Breakdown: Routing Inbound Inquiries to the Right Person

Using inquiry routing as the example: the four layers of decision fields, routing rules, fallback paths and response deadlines — plus which judgments must stay with people.

Inquiry routing is often the first process a team wants to automate, and the easiest one to automate into confidently wrong assignments. The difficulty is not technical: the routing rules have usually never been written down, running instead on one experienced colleague’s judgment.

Layer 1: define the decision fields

Routing must rely on fields you can read reliably from the incoming record. Four common ones:

Channel: web form, phone, referral. Intent strength differs sharply between them.
Request type: pricing, technical question, after-sales, partnership. This usually requires reading the message body.
Scale signals: company name, size band, industry. Missing values are normal, so rules must handle nulls.
Urgency signals: an explicit deadline, or a mention of comparing vendors.

Layer 2: express rules as a table

Use a condition → owner → deadline table rather than deeply nested conditionals. Two constraints:

Rules must be mutually exclusive or carry explicit precedence, or the same inquiry gets routed twice.
Keep the rule count under ten. More than that usually means the wrong dimensions were chosen and types should be merged first.

Layer 3: fallback paths

Fallbacks are not optional; they decide whether the system can go live:

Who receives anything that cannot be classified — name a specific person, not a group.
How long before an unanswered assignment escalates, and to whom.
How duplicate submissions are detected and merged so one customer is not contacted by two people.

Layer 4: deadlines and an audit trail

Set a measurable first-response deadline per inquiry type and record the actual response time. That number is the only basis for later judging whether the rules are sound — without it, optimisation is guesswork.

What not to hand to automation

Anything touching price tiers, whether to take the work, or customer creditworthiness should only prepare information and suggest options, leaving the decision to a person. Automation’s value here is having the material ready, not making the call.

Summary

Layer 3 decides whether this works. Most routing systems fall out of use because unclassified inquiries quietly pile up somewhere nobody checks.