures. If later attempts add little useful contact, the policy may be too aggressive or the delay may be poorly chosen.
In practice on ThunderPhone
ThunderPhone campaigns can retry voicemail outcomes according to their retry policy. When voicemail is detected, the agent's voicemail behavior can be configured to let the agent prompt decide, hang up, or leave a configured message.