One of the many advantages of Salesforce organisations is that the technology can drastically improve the organisation & work scheduling of its employees. This is especially true of the ‘Tasks’ component of Salesforce, which enables us to auto-assign tasks to specific users. There are some fantastic benefits for using Salesforce workflows to assign custom tasks – not only does it speed up the process of employees starting work on critical jobs, but it also ensures tasks to do not go missing and are always accountable to someone in the organisation. Firstly, lets take a look at the main situations you may want to have task assignment triggers setup:
Automatically create a task when a case or lead is closed – this makes a whole lot of sense, usually as soon as a case/lead is closed there is often some piece of work that needs to be completed. This is exceptionally true of promising new business leads, where fulfilling early promises is key to getting new business agreements over the line. If a new lead is closed, it’s likely there are a range of tasks which may need to be completed – from account setup through to sending contracts or documentation.
Route tasks to Salesforce users who become available – this is organisation & task dependent, but fluctuating availability is another task assignment trigger which is often used. If there are a range of tasks which are distributed amongst a small number of team members, you can quickly overpower your team members by distributing too many tasks at one time. Instead keeping tasks in a central pool, and automatically assigning those tasks when a specific user has more available time can improve performance.
Re-route tasks which have been unsuccessfully carried out – similarly if a task has already been allocated to a specific Salesforce user but has either been ignored or unsuccessfully actioned then using task automation can act as a safety net. In this situation, automation can kick-in and route tasks to Salesforce users who are in a better position to act.
How Does Salesforce Currently Operate?
Salesforce already has some level of automation built into the CRM. Users can choose to auto-assign tasks to specific users using either Salesforce workflows or Process Builder. Usually both of these methods work using user lookup fields to auto assign tasks, in which tasks are assigned to individual users using their Salesforce ID. When setting up, use the ‘assign to ID’ field which can pull in the specific IDs of individual Salesforce users into the equation, this works even better if the person you are assigning to already has some ownership of the record the task is being created on.
This is relatively easy to setup – however problems do arise if you want something more sophisticated. A lot of organisations using this approach are setting up task assignment rules which distribute the same types of tasks to the same user each time. For example, all the tasks involving a demo walkthrough are automatically assigned to the single contact who looks after the demo side of the business. This works fine, but by using the standard ‘assign to ID’ field means you can only insert one ID into the task assignment rule – what happens if team structures change or you need to assign Salesforce tasks to multiple users? Ultimately we are finding more companies want greater controls with how they automatically assign tasks in Salesforce, and this often means working with a third party who can unlock the potential of lots of unique assignment rules linked to your specific use case.
Extra Possibilities When Using A Dedicated Assignment App
As we mentioned, organisations are now demanding a whole toolbox of options when it comes to assigning tasks. Here are some extra areas to enquire about with your Salesforce administrator and to see if they would be useful for your organisation:
- Being able to assign tasks to multiple users.
- Being able to auto-assign follow up tasks as they arise.
- Automatically assign any type of task, even if it’s using a custom field.
- Have the ability to assign tasks using a round robin formula – or by using intelligent assignment rules which can assign tasks based on workload, complexity or shift patterns.
When auto-assigning tasks to specific users in Salesforce, there is now a whole World of options out there. Check out our Q-assign application which does all of the above, it also even has custom assignment rules for cases, leads and in fact any Salesforce object.
