TallTowers Corp (TTC) (fictional) is a Real Estate Company. Their Business is selling Property. They sell different kinds of properties, condo’s, apartments, Premium housing, commercial , and so on.

An astounding number of buyers these days, including myself, start their home search online. This meant that the company ended up with a very large number of leads.

Like many other organizations, TTC has its own call center with a number of professional agents.Each agent is qualified to sell/talk about a certain kind of a property.

Now, call centers usually work like this!

1. When calls come in, the first available agent takes the call.
2. He talks to the prospect, tries to figure out what type of property the prospect is interested in
3. If he is qualified to handle that property type, he continues the call
4. OTHERWISE, he tries to transfer to the agent who can handle the call.

So, what is the problem here?

1. Well, the process is a dumb process.
2. Many prospects calling in TTC’s call center had to wait for quite some time before finding the right agent
3. This in turn was affecting the customer satisfaction levels
4. This was also affecting the number of leads that the company was able to take up and process.

So, what happened?

This bright fellow in TTC came up with this brilliant idea.

1. Introduce a Ranking System for the Agents in the call Center.
2. Agents are ranked by the type of the property that they can handle,and their previous sales history. Properties are also ranked by value
3. Now, capture the rules for matching a prospect based on his real estate requirements as Business Rules in a BRMS
4. Introduce an IVR that will guide a prospect by collecting his real estate requirements.
5. Once the prospects requirements are captured, feed all the information to a Business Rules Engine
6. The Rules Engine will return a List of qualified agents to handle this particular customer. The Rule Engine internally will apply the Agent Ranking Rules to determine which agents can handle this prospect
7. The System will then connect the prospect to the first available agent among the list of qualified agents
8. This whole system will be a real time system

Moral of the story

Business Rules can help companies intelligently automate most manual but business critical processes in a business friendly fashion