Create an SLA to contact Leads

CRM 2016 Online (Update 1) now provides the ability to set an SLA on entities other than case. This is something I have wanted for a long time. J

The enhanced SLA on the case is a great feature but I have previously wanted to have an SLA on custom entities and on leads.

Have you ever known a sales person to be given a lead and sit on it so long that its stone cold before they attempt that difficult first phone call? Leads are hard to come by, so some sales managers want to be confident EVERY lead is progressed in a timely manner.

Because of this I’ve known companies want to enforce rules that newly created leads must be called within “n” days and qualified in “n” days. A lead SLA would be perfect for this. In one company I even saw a rule that if the lead hadn’t been contacted in “n” days it would be allocated to another sales person.

So how easy would it be to create this type of functionality. Let’s take a look ….

First of all, you will need to enable the lead entity for SLAs. This is easy, simply open the lead in customizations and select the new Enable for SLA option. This will be found in the Communication & Collaboration section of the Lead’s entity definition.

Note:
You can now enable SLA on activities, accounts, contacts, invoices, incidents, opportunities, quotes, leads and sales orders. Plus, any customer entity.

Note: Once set the  “Enable for SLA” option you can’t change it!

Before I could start to create an SLA I needed to create the SLA KPIs. For cases these exist out of the box as “first response by” and “resolved by”. But I needed something different for Leads. To do this I needed to create a couple of relationships between Lead and SLA KPI Instance. I went into customizations found the SLA KPI Instance entity and added the  1:N relationships shown below.

My first relationship between SLA KPI Instance and Lead and “First Contact By”. The details of my relationship are below.

Next I created another relationship called “Qualified By”.

Obviously you may decide to have slight different KPIs for leads. Also you are not limited to two relationships, you could have more. Maybe one for each of the stages in your business process flow. (I believe I read somewhere that 7 was the maximum but I haven’t confirmed that theory!)

Now my lead has been enabled for SLAs I can create an SLA. The creation of the SLA is still done in settings under service management. And is essentially the same process as for cases.

When you create an SLA you’ll see a new option to pick the entity. As I have enabled Lead for SLA it is now available. (FYI: I had published all my changes by this point!)

I then created an enhanced SLA in the same way as I normally would with a case. I didn’t waste time creating business hours correctly! I simply picked an out of the box working calendar. Obviously in a real situation you will need to define your companies working hours.

Once created I could then add SLA details for first contact and qualification.

As this was just a test I kept the definition of my SLA’s simple. First contact needed to be completed within 2 days and the lead qualified by 5 days. I also planned to send a warning after one day if first contact was completed and 3 days if the lead hadn’t been qualified.

As this was just a test I didn’t add any failure, warn or success actions. If this had been a real change I might have sent an email to the owner of the lead when the warning was reached. And then maybe sent an email to their manager if the failure point had been reached. The exact actions will obviously vary depending on specific business needs.

Tip:
As a failure action you could also change the owner on the lead. If the sales person hasn’t contacted the lead why not give it to someone else???

The detail of my “qualify” and “first contact” SLA lines was actually very similar. I have shown the first contact by below as an example. Notice that I have set the success action for first contact to by the “first contact by” field containing data. On my qualify I checked that the lead status had been changed to Qualified or Disqualified.

Next I activated and set the SLA as default.

NOTE: Setting the SLA as default didn’t seem to have any effect. I still needed to manually add an SLA to my lead when I created it. You might want to think about this. Maybe create a workflow that will default the SLA. Or maybe make the SLA field on the Lead form mandatory.

All done? Not quite! Finally, I needed to make some changes on my Lead form to show the SLA status. Back in customizations on the lead I added a new tab called SLA. In that I added a new field called SLA and a sub grid to show the SLA KPI instances.

The details of my sub grid are shown below. Notice that I’m only showing related records, the entity is SLA KPI instances and I have selected the All SLA KPI Instances view.

Once published my quickly created Lead form looked like this. As mentioned already when I created the lead I had to pick the SLA I wanted to apply.

You can see target dates for first contact and qualification. Also notice that the first contact is saying succeeded. This is because I marked this lead as contacted.

In many circumstances this will be all the functionality needed. As it is the warn, failure and success actions that will drive the required business logic. By sending out emails or maybe reassigning leads etc.

In my simple example this achieved everything I needed. But you may require a timer. A new timer control has been added to leads. Which is nice! J I will look at how the timer might operate in a future post.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas and also I hope you can see how this concept could be adapted for other entities.
J