Assignment Rules

The final automation feature we want to highlight is assignment rules. Assignment rules allow you to automate your lead generation and support processes by helping you control the record’s assignment. Typically, in Salesforce, a lead or case record will be assigned to the person creating the record or to a default user if the lead or case is being created through something such as Web-to-Lead or Web-to-Case. The assignment of records is important since the owner of the record is the person that will work on the specific lead or case to move it along in the process. Assignment rules allow you to set rules that will assign a new lead or case to a specific user or queue based on criteria.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics in detail:

• Creating lead assignment rules
• Creating a queue
• Creating case assignment rules
• Assignment rules in action

With the help of these topics, you will be able to understand when...

Technical requirements

For this chapter, log into your development organization and follow along as we create lead and case assignment rules.

Creating lead assignment rules

Lead assignment rules are a great tool for assigning lead records automatically. Knowing the capabilities of lead assignment rules will lead to fewer clicks for your users and quicker business process execution when working with leads. Lead assignment rules are created in the Setup section of Salesforce. Let’s learn how to create a lead assignment rule.

Business use case

You are the Salesforce admin for XYZ Widgets. The sales manager has a use case where any new lead created in Salesforce needs to be assigned to a specific user based on the State/Province field of the lead. Leads with a state/province of New York will be assigned to one user, while leads with a state/province of New Jersey will be assigned to another. Let’s learn how to build this.

Lead assignment rules in action

To create a lead assignment rule, we need to perform a few steps:

1. Navigate to the Setup page | the Home tab | Feature Settings | Lead...

Creating a queue

In Salesforce, every record has to be owned by a user or a queue. A queue is a group of users who can own records.

From a business perspective, one example is where new leads are placed in a lead queue. Users who are assigned to it can go into the lead queue list view and reassign leads to themselves that they wish to pursue.

Another use case could be when a group of support users is assigned to a case queue. From there these support users can actively go into the case queue list view to reassign cases to themselves. They will then be the owners of any reassigned cases and are responsible for working on these cases.

This concept is very important, as it allows users to complete work in a more efficient manner by providing direct access to assign records and keeping the business process moving.

Business use case

You are the Salesforce admin for XYZ Widgets. The support manager has a use case where a New York Cases queue needs to be...

Creating case assignment rules

Case assignment rules are a great tool for assigning case records automatically. Knowing the capabilities of case assignment rules will lead to fewer clicks for your users and quicker business process execution when working with cases. Case assignment rules are created in the Setup section of Salesforce. Let’s learn how to create a case assignment rule and apply it either to a user or to a queue.

Business use case

You are the Salesforce admin for XYZ Widgets. The support manager has the following use cases for you:

• Any new case with a State/Province of New York will be assigned to the New York Cases queue
• Any new case with a State/Province of New Jersey will be assigned to a user

Let’s learn how to build these.

Case assignment rules in action

To create a case assignment rule, we need to perform the following steps:

1. First, we need to navigate to the Setup page | the Home tab | Service...

Assignment rules in action

Now that we have created a lead and a case assignment rule, let’s see how this looks in action. The assignment functionality works the same way for leads and cases, but we will use cases for our example since the case assignment rule allows us to assign to both a user and a queue. Any case that is created automatically through Web-to-Case or Email-to-Case will trigger the assignment rules. In our examples, we will create the cases directly in Salesforce.

The following screenshot shows the account record we will be using for our test:

Figure 18.18: Highlighted areas of an account record

As you can see, we will use the Edge Communications account (1). We will create cases using the two existing contacts, Sean Forbes and Rose Gonzalez (2). I made sure to update Mailing State/Province for Sean Forbes to New Jersey and Mailing State/Province for Rose Gonzalez to New York. These are the criteria the assignment rules will check so that it...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned what an assignment rule is and how to create a lead and a case assignment rule. We learned what queues are and how to assign records to queues using assignment rules. We also understood what rule entries are and how to create multiple rule entries for a single assignment rule. Then, we applied these skills to real-life use cases to help you understand how assignment rules are used within the context of a business.

In the next chapter we will cover advanced data types.

Questions

1. Besides a user, what else can a case or lead record be assigned to?
2. How is the sort order used on an assignment rule?
3. What happens if you don’t choose an email template for a rule entry?
4. When creating a queue, what is the Queue Email field used for?
5. If you leave the Queue Email field blank, who gets notified when a record is assigned to a queue?

Further reading

• Assignment rules: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=customize_leadrules.htm&type=5
• Setting up queues: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=setting_up_queues.htm&type=5

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