I ran into many issues when trying to get more information in the Verto client and take advantage of it's impressive features. My use case for retrieving custom variables was to get the 'parent' call UUID so that I could issue ESL commands on the parent channel.
I can now also use this to pass any customer data into the Verto client so I can have one less HTTP request going to my app server (which is already handling the ESL socket/dialplan).
I saw this hint: 'To send custom variables on incoming call to verto end point set variable with name prefix verto_h_ (since 1.6.16)' (Alexandr Popov). This didn't work out of the box though..
SEE MY SOLUTION BELOW..