If you are a CRM manager or Salesforce admin, one of the painstaking activities is following up on tasks when the task owner is out of the office. This leaves a lot of admins and business users gasping for support which also results in your salesforce org cluttered with many tasks on a pending status. So How do you manage these tasks that need to be done and keep the lights on?

Flow and Automation to the rescue.

The solution is to first come up with a solution to flag a user when he is out of office. There are a couple of options to do this.

1. If you use chatter, there is an option to set out of office for users.
2. If you are not using chatter and there is an option in your HR system like Workday or Peoplesoft, you can use your integration with your HR system to flag the user for out of office with a custom attribute.
3. The other elegant solution is to use flows to automatically assign users to a queue and have queue users act on it.

Flow solution with details

Steps below:

1. Create a queue under set up || Queues. Give the Name of queue as “Task Escalated Queue”.
2. Add the required members to the queue and take note of the queue record id.
3. Then create a custom formula field under set up || Object Manager || Activity. Name it as Elapsed Task. Formula can look like (TODAY() – DATEVALUE(Lastmodifieddate)) > 2.
4. Then create a scheduled path flow that runs daily as below on task Object.

Above screenshot queries tasks where “Elapsed Task” formula field is true and Task owner is a user, which we check by querying the owner’s record id which starts with “005” for a user.

1. Then perform an Update operation to the Owner of the task and assign the Escalation queue as the owner. Here the record id of the queue has been captured and referred in the assignment.

As an alternative, a GET element can also be added to get the respective queue id OR we can store queue id as a resource element and assign to the ownerid value.

We then save and run this flow, which will then assign the Task to an escalation queue if it was idle for N number of days.

To summarize the approach for assigning tasks to users who are out of the office, here are the best options.

1. Figure out a solution to flag a user with an attribute for out-of-office with updates from the HR system to flag users who are out of office.
2. Build a flow solution which is shown above which can query users or tasks that are overdue and assign the users to a queue that can be acted by users on behalf of the out-of-office users.
3. Have a business process with training where escalation queue owners can take respective actions on behalf of out-of-office users and keep the leadership team notified. A follow-up on a completed task report to the out-of-office user will help the out-of-office user follow up with the escalation queue team on pending tasks and status.

As always, feel free to post your comments below or contact Manoj for further questions. You can follow this thread on any pending questions as well.