Guidelines for Assignment Rules

Planning for Assignment Rules

To get started with assignment rules, consider these questions.

• Analyze how you would like your cases assigned. How do you route cases to the appropriate service rep? Are products or product versions a factor? Define your case assignment hierarchy.
• Decide whether cases are assigned to users, queues, or a mixture of both. Do your users choose cases from a pool? Case queues allow queue members to take ownership of the cases within the queue. What queues do you need and which users are assigned to those queues?
• Decide what case attributes determine which user gets the case. If you route cases based on their level of support, are you collecting that information when a case is created?

To create an assignment rule, from Setup, enter Assignment Rules in the Quick Find box, then select Lead Assignment Rules or Case Assignment Rules.

Considerations

• Lead assignment rules can assign leads regardless of whether leads are created manually, are generated from Web-to-Lead forms, or are imported using the Data Import Wizard.
• Case assignment rules can assign cases regardless of how cases are created. Cases can be created manually or automatically using Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case, the Self-Service portal, the Customer Portal, Outlook, or Lotus Notes.
• Organizations typically use one rule for each overall purpose. For example, use one lead assignment rule for importing leads and use a different lead assignment rule for web-generated leads. Or use one case assignment rule for standard use and one case assignment rule for holiday use. For each rule type, only one rule can be in effect at any time.
• Your organization can have one case assignment rule active at a time. A case assignment rule can contain up to 3000 rule entries, including 300 formula rule entries, which contain the conditions a case must meet to be assigned to a designated assignee. A case assignee can be a user or a queue.
• If your organization has a private sharing model, you can use case queues to give departments or teams access to cases. For example, if you have one support teams for hardware and another for software, create a case queue for each team. Then, give access to the cases in that queue by making each team member a member of the appropriate queue. For example, only the representatives in the software team can view or take ownership of the cases relating to software. Users can also assign cases to queues manually when editing the case.

Sample Assignment Rule

Each rule consists of multiple rule entries that specify exactly how the leads or cases are assigned. For example, your standard case assignment rule can have two entries: cases with “Type equals Gold” are assigned to the “Gold Service” queue, and cases with “Type equals Silver” are assigned to the “Silver Service” queue.

This case assignment rule assigns a case to a specific queue based on the account rating:

Rule Name — Hot Account Assignment

Rule Entries:

Tip Create an inactive assignment rule designed for routing cases during a holiday shutdown period or special company break. You can quickly set this assignment rule to active temporarily during the holiday period, and switch it back when you’re ready to activate your standard assignment rule.