The four common routing methods
- Round robin: fairest for volume, blind to fit. Good default for uniform work.
- Territory: routes by geography. Predictable, but breaks on edge postcodes.
- Skill or trade: routes by capability. Best quality of fit, hardest to maintain.
- Queue and claim: routes to a pool, first available takes it. Fast, needs an escalation timer.
The rule people forget: unclaimed work
Most routing failures are not mis-routing. They are silent non-response — the lead went to the right person, and that person was on a roof. Without a timer, nobody finds out until the customer books with someone else.
The fix is boring and effective: assignment starts a countdown, and if the record is still untouched at the threshold, it escalates to a manager or returns to the pool. This has to be a scheduled check, because the failure is an absence of activity.
Reassignment as a first-class event
When work changes hands, three things must be true: the previous owner is recorded, the new owner is notified, and the response clock restarts. Overwriting the owner field silently destroys the ability to answer 'how long did this actually sit?' and makes performance conversations unwinnable.
Treat reassignment as its own event, distinct from initial assignment, so you can build different rules for each. A new lead deserves a welcome; a reassigned one deserves context.
Edge cases that break routing
- After-hours arrivals with nobody rostered to receive them.
- The assignee is on holiday and the rule does not know it.
- A single high-performer absorbing everything because the rule is availability-blind.
- Duplicate submissions creating two records routed to two people.
- Records that are assigned to a role that no longer exists.