Tip #564: Avoid cherry-picking in the queues

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Dynamics CRM TipperWe have not done a truckstop for a while but Joel “Standing on the shoulders of other MVPs” Lindstrom just could not help himself.

Question

I work with many customer service deployments, and a very common request for certain types of groups is to have a way to auto feed a queue item to a user rather than having users pick an item. Cherry picking means picking the easy items and leaving the difficult ones for your coworkers to handle.

Have any of you come across this? How did you address this requirement? In my search I found 4-6 add ons for salesforce for this, but nothing MSCRM related.

Could write a custom interface or a “get item” button that gets the next available item I guess. Just looking for feedback if anyone has built anything for this in the past.

Answers

Dylan “Not a real Kiwi” Haskins: I used a Client side “Get Next Item” button that leverages a queue / fetchxml to determine which items and which order to allow the pick from. Gets added to the queue command bar. Have used it for a number of clients with great success.

Chris “That’s Mr ADFS For You” Cognetta: We route a round robin plugin that assigns the incoming case to the user based on a bunch of settings. It has stopped the cherry picking.

Demian Raschkovan takes the cake on this occasion though: you gave me some “inspiration” with this. I added a Workflow Activity to my “Dynamics CRM 2016 Workflow Tools” solution on Codeplex. With this solution you can automate the Queue Item Picking with workflows, avoiding the “Cherry Picking” issue. (Documentation is available – t.j.)

On next version I’ll add new activities in order to Query how many Items are in each queue.

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