Best way to automatically assign an agent?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I'm trying to automatically assign a new lead to a call center agent so he or she can contact it as soon as possible. These agents are Marketo users with limited permissions, who don't own a Salesforce user (We have Marketo connected to Salesforce, but we dont automatically assign to a sales person because we have a very strict qualification process) But the idea is that ANY lead is contacted in the first few minutes.

On the middle term we plan to keep two people doing this, so I was thinking of assign them with a smart campaign that goes "if lead id ends in even number, assign to X, if its an odd number, assign to Y", BUT I juste realized I cant use lead id as a smart filter/trigger.

So, any suggestions to achieve this?

On the long term we obviously want to grow this contact center operation, so if there's another solution you can think of and you can share it with me I would appreciate it a lot!

Thank you.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Zayra,

Round Robin assignement is always a little touchy

All methods that split the lead statically on criteria set ahead of the the assignment moment will give fair results on the long term, but not necessarily on the short term. For instance, if you split the leads based on even/odd numbers, it is possible that, during a few hours only even (or only odd) leads surface as qualified leads. This being said, these methods have the advantage of being quite simple to implement:

• either use a webhook to create an even/odd separation. Use the free Hoosh Excel formula, it will perfectly do the job. Contact Fab Capodicasa​
• Or assign your leads to 2 static lists when they are created using random samples, and the leads are to be assigned, test whether the belong to list A or B

The more advanced method will use a webhook to call a web service that will "remember" the last number that was assigned, and make sure that the following assignment will be given to the other rep and ensure dynamically that the round robin always alternate between your rep A or B. But these will be paid solutions. Look into the 3 solutions:

• flowboost from Etumos. Contact Edward Unthank (Etumos) ​or Sanford Whiteman​
• CalcItNow. Contact Diederik Martens
• BrightHook. Contact Rajesh Talele

Also, when implementing round robin assignment, think about how you will be handling team changes, vacations, sick leaves, as during these periods, you do not want the leads to be assigned to a rep who will not take care of them.

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

Thanks for the shout on this, Greg. FBCounter, the event registration/counter service, could actually be used with FlowBoost Community to do this.

Agent Assignment can be an event (there's no need to restrict events to events like webinars or trade shows). Then when someone is added to the event, you get their registration #.

Then pass that number into a simple FB recipe:

var numberOfAgents = 3,
    assignedAgent = {{lead.agentRegistrationNumber}} % numberOfAgents || numberOfAgents;

assignedAgent will then alternate 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3.... If you switch numberOfAgents to 4, then they'll alternate 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4....

But you're right, round-robin is positioned as more of a Pro feature in that it can be done directly with the database.

[Rachit_Puri2]

Hi Zayra

+1 for Greg's suggestion. Managing auto-assignment will always be tricky in Marketo. Firstly, you should use Random Sample in the choices of your flow to assign leads. You can start with a Random Sample of 50 to assign leads to X and Y. Later, you can change the sample size as you add more agents. Since these agents are not Salesforce users, I am assuming you would just send an alert to these agents to contact the lead. There would be no SFDC assignment.

You can create a new custom field which can track the assigned agent. When the alert is sent, you can append the name of the agent in the custom field.

Personally, I like to avoid using webhooks since they may slow down the process and also consume the API calls. For handling situations like team changes, vacations, sick leaves, you will have to make edits in the flow of the campaign.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Webhooks don't consume API calls.

[Rachit_Puri2]

Sorry, my bad.