Workflow orchestration

Salesforce routing

Salesforce routing is the logic that delivers a record to the right owner at the right time. The terms case assignment, case routing and case distribution describe the same job for cases; the same idea applies to leads, opportunities, work orders and custom objects.

Routing decides the owner by one or more strategies: the right person (skills, capacity), the right time (availability, business hours), and the right context (territory, language, account, priority). Native Salesforce routes on fixed field values. Routing that reflects how a team actually works reads the state of the team and the record together, at the moment of assignment.

Salesforce ships two mechanisms. Assignment rules match leads and cases to a queue or user against fixed criteria, and fire once, at creation or on update. Omni-Channel distributes work from queues to agents in the console, with queue-based routing, skill-based routing, and external routing that hands the logic to a third-party tool over APIs.

Between them they cover the basic shape: get a lead or case to a queue, and push it to an available agent. What they do not do is adapt after the rule fires, weigh several factors into one decision, or route objects beyond leads and cases.

• Reassignment after creation. Assignment rules fire once. If a record needs to move after it is created, that is manual.
• Real-time workload. Native routing reads workload at the point of assignment, not on a rolling basis as work is resolved.
• Complexity weighting. Several factors (product, language, availability, location, tier) rarely combine into a single defensible score.
• Business hours and out-of-office. Records get assigned to agents who are offline, creating a lag between arrival and response.
• Round robin and pull. Controlled, weighted distribution and pull queues that stop cherry-picking are not native behaviours.
• New channels inheriting the logic. As inbound channels are added, applying the same assignment logic to each one is manual work.

Ortoo Orchestrator answers each: continuous rebalancing handles reassignment and real-time workload, multi-factor matching handles complexity weighting, schedule-aware routing handles business hours and out-of-office, and object-agnostic routing applies one model across every channel and object. Deterministic logic controls the decision, and every routing decision is logged and reportable.

Native assignment rules cover leads and cases. Ortoo Orchestrator routes leads, cases, opportunities, work orders, tasks and custom objects on one model, so the same skills, capacity and SLA logic applies wherever work arrives.

See it applied to each object in the routing cluster below: case routing, lead routing, lead distribution, opportunity assignment, work-order assignment, custom-object assignment and territory assignment.

Omni-Channel and Q-assign are not either-or. Omni-Channel delivers work to agents in the console. Q-assign matches the right agent on rich attributes (skills, capacity, availability, SLA) before delivery, and keeps adjusting after it.

Teams already on Omni-Channel extend it with Q-assign rather than replace it. Salesforce is retiring standard Omni-Channel and moving orgs onto Enhanced Omni-Channel, which is a natural moment to add the matching layer above it.

Skills-based routing assigns work to the agent whose skills fit the record. Native skill-based routing tags agents and matches on skills alone.

Multi-factor routing reads skills together with current capacity, availability and SLA state, so a skilled agent who is at capacity or offline is not handed work they cannot start.

Routing on Ortoo Orchestrator is configured by operations in Salesforce setup, point and click, no code. Rules are readable, the routing decision is logged on the record, and changes take effect without a release cycle. A full routing model can be built and tested in a sandbox before anything reaches production.