Where they come from
The portals dominate, with WhatsApp a close and growing second, and WhatsApp is the one most likely to live outside the system of record, on an individual agent’s phone, where the company cannot see it and cannot recover it when that agent leaves.
Where they get lost
Three places, in order. Unassigned, where nobody owned it. Assigned but unacknowledged, where somebody owned it on paper and never opened it. And no activity, where it was worked once and then quietly abandoned at forty eight hours. Almost every lost lead is in one of those three buckets, and all three are measurable.
- Unassigned queue with escalation
- Assigned but not acknowledged view
- No activity in 48 hours
- Past response SLA
Set an SLA you can actually hit
Fifteen minutes for a first response is a common target and a reasonable one during business hours. Set it against a named agent, not a team, and set a separate next action target so a lead cannot be acknowledged and then forgotten.
Route by something meaningful
Round robin is fine and better than nothing. Routing by community, language or source is better, because a buyer who wrote in Arabic about Palm Jumeirah should reach somebody who speaks Arabic and knows Palm Jumeirah.
Review the right number
Total leads received is a vanity number that goes up when marketing spends more. Leads past SLA, acknowledgement time, and conversion by source are the numbers that change behaviour.