Routing enquiries across 18 directors

Starting point

Enquiries arrived in a single shared inbox. Two people in sales ops opened them one by one, entered them into a spreadsheet and assigned each one to one of 18 regional directors. The spreadsheet recorded the outcome of the assignment. It did not record the basis on which that assignment had been made.

What made the work harder

• Routing depended on two specific people being available and stopped when they were not.
• Each director's current workload had to be judged from memory for every enquiry.
• After the fact, there was no way to reconstruct why an enquiry had gone to that person.
• Across 18 regions, every departure from the rule needed a separate explanation.

Scope of the rollout

The work covered one stretch of the process: the path of an enquiry from the shared inbox to an assigned owner. The change concerned how work was divided, not how the conversation with the client is run, so the content of the rep's reply and the later stages of the sale stayed outside the scope.

How the routing works

1. An enquiry reaches the shared inbox and is enriched with the data needed for the decision.
2. The system checks the region, the director's current workload and their sales results.
3. It picks a person, assigns the enquiry and records the basis for that choice.
4. An incomplete or unusual enquiry goes to a person for review.

There is one rule and it applies to all 18 regions. Changing it happens in one place rather than in the practice of two people, so it is immediately clear who is affected.

What went wrong along the way

Three things took longer than the plan assumed. All of them came down to decisions on the company's side rather than to the tools.

Reconstructing the rule took longer than programming it

The plan assumed we would move an existing rule into the system. The spreadsheet, however, recorded the outcome of each assignment rather than its basis, so the rule first had to be reconstructed with sales ops, enquiry by enquiry.

Workload meant different things in different regions

Before the system could take workload into account, one definition was needed: what counts as an open case and from which point it stops weighing on a director. That was the client's decision rather than a technical choice, so we waited for it outside our own schedule.

The change affected 18 people, not one department

Automatic routing changes who receives which enquiry, so from the outset it had to be explainable to each director individually. Hence the requirement to record the basis of every decision, which turned out to matter more than the speed of routing itself.

On later projects of this kind we start from these decisions, before the first rule is written into the system.