Good lead routing means every enquiry reaches the person best placed to answer it, fast, whether it lands on WhatsApp, by email, on the phone or through a web form. To do that reliably you need three decisions baked into your process: which channel it came from, where the customer is, and what service they want. Get those right and nothing sits in the wrong inbox for a day, no job goes to someone who cannot handle it, and no customer has to explain themselves twice.
This guide walks through how to set that up without turning your team into full-time inbox sorters.
Why routing is harder than it used to be
The phone rings less and the messages pile up more. Preference for online messaging apps rises to around 75% among 25 to 34 and 35 to 44 year olds, while older customers still lean on voice calls, according to Ofcom’s work on personal online communication services. Meanwhile total call volumes fell by 6% in 2023 and SMS use fell by 13%, per Ofcom’s Communications Market Report 2024.
The practical takeaway: a routing setup built only around the phone and a shared email address now misses the channels your busiest and youngest customers actually use. Enquiries scatter across places, and each place needs a clear path to a person.
The three questions that decide where an enquiry goes
Before you build anything, agree the rules on one page. Every enquiry gets sorted by answering three questions in order.
- Which channel? WhatsApp, Instagram, email, web form or phone. Channel often decides tone and speed, and sometimes who owns it.
- Where is the customer? Postcode, town or service area. This matters the moment you have more than one engineer, branch or coverage zone.
- What do they want? The service or product. A new-boiler enquiry and a warranty callout are not the same job, and rarely the same person.
Write the destination for each combination down. It feels laborious for an afternoon and then saves you hours every week, because the decision is made once instead of re-argued for every message.
Route by channel without making customers repeat themselves
The failure mode here is obvious once you look for it. A customer messages on WhatsApp, gets told to “give us a ring”, calls, and has to explain the whole thing again. Every handover where the customer starts over is a chance for them to give up.
Better is to keep the conversation on the channel the customer chose and bring the right colleague to it. If your team uses WhatsApp for enquiries, decide who watches it and how a message gets passed on with its full history attached. The difference between the free WhatsApp app and the Business Platform matters a lot here, because the Platform is what lets multiple people and automated steps work the same conversation cleanly.
Route by location so the right person responds
As soon as you cover more than one area, location routing stops being optional. An enquiry from a postcode two hours from your nearest engineer should not land with that engineer, or with nobody.
Capture the location early, ideally in the first exchange, and match it to your coverage map. That way the enquiry goes straight to the person or branch who can actually attend, and the customer hears a realistic answer sooner. If you serve defined patches, this also keeps your promises honest, which links back to the timing rules we cover below.
Route by service so specialists get the right jobs
Service-based routing is where good qualifying earns its keep. You need just enough detail to know which type of job this is, without a fifteen-field form that scares people off. Ask the one or two questions that split your work into its main streams, then send each stream to the person who owns it.
This is also where you decide what a human must handle versus what can be resolved automatically. Some enquiries are simple enough to be answered and booked without anyone stepping in. Others need judgement. Being clear about when an assistant should hand over to a person keeps the tricky jobs with the people who can win them.
Answer first, route second
Routing is not an excuse to make people wait while the enquiry finds its home. Acknowledge fast, then route in the background. Speed is both commercial and, on the phone, a compliance matter.
If you use call queues, diallers or overflow, watch for silent and abandoned calls. Ofcom treats the repeated making of silent or abandoned calls as persistent misuse and can impose penalties of up to £2 million, as set out in its enforcement programme into silent and abandoned calls. A routing setup that dumps callers into dead air is a risk, not just a bad experience.
There is a consumer-law angle too. Once an enquiry becomes a booking and you have not agreed a specific time, the customer has the right to have the service performed within a reasonable time, under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. Routing that gets the right person on the job quickly is how you keep that promise.
Keep a clean record once the enquiry is routed
Wherever an enquiry ends up, someone owns the data. Decide who, how long you keep it, and how a customer can ask for it to be removed. The ICO’s storage limitation principle does not set a fixed period; you must justify how long you hold personal data and not keep it longer than you need.
One common worry: replying to and following up an enquiry is not the same as cold marketing. The ICO confirms that service messages, such as an appointment reminder, are not direct marketing, in its guidance on marketing and data protection. Responding to someone who contacted you is your core job. If you later build campaigns from that data, the marketing rules apply and you need the right basis and consent records.
All of this is far easier when enquiries live in one system rather than scattered across phones and inboxes. If yours are spread out, our guide on moving from spreadsheets to a CRM is a sensible next read.
Do not forget the after-hours path
Enquiries do not wait for opening hours, and neither should routing. Decide where a 9pm WhatsApp message goes and what the customer hears back before morning. A holding answer plus a routed follow-up beats silence every time. We cover the practicalities in handling out-of-hours enquiries without a night shift.
Where Kilij fits
Setting routing rules is the easy part on paper and the hard part in practice, because it has to run every hour without someone minding it. Pala, our AI lead-management product, answers enquiries across WhatsApp, Instagram, email and the website in seconds, qualifies them, and routes each one to the right person by channel, location and service, then books the job. That is the outcome to aim for: every enquiry answered, sorted and sent to the person who can win it, day and night.