Published
Lead assignment: a queue per language line, a “Take it” button and a workload screen
The office owner turns a queue on for each line separately, staff take a free lead with one tap, and the list shows which leads have no owner.
A lead used to arrive and settle into the shared list with no owner. Who would call was decided by talking across the room rather than by the system. In an office of six that works; in an office of sixteen some leads are picked up by nobody, and you find out a week later, from the complaint of the person who wrote in.
Three things have appeared: a queue, a button and a screen.
The queue. The office owner turns it on, separately for each language line, and it is off by default: the system does not start handing out leads on its own. When the queue is running, the owner is set at the moment the lead is received, in fair order among the people in the circle.
The circle is closed inside the language line. A Hebrew lead will not go to somebody on the Russian line: they simply would not see it, and the lead would then be lost to everyone, including the person it was given to. The office owner and the manager are not in the circle: they do not take leads themselves. Somebody can be taken out of the queue or marked unavailable, on holiday for instance, on the staff screen, and “unavailable” is shown next to the name. The queue moves round the circle rather than by position number, so one person's holiday or departure does not shift the queue for everyone else.
The button. Somebody who sees a free lead takes it with one tap instead of writing to a senior colleague. The owner decides, per line, whether taking is allowed, and separately whether a regular member of staff may do it. A lead that already has an owner does not show the button at all: another person's lead is handed over by reassignment, not by taking. If two people tap at the same moment, the second gets a clear refusal and does not take the lead away from the first.
The mark in the list. A lead without an owner is marked with a word, and a separate chip gathers all of them with one tap. The mark and the chip appear only in an office that uses assignment. Otherwise they would sit on every row and stop being a signal on the first day.
The “Workload” screen. It answers one question: who has how many leads in progress, by line, and how many leads are hanging with no owner. The row of unowned leads leads into a filtered list, and when there are none it is not shown at all. The screen is open to the owner and to those with the right to a breakdown by member of staff. There are no names of the people who wrote in, no phone numbers and no enquiry texts on it: only staff names and figures.
- Imported history is not handed round the queue: dealing year-old rows out to live people is not assignment.
- A repeat enquiry from the same person stays with the previous owner, because that is who spoke to them.
- Moving a lead to another line removes an owner who does not cover the new line, and if a queue is running there, the lead immediately gets somebody from the new line.
- Assigning an owner does not stop the count of time to the first response: “taken and not called” is exactly the case the count is kept for.
- Every assignment is written to the log, and the log shows how it happened: by the queue, by taking, or by hand.
The queue hands leads out in order, not to whoever has fewer in progress. The workload screen exists, among other reasons, so that this difference is visible.
Want to see this on your own office's inquiries?