Load Balancing

Load balancing provides a way to achieve even distribution volumes. Despite differences in availability or tags, balancing will attempt to top up those who have received fewer assignments.

With load balancing you can:

  • Balance daily assignment volumes
  • Balance weekly assignment volumes
  • Balance monthly assignment volumes
  • Balance by Active Status or Totals, based on the team setting Active cap and balance by
    • Balance by the number of records owned
    • Balance by the total value of a field on the records owned
  • Balance assignments at the distributor level
  • Balance assignments at the team level  

Load balancing also works in conjunction with other features, such as sticky assignment, weighting and capping, distribution hours, out of office, action tracking, auto-reassign and assignment rejection.

Distributor settings

When setting up a distributor choose the load balancing method and the load balancing level.

  • Load Balancing Level - Determines if load balancing is at the Distributor or Team level.
  • Team - Load balancing assignments are looked at across all distributors in the team.
  • Distributor - Load balancing assignments are localized to this distributor.
  • Sticky Assignment - Allows for records of the same defined criteria to go to the same team member. See Sticky Assignment.
  • Assign if user is unavailable - if checked, records will assign regardless of team member availability (Out of Office, distribution hours, widget toggle).
  • Assign if user is offline in widget - if checked, records will assign when a team member is toggled offline but not when Out of Office or outside Distribution Hours.

 

Team settings

On the team settings page you can choose to balance by the record count or total value of the records owned.

Active cap and balance by

  • Record count - balance by the number of records owned.
  • Total value - balance by the value of the records owned. Allows you to select which field to use for value. 

Load balancing type

  • Determines if the load balancing is daily, weekly or monthly or using the active count/value (or total count/value if no active status is defined) .
Daily, weekly and monthly balancing is done based on DE assignments. Active or total balancing is based on all records owned.

Advanced load balancing settings

The Distribution Settings tab includes some advanced settings to further control the behavior of load balancing. These determine whether sticky, lookup owner or pull distributor assignments should be included in the balancing. You may for example consider sticky and lookup owner assignments to be duplicates and so shouldn't be included in the balance.

 

Examples

Availability

Some team members have been given 10 assignments today, but others have been out of office and have no assignments. A load balancing distributor would bring all members up to 10 assignments before giving any more to the rest of the team.

Active Status - Count

Team members are assigned records to work but some work faster than others. Only leads with a status of New are included in the Active count. Each team member has been assigned 4 records. Mary has contacted 3 while Bob hasn't contacted any. Mary now has an active count of 1. So new assignments will be given to team member Mary until she has an equal number of Active records to work as Bob. 

Active Status - Field Total Value

You may want to balance the workload for your team based on the total revenue of the leads they are working. If Mary has 3 leads totaling $6000 in revenue and Bob has 3 leads totaling $1000, Bob would receive assignments until the value of his assigned leads equals Mary.

We suggest bucketing revenue values and then balancing based on these buckets. For example, Leads with revenue from $0 - $1000 = 1, $1001 - $5000 = 2, and $5000+ = 3. This helps lower the potential split between total field values and will make the load balancing more even.

 

 

How did we do?

Lookup Owner

Round Robin

Contact