Round Robin Rounded Up: OpenCRM’s solution to record assignment (and more!)

First of all, what is a Round Robin? It’s a tool that shares workload equally among Users or Teams — if you have four Users and a batch of 100 new Leads come in, Round Robin means each user gets 25. Round Robin has been around in OpenCRM for a while, but it’s recently had some pretty major changes. Let’s have a look.

CRM Round Robin Explained

Round Robin is an incredibly useful tool that shares workload equally among Users or Teams. If you have four Users and an incoming batch of 100 new Leads, applying Round Robin means each user gets 25 new Lead records assigned to them.

General Round Robin Settings

Enabling Round Robin works exactly as it did before:

Round Robin can be applied to Companies, Contacts, HelpDesk, and Leads, and works whenever a new record is created — manually, via an import, or through workflow.

Adding Users to Round Robin

This is where the first real change appears. Previously, Users were added to Round Robin based on their individual user record. Now, it’s handled at the Team level — Users are added to Teams from their record or the Team management page, found under User Management in Settings.

That means at least one Team will contain your “Round Robiners” — though there could be two, which we’ll get to shortly. Turning on Round Robin for a Team reveals two new columns: Record Sharing and Round Robin.

Setting up Round Robin itself is straightforward:

Round Robin will now begin doling out the workload, alternating among team members.

Record Sharing

There’s an additional setting on the Team screen called Record Sharing. Once ticked, it allows records to be shared within that Team, depending on your permissions model.

First, check which of your Default Organisation Sharing Access (DOSA) settings your system currently uses — these control which Users can view, create/edit, or delete records across different modules, including whether Users in the same Team can see or interact with each other’s records.

This is useful when, say, a sales team needs to work in unison on the same customers — seeing and editing shared records — without Users outside that team being able to see, edit or delete them.

Using Multiple Teams

What if you have two Sales Teams, but only one of them can be trusted to share nicely? The new Record Sharing controls let Team A have sharing switched on, so they can collaborate freely, while Team B has it switched off — your general permissions model stays exactly as it was, but that smaller group won’t see or interact with each other’s records.

Say your company receives Leads from all over the country. You could set up multiple Teams within the Leads module to use Round Robin — Team A handling Leads from the North, Team B from the South. Team A (the nice ones) can view and edit each other’s records; Team B has Record Sharing disabled, so there’s no sharing the Leads from the South.

This can be enabled and fine-tuned for any module that uses Round Robin — Leads, Contacts, Companies, and HelpDesk. And as always, it’s included as standard, with no paywall in sight.