A lead that was “routed in two minutes” and still cold on Thursday is not a routing problem. It is a response problem wearing a routing report.
Most speed-to-lead SLAs start the clock when the record is assigned, or when it lands in a queue. The number that moves a deal is the first human action: a call, a useful email, a meeting booked. Those two timestamps are often hours apart, and the gap is where enrichment is missing, fields are empty, and the rep cannot tell whether this row is worth their afternoon.
What the report is actually counting
Open the report. Check the start event. If it is “owner was set” or “entered this queue”, you are measuring the assignment job. Completing that job faster, including with an agent, will make the SLA green and leave the pipeline unchanged.
Add, if you can, time to first activity on the record: a logged call, a task completed, a reply. Use that as the number the Head of Sales actually cares about. Keep the assignment SLA if operations needs it. Do not let it stand in for response.
Leads sitting unworked in Salesforce usually have one of three shapes. The owner is a queue nobody watches. The owner is a person, and the record has no phone, no company, and a notes field full of the form dump. Or the owner is a person who can see the record is junk and is correctly ignoring it. Only the second shape is an enrichment and scoring job. The first is a coverage job. The third is a source problem.
Where an agent is allowed to help
Enrichment of firmographics you are willing to trust, on a schedule, not as a one-off dump. Scoring against a rule the team can say out loud. Writing those into proposal fields, then promoting them when they pass validation. Preparing the next conversation: a short internal brief, missing fields listed, a task with a due time.
That is the sales operations package: enrichment, scoring, CRM write-back, next-step prep, and a list of records the agent could not finish. A person still owns outreach, discounts, and anything a customer will see, until you approve those writes.
The agent should never silently replace a value a rep typed. Conflict detection belongs on the write path. If the company name the form captured disagrees with the enricher, that is an exception, not an overwrite.
Where it will not help
The agent cannot make a rep pick up the phone. If first-response is bad because the team is in meetings, or because incentives pay on demos not on speed, wiring an agent into the CRM will give you cleaner records and the same idle time.
It also cannot fix a source that sends you job-seekers and students. Scoring will bury them. That looks like success in a dashboard and like a quieter queue, which may be enough. It is not “speed to lead”.
If you want to know whether your CRM queue is the second shape or the third, bring it to the assessment. Thirty minutes on real records is enough to tell. The assessment is free.