Set up queues to manage activities and cases

Use queues to organize, prioritize, and monitor the progress of your work. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, queues are containers to store anything that needs to be completed or requires an action. For example, completing a task or closing a case. Improve routing and sharing of work by making cases and activities available that everyone can access.

Create queues from incoming cases

By default, a queue is created for each user and team in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can use this default queue to track all your work items, or you can set up queues to reflect your organization's structure, business processes, or both. How you set up queues depends on your unique business needs. For example, you could create separate queues for First Tier and Second Tier product support teams that reflect their differing levels of expertise, or Gold and Silver queues to reflect differing priorities based on service contracts that customers have with your organization.

Queues share cases or activities as a group until these are taken out of the queue, or accepted, by a customer service representative (CSR) who assumes responsibility for handling them.

Create routing rules

After you've created queues, create rules to manage the routing of cases to the appropriate CSR, queue, or user. You can manually assign cases and activities to queues or you can use workflows to route information to queues based on certain criteria.

In addition to cases, you can set incoming e-mail messages to be routed to a queue. Choose to route all incoming messages or to route only those regarding a Microsoft Dynamics CRM account. In the queue, e-mail messages can be assigned to another queue or user, or converted into a case, opportunity, or lead.

Based on the queues and rules you have set in place, Microsoft Dynamics CRM automatically routes activity or case records to a user or queue. Alternately, you can manually assign records to a queue or another user if you want. CSRs can also assign records to themselves from the queues.