Assignment rules in Salesforce are just one example of why Salesforce is still, after several years, the king of CRM, and the purest definition of what it truly means to be SaaS. Whenever someone asks about SaaS, one of the first examples people will reflexively point to is Salesforce, its cross platform power, its high security, always up to date CRM core, and the brilliant App Store and programmability of damn near every aspect of its data keeping.
But, are assignment rules in Salesforce complex and hard to understand? With a system like this, you often encounter the problem that, as complex, powerful and diverse as everything is, it becomes convoluted, or at least it can seem that way.
Well, these aren’t so bad. Let’s take a look at how to set this up, and what the arguments (computer talk for parameters, haha) actually are.
Basic Setup:
First, be sure you have the group, professional, enterprise, unlimited or developer edition of the software, as any other versions won’t let you use this. Bummer, huh? Also, make sure you have the permission ‘customize application’. If you don’t, consult your admin before attempting this!
#1 – From your setup, click “Customize”.
#2 – Now, select “Leads” or “Cases” and click “Assignment Rules”. With me so far?
#3 – Now, select a new entry, and give its rule a name. Specify if you want it active for leads or cases that are manually made, and by those created automatically by web and email interop. Click save now.
#4 – You will now be asked to create the rule criteria. Go to rule entries, and click new. Let’s look at the criteria for this and what they mean.
Criteria for Rules:
#1 – Order: This is the order in which the entry is processed. Basically, like a queue.
#2 – Criteria: These are various conditional criteria, and the trigger of met, not met etc. You can use formulaic analysis here, but that actually is a complex affair we’ll have to cover in another piece later, as it’s involved.
#3 – User: This specifies which user’s process queue to use.
#4 – Don’t Reassign Owner: This determines if the user whose process stack is in use becomes the owner of the rule entity, or if it remains owned by its creator user.
#5 – Email Template: This specifies email template settings for if the rules trigger an email transmission to a prospect or a user within the group etc.
Along with these are a few case definitions and team management things that are also too complicated to share space with a bigger topic like this one, so once more, those are for another time (if you’re new, you don’t need them yet).
Final Steps:
After you specify all the rules you want to use for the entry, then you can click save, or click “Save & New” if you wish to save, and then build more.
No, assignment rules in Salesforce aren’t really complicated, aside from when they bring in the really powerful and flexible logic available for a few criteria. And honestly, those aren’t that bad either, just heavy enough to need their own topics. We’ll talk about those down the line, but for now, you know enough to do some powerful stuff with these if you stop and plan it out first.
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