How to Assign Fulfillment in Salesforce
Speedy fulfillment is essential to customer happiness and retention. As mentioned in our overview of Fulfillment in Salesforce, doing all the work to win a deal and then letting it slip through the cracks during fulfillment is a worst case scenario.
While plenty of companies run their fulfillment out of Salesforce, the software isn’t exactly designed for this type of process. Accordingly, we've created a free package to spin up a custom object for fulfillment, and this guide for how to assign the work out.
One important customization: getting fulfillment objects, whether you use Opportunities or custom objects, quickly assigned to the correct employees. Keep reading to get tips for designing and implementing your assignment model.
Choosing How to Assign
Before you can implement, you need to know what to implement. Before you know what to implement, you need to understand your priorities.
Priorities
Let’s tease out some priorities common amongst fulfillment teams.
Speed of fulfillment: This is almost always a top priority for fulfillment teams. If speed is important to you, think about what can make your team operate more quickly. What are your bottlenecks? Maybe one of your employees spends their time managing a team queue when they could be working on orders.
Equitable distribution for employees (or Round Robin): This is more common for Sales teams, where employees are compensated with commission. In this situation, providing an even distribution of leads is important to motivating employees, boosting morale, and avoiding complaints of unfairness.
Special treatment for VIP customers: Some teams call them VIPs, while others have tiers, e.g. Tier 1 customers, Tier 2 customers, etc. You might want orders from these customers to skip the line, or you might want them handled by more senior, qualified employees.
Local or territory-based fulfillment: It may be important that your west coast fulfillment associates handle orders placed on the west coast.
Other categorical divisions: Many teams will divide into specialties, so that an employee or group of employees own orders for certain verticals or product lines.
Preventing dropped balls: It happens; things slip through the cracks. If it is paramount that you don’t get an email from your support team asking about the status of an order placed three weeks ago, call it out and make this a priority when choosing how to assign fulfillment in Salesforce.
Team Size and Fulfillment Volume
Keep these in mind when thinking through your strategy for how to assign fulfillment.
If your team members are carefully managing a handful of orders at a time, your approach might look different from a team that is struggling to meet demand and crunching through dozens or hundreds of new orders every day.
Implementing Assignment for Fulfillment in Salesforce
Let’s talk about the different ways to deliver on the above strategies. Keep in mind that the below implementations are not mutually exclusive.
Manual Assignment
What is it? In this implementation, a dedicated team member manages a queue of newly created orders. Their job is to take each new order from the queue and assign it to a team member.
When to implement manual assignment: This approach is best for small teams with straightforward assignment rules, such as a round robin assignment.
What are the drawbacks?
- Speed: Every hour spent managing a queue is an hour not focusing on fulfillment.
- This system breaks at scale. One person would have a difficult time keeping up with high order flow.
How to implement:
- Create a Queue for all new fulfillment orders.
- Create an object to track the fulfillment process - Ops Framework is a free way to do this.
- Create a list view that shows everything assigned to this queue;
- Update the process or software to set the owner equal to the Queue;
- Publish, print, and distribute the rules for assignment to your team members;
- Create, print, and distribute a shift schedule for the queue.
Automated Round Robin for Fulfillment
What is it? Automated round robin is exactly what it sounds like. Salesforce automation will automatically assign new orders to your team members in a round robin fashion.
When to implement automated round robin: Follow this approach if equitable distribution of fulfillment among your employees is a priority.
What are the drawbacks?
- This approach is more prone to dropped balls than manual assignment. Fulfillment orders could be assigned to someone who isn’t ready to receive them.
Salesforce Omni-Channel
Salesforce’s Omni-Channel product enables you to route objects to team members according to any number of properties about the customer, the order, or the team member. While Omni-Channel is good for quickly routing objects, it is designed for high-volume customer service centers.
Questions? Ask For Help
As you can see, assignment models for fulfillment vary from company to company. The most important thing is to start with your goals and work your way down from there.
We've created a free tool called Ops Framework to get you started with Order Fulfillment. You can find a link to it below. If your questions are not answered above, or if you need help designing or implementing your approach, please use the chat to get in touch.