Route and Work with Referrals
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you'll be able to:
- Describe how assignment rules and decision matrices route a referral.
- Explain how a specialist works with a referral.
- Describe how updating a referral's fields can retrigger assignment rules.
Put Referrals to Work
In the previous unit, you explored how Wealth Advisor Ryan Dobson at Cumulus Wealth submitted a referral. Now, learn how specialists work with referrals to close more business.
On submission, the system determines which path a referral takes. It can either route to:
- A specialist or a queue based on assignment rules.
- An automated marketing and qualification journey through an automated flow.
As you plan how your organization uses Intelligent Referral Management, decide which referral types your team handles directly and which go to an automated digital journey. Either way, the referrer who submits the referral gets a message about what happens next with their submission.
For Ryan’s referral, admin-defined assignment rules send it to his colleague best-qualified to handle the client’s needs. In this unit, you learn how that routing works, and what a specialist does after receiving a referral.
Route a Referral
Intelligent Referral Management's no-code referral assignment rules determine whether a referral goes to a specialist or a queue.
Admins define these rules based on fields from the Referral object and related objects, such as Account and Party Profile. Admins create individual rule entries and set the rules’ evaluation order on the Intelligent Referral Management page in Setup. The assignment engine assigns each referral to the first matching entry, so this evaluation order of rule entries is critical.
For example, Ryan’s referral qualifies for a Cumulus Wealth rule for the alternative investments of high value. The system assigns it directly to Ryan's colleague Natalie Wilson, Cumulus Wealth's high-value alternative investments specialist. Assignment rules entries route lower-value alternative investments referrals to a queue for other members.
For more complex criteria, admins use the Referral Routing Expression Set, a Business Rules Engine decision matrix built for referral routing. A decision matrix, for example, can match referrals to territory teams by postcode, industry, and turnover. Your organization can maintain these matrices by using CSV import after you set up routing.
This complex routing isn’t necessary to send this referral to Natalie, though. She receives the referral, and she’s ready to get to work.
Review a Referral
Natalie and Cumulus Wealth use Run My Day, so she finds the referral prioritized in that feature's Grow group. She opens the record.
On the referral, Natalie reviews the details that Ryan submitted. With admin configuration, the system can also automatically add context to a referral with Data 360 data and Agentforce-generated talking points.
Natalie uses Agentforce to draft a personalized first-touch email to the client, reviews it, and sends it in one click.
Reroute Referrals with New Information
Natalie’s email results in a call with the client, and she learns the customer's family trust structure is different from Ryan’s original understanding. This information changes the referral's estimated business value. She updates the value field, which triggers the assignment rules again.
If a field update changes which rule matches a referral, Intelligent Referral Management automatically routes the referral to another specialist or queue. The system then updates the referral's activity timeline with the trigger field, the previous assignee, and the new assignee.
Admins can also configure assignment rules to skip running on a manually assigned referral. This setting keeps a referral from reassigning when it's meant to stay with a specific specialist.
In this case, the referral’s value change reassigns the referral to one of Natalie’s colleagues, who reviews the notes and context she added to the record.
Track Progress as a Referrer
While the Cumulus team works on the referral, Ryan follows its status.
Notifications tell Ryan when Natalie contacts the client and schedules a meeting, plus when it’s reassigned to another specialist. This visibility keeps him confident that his colleagues are taking care of his clients and cultivating the relationships that he worked hard to build.
As your organization plans its use of Intelligent Referral Management, decide which status updates and notifications your referrers receive.
Wrap Up
Ryan’s referral pays off for Cumulus Wealth. The Cumulus team is able to help the client not only invest in niche private equity, but also diversify in other alternative investments and restructure the client’s family trust. That’s a win for Cumulus Wealth and Ryan, who both deepen their relationship with the client and add more assets under management.
The next time the client has a financial need, they’ll turn to Cumulus Wealth because it was able to meet all of their needs quickly, even across specialties. The client even plans to refer a few friends.
Whatever your line of business, Intelligent Referral Management can help you build the same type of customer loyalty. With Intelligent Referral Management, you can be sure that you collect referrals efficiently, route them to the best specialists, and track their outcomes with full attribution.
As you get started with Intelligent Referral Management, be sure to check the links in Resources for more details.