The question asked by everyone new to Salesforce: What is the difference between a role and a profile? Put simply:
Roles determine what data you can see. Profiles dictate what you can do with it.
This is an ever-changing concept as Salesforce works towards ultimately eliminating Profiles and replacing them with Permission Sets.
Reminder: Permission Sets are used in correlation with Profiles to open up access – they cannot be used to restrict access.
Let’s say, for example, that you are the Awesome Admin for Arendale Aeronautics. Your Customer Service model is done by region:
- North America
- South & Central America
- Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA)
- Asia & Pacific (APAC)
All of your support agents need to be able to create and edit Cases, but your agents in APAC should never work on Cases for North America. We would solve for this in Salesforce by creating a profile to be used by all agents – Customer Service Agent. This profile would have Create / Edit permissions on the Case Object. But because of that territory requirement, we would want a role hierarchy that looks something like this:
So our some of our users might be…
| User Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Wanda Partridge | VP Customer Experience – East |
| Alan Richards | Customer Experience Director – EMEA |
| Leticia Morgan | Customer Success Team Lead – EMEA |
| Horacio Alvarez | Customer Success Agent – EMEA |
| Pooja Burde | Customer Success Agent – EMEA |
| Alisha Smith | Customer Experience Director – North America |
| Roberta Perez | Customer Success Team Lead – North America |
Remember how we created only one profile? That means these users are all going to have that same profile. BUT, their varying roles will give them visibility to different records. For example, Wanda will be able to see all cases for EMEA and APAC – all cases owned by Alan, Leticia, Horacio, Pooja, and anyone in APAC we don’t have on our list here. Similarly, Leticia (who manages Horacio and Pooja) will be able to see cases owned by her team members, but not team members in APAC. Depending on our Privacy settings, Pooja and Horacio may not see each others cases either. Alisha and Roberta, on our North America team, will not be able to interact with Pooja and Horacio’s cases. Similarly, Leticia and Alan will not have visibility into Alisha and Roberta’s teams.
SaaSy Sisters 