Queues in Salesforce

While working with CRM, it is often required by organizations across various industries to optimize their workflows and enhance team productivity. Queues in Salesforce were introduced to address this common requirement.

It offers a solution for these management and distribution tasks within a team or department. You can utilize Salesforce Queues to prioritize, distribute, and assign records used by teams that share workloads. This helps you to easily manage leads, tasks, orders, contracts, and much more in one place.

So let’s see what Queues are and how you can implement them in your Salesforce org.

What are Queues in Salesforce?

Queues in Salesforce are a collection of records that don’t have any owner. Users with access to the queue can examine every record and claim ownership of the ones they want. Salesforce queues help prioritize, distribute, and assign records to team-sharing workloads.

Because the platform naturally supports queues for leads, cases, service contracts, and any custom objects in queues. These are commonly used in sales and support organizations to allocate new leads and support instances to the personnel with the most availability.

Records in Queues can be added manually by changing the record’s owner. Also, assignment rules can add cases or lead to a queue based on criteria. Records remain in a queue until they are assigned an owner or a queue member volunteers to own them. Any queue member or user higher in the role hierarchy can take ownership of records in a queue.

Users of a Queue can only be changed by

1. Admin

2. The person with “Manage [Object Name]” permission privileges

What is the Importance of Queues in Salesforce?

In various teams of an organization, a massive volume of leads or records is shared between team members. This data needs to be more organised and causes hassle when required for tasks. This is where the Salesforce Queues come in handy as they help to arrange records, especially leads, so they can be prioritized and handled methodically.

One of the main advantages of queues is that until a person claims them, the records are kept in the queue. Customers and staff at the company gain from the installation of a queue.

Doing this keeps workers from being overworked and guarantees that client issues are resolved quickly. As such, this method ensures that records are noticed and addressed.

How to Create Queues in Salesforce?

Implementing queues in Salesforce is relatively easy; here, we will guide you on creating a queue in Salesforce step by step.

1. From Setup, enter Queues in the Quick Find box, then select Queues.
2. Click New.
3. Enter a label and queue name. The label is the name of the list view that users work from.
4. Choose whom to notify when new records are added to the queue.
5. If your org uses divisions, select the queue’s default division. Cases inherit the division of the contact that they’re related to. If a case doesn’t have a contact, it’s assigned to the default global division.
6. Add which objects to include in the queue.
7. Add queue members. Members can be individuals, roles, public groups, territories, connections, or partner users. Depending on your sharing settings, only queue members and users above them in the role hierarchy can take ownership of records in the queue.
8. Save the queue.
9. If you want, set up assignment rules for your lead or case queues so that records that meet specific criteria are automatically added to a queue.

To view the queues that a user is a member of, from Setup, enter Users in the Quick Find box, then select Users and select the user. In the user’s Queue Membership-related list, you can create a queue or click a queue name to view its details. We can also access the queue from the object list view. 

Now, it is essential to understand the organization-wide default sharing settings implemented in Salesforce.

OWD for the Objects and its Record in Queues

The OWD sharing model for an object determines the access users have to that object’s records in queues.

1. Public Read/Write/Transfer: Users can view & take ownership of records from any queue.
2. Public Read/Write or Public Read-Only: Users can view any queue but only take ownership of records in which they are a member or, depending on the sharing setting, if they are higher in a role hierarchy than a queue member.
3. Private: Users can only view and accept records from Salesforce Queues of which they are members or depending on sharing settings if they are higher in the role hierarchy than a queue member.

Things to Remember

1. Regardless of the sharing model, users must have edit permissions to take ownership of records in their members’ queues.
2. Admin, users with “Modify All” object-level permission for the respective object and users with “Modify All Data” permission can view and take records from any queue regardless of the sharing model or their membership.
3. Before deleting a queue, reassign its records to another owner and remove it from any assignment rules.