I was working on Service Cloud in an organization that uses Salesforce CRM. Recently, our organization sought to enhance its case management process by streamlining the organization of support cases.
To do this, they want to set up a queue in Salesforce to handle “High” priority cases. This will allow multiple support agents to work together and resolve issues more efficiently.
Here, I will explain what a queue is in Salesforce, which objects we can use queues for, and how to create a queue in Salesforce.
Queues in Salesforce
In Salesforce, queues are used to assign records without an owner. When we assign records to queues, all the users who have access to that queue can take ownership of that particular record.
A user who has access to the queue is called a queue member. All queue members can always view the records in the queue and take ownership of the record in that particular queue. Queue members can examine the records in the queue and claim ownership of any record they want; this is how they can share the workload with the help of queues.
Queues are only supported for cases, leads, service contracts, and all custom objects in Salesforce. We cannot assign queues as record owners other than these standard objects. Records can be assigned to queues by manually changing the owner’s field of the record or using assignment rules. Queue members and users above them in the role hierarchy will always have access to records in that queue.
Role of OWD (Organization-Wide Default) in Queues
When the queue is assigned to any record, the OWD defines the access to the object’s record to the queue.
Below, I explain OWD settings and record sharing/access by queue members.
- Public Read/Write/Transfer: This option is available only for leads and cases; it is not available for custom objects. Here, any user can take ownership of who has access to that particular object record.
- Public Read/Write, Public Read Only: In this case, all organization users with access to the particular object can read or edit the record, but they cannot assume ownership as assigned by the queue.
- Private: If the OWD is set to private for the object to which we assigned the queue as the record owner, then only queue members can access or take ownership of that particular record. Here, only queue members can view that particular r