Managing Leads and Requests: Building an Automated Process

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Building our Lead & Request Routing Engine

The ability to create a custom, automated process is one of the most powerful tools that applications such as customer support portals, CRM systems and other open OS platforms can provide. In order to enable sellers to manage customer leads and requests for information (RFIs) generated on Knowde, our Product, Customer Success and Sales teams collaborated to develop an automated assignment tool that could simplify the logistics of distributing information.

Adopting the Industry Standard

Taking inspiration from industry giants such as Zendesk, Monday and Salesforce, Knowde’s Product Team built an “Assignment Engine” that Knowde suppliers can use to create automations for receiving, assigning and responding to leads and requests.

Suppliers are now able, for example, to direct sample requests submitted by buyers in Asia within the Personal Care market to one sales representative, while directing technical questions for cleaning ingredients submitted by users in a different market to a knowledgeable expert.

How we Built a Powerful Assignments Engine

Building this tool required close cooperation between the Design and Development teams. Hours were spent debating the principles that were most important for companies in the chemical industry to be able to make assignments, and even more hours were spent creating designs that would be intuitive for an industry which is not accustomed to selling its products online.

Ultimately, Knowde’s Knowledge team was called in to help answer some of the questions. Composed of chemical industry veterans (engineers, buyers and sellers), the Knowledge team shared its extensive experience and knowledge to provide valuable insights.

In September, Knowde launched “Automated Lead & Request Routing” – a phrase that was much more familiar to suppliers than “Assignment Engine,” which had made the most sense to developers.

Knowde now offers the ability to assign leads and requests by customer region, customer role, customer company, product, brand, or a combination of product, brand market and technology. Suppliers can send leads to a specific sales representative or team member, or to a specified group of members, based on “and/or” conditions

A Successful Launch

This new tool has absolutely changed the way that suppliers interact with leads and requests on Knowde. For suppliers, who are accustomed to more manual processes, this tool helps reduce the time, cost and effort of interacting with customers. And it was built with Knowde’s own, proprietary software, rather than having to purchase and integrate a solution.

We’re seeing steady adoption and usage of the tool, and have received constructive feedback that will enable Knowde to continue iterating to introduce more functionality and make suppliers’ jobs even easier.