I’ve lately been involved with quite a lot of Service Cloud implementations.  One thing that I’ve noticed almost all of them have in common is that their Cases never seem to always go to the right Department – or they need to be sent to another mid-Case.  The most common complaint usually has to deal with how many screens someone has to go through to successfully reassign the Case, especially if you’re in the Feed View and not the Detail View of the Service Console.  If you noticed, Owner isn’t an option for us in a Record Update on the Quick Action Page Layout.  So, that means we have to get creative to solve this business problem!

We need to make sure we have a few things built before we begin.  In this case, we need to add two fields to our Cases.

The first field is going to be a dropdown that will allow us to mirror the list of Queues available for Cases.  We will call this Assign to Queue.

The next field we need to create is a User Lookup.  This we’re going to call Assign to User.  We are using this in place of the Owner field, because that isn’t allowed (at the time of this post). Note: this is a Lookup to the USER Object, not CASE.  The Child Relationship Name is referring to what this Lookup would be called in relationship to the User Object on a Page Layout (if that was visible), not that it is a Lookup to the User.

We could make a Validation Rule to only allow one of those fields to be filled out, but we’re just going to do a decision of ‘what matters’ in our Process Builder that will ignore that being needed.

Now that we have our Custom Fields built, lets make sure every value on the Reassign to Queue field has a match!

Now that we have that taken care of, lets build our Action!  Navigate to the Buttons, Links, and Actions section under Cases and then select New Action.

For this Action we are going to be doing a Record Update.  This is because we are going to be updating one of the Assign to fields we created at the beginning.

You have the option to insert your own Icon here.  I like to do this for my clients and even customize it to be one of the colors from their logo.  I’ve got a post coming shortly on how you would do this, but for the meantime you can go checkout http://www.lightningdesignsystem.com by yourself!

Now we need to clear out default layout our Action has.

 

To finish our Action we just need to drag in our Queue and User fields.  Once you do this hit Save and you’re done with your Action!

Now we need to go add it to our Case’s Page Layout.  We want to drag it down to the Quick Actions section.  If you haven’t customized your Salesforce1 Actions yet, they’ll just mirrors your Quick Actions layout.

 

And this is what it looks like!

 

Now, lets jump over and build out our Flow!  (Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Flows)

The first step is going to be grabbing our Record Lookup.

We’re going to be needing to create a variable to store our Queue Name, which we will pass in from our Process Builder.

Notice, we are using a filter to make sure that Type = Queue.  This is because the Group Object houses more than just Queues.  It houses other types of Groups like Public Groups!  We just want to make sure we bring back the correct ID in case another type of Group has the same Name.

Now lets create a variable to store that ID that we are looking to get.

Our finished Record Lookup will look like this:

Lets set it as our starting element

The next thing we are going to do is to use a Decision to validate that we found an Id.  You can read more about it in my post on using Decisions as your Test Coverage, so we won’t cover this step in detail here.

Now, lets drag in a Record Update element so that we can update our Case!

We want to create a variable to house our Case Id that we are going to pass in from our Process Builder.  This allows us to make sure we are updating the correct Case.

We need to update the OwnerId with our  variable var_QueueId, and to update the Assign to Queue field with an empty string so that it can be used again.

After saving our Record Update, we need to connect our elements together and then save our Flow.

Make sure you activate your Flow or it can’t be referenced in Process Builder!

Now, our Flow is completed and activated, but right now its doing nothing!  So we need to have a Process Builder trigger it.  However, did you notice it seems like we’re missing something?  We also have the Assign to User field.  We didn’t put that in our Flow!  Well, turns out we don’t need to.  We can take care of that in our Process Builder!

So lets go create a new Process Builder for this.  (Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Process Builder)

Set this to have the ability to fire from the Case Object on when a record is created or edited.

For our Criteria we need it to be whenever our Assign to User is filled out, which would be the equivalent of saying that it isn’t null.  So, lets use “is null” equals “false” as our conditions.

When this happens, we want to do a Record Update to change the OwnerId to the Assign to User Id, as well as we want to clear out any values in the Assign to User and Assign to Queue fields.

Now that we’ve got our first situation complete (when the Assign to User is chosen), lets work on our second one (when Assign to Queue was chosen).

When we meet this criteria, we want to go to our Flow and do our query to see if we find a matching Queue.  So lets create our Flow Action and pass in our variables.

Hit Save and then Activate your Process Builder and you’re done!  Go grab a nice drink and enjoy your accomplishment!

Hopefully the combination of Actions, Flow, and Process Builder has got your mind racing with cool automations you can make yourself!