Performance-based lead routing rewards your top-performing sales representatives while motivating lower producers to improve. A customized plan is crucial for maintaining a balance among your agents, so your automated system continues to route leads fairly.
We will look at how to customize your performance-based lead routing plan to set every agent up for success.
Key Takeaways
- Performance-based lead routing incentivizes your agents to work harder so that they can receive higher-quality leads.
- A customized routing plan uses unique, industry-specific metrics to rank each agent.
- Using a mixed routing strategy ensures you distribute leads fairly.
What is Performance-Based Lead Routing?
Performance-based lead routing is one of many routing processes businesses use for assigning leads to reps. At the core, this system rewards the top performers in your company by ensuring they have the most and highest quality leads.
Sales will assign specific rules to their lead routing automation software to distribute leads based on specific performance metrics your business deems most suitable for the industry.
Alternative Lead Routing Strategies
Lead routing is either pull-based or push-based.
- Pull lead routing is a manual process where reps pull leads from a queue blindly or analyze the best leads for their expertise.
- Push lead routing is an automated system that distributes leads using a set of rules.
Source: Novocall
The simplest form of push lead routing is a round-robin approach that distributes leads in a pattern ensuring every rep receives the same number of leads. However, high performers are often left waiting for the next round of assignments instead of using that time to convert more leads.
Benefits of Performance-Based Lead Routing
Performance-based lead routing motivates agents to put forth their best effort to receive more leads and access quality leads.
Therefore, your agents will begin moving faster, giving higher quality customer care, and converting more consumers. Companies have found that offering an incentive motivates at least 85% of their workers to improve their performance.
Potential Problems of Performance-Based Lead Routing
Where your high-performing agents are succeeding, others are losing potential conversions. Once an agent ranks as a low performer, they struggle to rise in the system because they will not receive many leads. A second potential issue that often arises is that the top performers become overwhelmed by all the leads then feel burnt out.
5 Metrics to Measure Agent Performance
Here are five metrics to rank and distribute leads according to how your agents perform.
1. Answers the Most Calls
Some industries, especially inbound call centers, rank their agents based on how many calls they receive or make within a day. This metric indicates they are efficient in handling customer issues and know how to perform sales without wasting time on unnecessary tasks.
However, some industries require quality calls over a large quantity. In those cases, this metric would not indicate someone is a top performer.
2. Maintains the Average Handle Time
If your sales representatives have strong communication skills, they will know how to keep the consumer engaged for the entire sales pitch while also addressing questions efficiently. You can identify these agents by their average call duration. If their time is low, that might suggest customers are not engaged and hang up before the agent finishes their pitch.
Source: Call Centre Helper
3. Generates the Most Conversions
The number of conversions is one of the universal metrics for indicating a top performer. Conversions include sales, booked meetings, inquiries for more information, or upselling.
4. Has the Most Experience
Your automated system should record which agents interacted with customers in the past. Then, if those interactions were favorable, that agent should receive the same customer if your system ranks based on experience. In that way, customers receive a consistent experience with known representatives handling all of their questions and actions – leading to a better customer-agent relationship.
5. Has Specific Expertise
You might also consider ranking your agents based on their expertise. For example, the automated system can sort leads using demographic information or the consumer’s inquiry type. This ranking ensures leads go to the most qualified agents.
The following video will look at four other metrics you can use to judge an agent’s performance when ranking them for lead routing.
How to Create a Customized Lead Routing Plan
Customizing your lead router plan is a careful balance of ensuring leads are routed to the best performers while also keeping your system fair. Then your low performers are encouraged to improve their interactions and have a chance to rise in the ranking.
Route High Quality Leads to the Best Performers
Not all five metrics apply to every industry. A customized approach picks only the most relevant metrics to rank their agents according to their company’s goals. For example, a B2B company relies on facts and data to convert CEOs and other key decision-makers. Therefore, routing leads by expertise helps match those customers with the most knowledgeable agents.
When customers are matched with knowledgeable agents, they have a better experience. Three reasons businesses invest in a better customer experience are to improve cross-selling and up-selling, improve customer satisfaction, and improve customer retention. Altogether, 88% of companies prioritize the customer experience.
Mix Solutions to Help Low Performers Improve
While you want your highest-quality leads paired with your best performers, you shouldn’t neglect your other agents. If they don’t feel that the system is fair, they are more likely to put forth less effort or leave the company altogether.
Instead, you can relax your automation rules, so your top performers receive minor priority, and your lower performers are only slightly penalized. In this way, they still have access to many leads, allowing them to improve their performance and raise their rankings. In addition, your top performers won’t see as large of a percentage of the leads, which lessens the chances of them becoming overwhelmed by leads.
When you invest in your employee satisfaction, your entire company will benefit. Companies with a high employee satisfaction rate are 202% more productive than those with a low satisfaction rate.
Automate Your Lead Distribution
Automation software streamlines your lead distribution process so you can route leads faster and lose fewer potential conversions. You can also customize your rules for a personalized performance-based lead routing plan that encourages your high performers without neglecting the low performers.
Contact us to learn how our automation platform will help you track and manage your lead routing.
Feature Image: istockphoto
