Definition
Work Item is a core Salesforce concept that supports the management of customer data and business relationships. It is commonly used across sales, service, and marketing processes to maintain a complete view of customer interactions.
Real-World Example
a business analyst at Clearwater Inc. uses Work Item to improve how the organization tracks relationships and interactions. By setting up Work Item properly, the team gains better visibility into their customer base, which leads to more informed decisions and stronger customer relationships across the board.
Why Work Item Matters
A Work Item in Salesforce is a record that represents a unit of work assigned to a user or queue within the Omni-Channel routing framework. It is the mechanism through which cases, leads, chats, custom objects, and other supported record types are distributed to agents based on availability, capacity, and skill. Work Items solve the problem of manual work assignment by replacing supervisors who manually distribute tasks with an intelligent, automated routing engine.
As service organizations scale, Work Items become the backbone of equitable workload distribution. Without them, some agents end up overwhelmed while others sit idle, leading to uneven performance metrics and SLA breaches. Organizations that do not properly configure Work Item priorities, routing configurations, and agent capacity often find that high-priority items wait behind low-priority ones or that agents receive work beyond what they can handle simultaneously. Fine-tuning Work Item routing is essential for maintaining both agent satisfaction and customer service quality.
How Organizations Use Work Item
- Pinnacle Support Services — Pinnacle configured Omni-Channel to route Case-based Work Items to agents based on skill groups. Billing cases go to agents with billing expertise and technical cases route to certified technical reps. This skill-based routing reduced average handle time by 25% because agents receive only the cases they are best equipped to resolve.
- Velocity Commerce — Velocity uses Work Items to route incoming chat requests alongside email cases through Omni-Channel, with chat Work Items assigned higher priority than email. During peak hours, agents always receive chats first since customers expect immediate responses, while email cases queue until chat volume subsides, balancing real-time and asynchronous support.
- Atlas Financial — Atlas created a custom object called 'Loan Review' and configured it as a Work Item type in Omni-Channel. When a loan application hits the review stage, it becomes a Work Item routed to the next available underwriter. This replaced a shared spreadsheet system where reviews were claimed manually, reducing review pickup time from 4 hours to 12 minutes.