Queue Member
A Queue Member in Salesforce is a User who has been added to a Queue, granting them the right to claim ownership of records assigned to that Queue.
Definition
A Queue Member in Salesforce is a User who has been added to a Queue, granting them the right to claim ownership of records assigned to that Queue. Under the hood, Queue membership is stored as Group Member records (with the parent Group having Type = "Queue"), since Queues in Salesforce are a specialized type of Group. Each Queue Member has visibility into all records currently owned by the Queue, can change their ownership to themselves (claiming a record) or assign them to other team members, and is included in any Queue-targeted notifications, email alerts, or routing rules. Queue Members are the operational core of any work-distribution model in Salesforce — Service Cloud queues for Cases, Sales Cloud queues for Leads, and custom-object queues for any team-shared workload. Adding or removing Queue Members directly affects who can act on the queued work, making roster management one of the most frequent admin tasks in service-heavy and high-volume sales orgs.
In plain English
“A Queue Member is a user assigned to a Salesforce Queue — like one rep on a support team that shares a pool of incoming Cases. Any Queue Member can pick up a record from the Queue and start working on it. Adding or removing a Queue Member directly controls who can act on the queue's shared workload.”
Worked example
A customer support team operates a "Tier 2 Escalations" Queue that holds Cases requiring senior agent attention. The team has 12 senior agents, each added as Queue Members. When Tier 1 agents escalate a complex Case, they change the Case's OwnerId to the Tier 2 Queue. The Case now sits in the Queue's pool, visible to all 12 Queue Members through a "My Team's Cases" list view. The next available senior agent claims the Case by changing OwnerId from the Queue to themselves, and works it to resolution. When two senior agents go on parental leave, the admin removes them as Queue Members for two months — they no longer see queued Cases in their list views, and the workload distributes naturally across the remaining 10 active members.
Why Queue Member matters
Queue Membership is technically Group Membership with the parent Group having Type = 'Queue'. This means a Queue Member row is just a Group Member row pointing to a Queue-type Group. Adding a Queue Member through Setup > Queues > [Queue Name] > Edit > Selected Members produces an underlying Group Member insert; the two views (Queue Members in Setup vs Group Members via SOQL) show the same data through different UIs.
Queue Members can be Users or other Groups. Adding a Public Group as a Queue Member effectively delegates Queue membership to whoever is in that Public Group — useful when a Queue should always include 'everyone in the Western Region Sales Group', and the team roster is maintained centrally on that Group rather than on every Queue separately. Group nesting is allowed but requires careful design to keep effective membership traceable.
Queue Members can also assign records to other Users — either to themselves (claiming work) or to teammates. This delegation pattern is important because the Queue itself is an OwnerId reference, but Queues do not have an inbox in the traditional sense — work distribution happens through Queue Members opting in via list views and ownership changes. Queue assignment automation (assignment rules, auto-routing through Omni-Channel) bypasses the manual claim step, but the underlying ownership model is the same — a Queue Member ends up as the Case Owner once routing fires.
How organizations use Queue Member
Maintains Queue Members for tier-based support queues — Tier 1, Tier 2, Specialist Knowledge — with shift rosters added and removed weekly. Cases route into the appropriate Queue, and the next available Queue Member claims them through Lightning list views or Omni-Channel routing.
Adds new SDRs to a 'New Leads' Queue as they ramp up, and removes them when they transfer to other roles. Lead assignment rules route web-form submissions into the Queue; SDRs work them on a first-come-first-served basis from the Queue's list view.
Maintains regional Queue Members for service-request queues by service territory. Work Order routing places requests into the appropriate regional Queue; on-call dispatchers (the Queue Members) claim and assign them to field technicians, with the Queue providing a single workload pool per region.
Trust & references
Straight from the source — Salesforce's reference material on Queue Member.
- Queues in Salesforce HelpSalesforce
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