Penalties

Virtual Allocations allow some allocations to be penalised so that they are dealt with at a lower priority.

Penalties are generally only useful if you are topping up campaigns with fresh leads on a regualar basis or via the Noojee Api InsertLeadFast.

Use Cases

You some times need to help another team handle their leads, but want to ensure that your leads are prioritised over the other team's leads.

You have a campaign containing 'non-urgent' leads that you only want to dial after dialing the more urgent leads.

How do penalties work?

Penalties work by increases the priority value of a lead. As Noojee Contact treats low priority values as the highest priority (e.g. priority 1 is more important than priority 2) increasing the priority value of a lead decreases its priority.

The decrease in priority doesn't actually affect the lead's real priority. If you like the increase is a 'virtual' priority value that is only considered within the Virtual Allocation that you set the penalty.

The affect of this is that you can include the same Allocation into multiple Virtual Allocations and in each case apply a different penalty (or no penalty).

How Penalties affect lead ordering

To understand how penalties affect the order in which leads a dialed we need to review how lead are normally ordered.

You can review the full document on lead ordering here.

The key to understanding lead ordering is to remember that the priority trumps everything.

What this means, is that all leads with the highest priority are dialed first, regardless of the age of the lead.

For the given priority the system starts from the most current Ageing Date and works backwards in time.

Once all leads for the most highest priority are dialed, the system looks at all leads with the next highest priority and applies the same process.

So we can now apply penalties to the above process.

If you add an Allocation to a Virtual Allocation with a penalty of '1', then all of these leads from that Allocation (we refer to this as a foreign Allocation) have their priority value increased (so their priority is lowered).

Now when the system selects a priority it will be using the 'virtual' priorities of each lead.

Lets look at some examples.

You can see from the above table the 'virtual' priorities of 'My Important Allocation' are identically to the Standard Priorities as a Penalty of '0' means that no penalty has been applied.

For the Allocation 'A Foreign Allocation' we can see that penalties have been increased by 1 across the board and by 2 for the Allocation 'Another Foreign Allocation'.

So now when we apply the the standard lead ordering we see that leads will be dialed with the following priority order and within each priority the secondary Ageing date will be used to order the leads.

Its important to note that the lines that both have a priority of '6' are all considered equal so the Ageing date will be used to select the order that these leads are dialed in.

When setting up your own penalties Noojee recommends that you set up an Excel spreadsheet with the above two tables to ensure that you understand the consequences of the penalties.