Fun with Queues

What is the problem solved by a Queue in Salesforce CRM or on the Force.com platform?

• You are getting a lot of incoming sales leads, customer service cases, job applicants, or otherwise that your team needs to manage.
• You could setup assignment rules or work flow rules to auto-assign these incoming requests to your team members, but you would prefer to simply put them in a “queue” or pool for the members of this queue to manually grab and attend to.

How can a Queue help?

• A Queue can help your teams manage leads, cases, and custom objects.  Once records are placed in a queue either manually or through an automatic case- or lead-assignment rule, records remain there until they are assigned to a user or taken by one of the members of the queue.  Any queue member or users above them in the role hierarchy can take ownership of records in a queue.
• Think of a queue more like a pool of users, as there is no sequential order to it, which one may assume with the name “queue”.

What are examples of Queue uses?

• Lead queues - Help your organization manage the distribution of leads. For example, you might have a lead queue for your Western Region team and one for your Eastern Region team. You can put leads in different queues, either manually or automatically via a lead assignment rule as leads are imported, created or edited manually, or captured from the web. Each salesperson should be a member of one or more lead queues.

• Case queues - Help your organization manage your support workload and differentiate cases based on levels of support. By using queues, you can ensure that cases are resolved quickly even if an individual user is on vacation. By creating queues for different levels of support, for example, Gold Service Level and Silver Service Level, cases are automatically prioritized. You can put cases in different queues, either manually or automatically via a case assignment rule as cases are generated from the web or created manually. Each support representative should be a member of one or more case queues.

• Custom object queues - Help your organization manage the distribution of custom object records. When a custom object record is created, manually assign it to a queue so that the users who are assigned to the queue can access it and take ownership of it as appropriate.

What is a Queue Email?

• You can specify an email template to be sent to the Queue Members, upon assignment.  Send email to members of Queue
• Send email to members will send an email to all of the members of the Queue, to notify them that a record has been assigned to the Queue.

How do Queues operate?

• If your organization uses divisions, select the default division for the queue. This determines the division for a record when it is assigned to the queue via assignment rules or a manual change of ownership.
• Specify which users, roles, public groups, territories, connections, or partner users will be members of the queue.
• Once you have defined a queue, you can set up lead or case assignment rules to automatically reassign ownership of leads and cases to the queue.
• For queues that include custom objects, you can accomplish the same thing by setting up a workflow rule that reassigns ownership of custom object records to a queue with a field update on the record owner field.
• Note that cases inherit the division of the contact to which they are related, or are assigned to the default global division if no contact is specified.