Cases
A case is a threaded conversation with a customer: a question, a request or an issue, owned by somebody, worked to a resolution and closed. The thread is the record, so everything said in both directions stays with it.
What you need: the CRM Cases permission, plus the CRM section the case’s category routes to. Sales cases additionally need the Cases & Email feature; Customer Services and Credit Control cases do not.
The case reference
Section titled “The case reference”Every case carries a reference in the form CS-ABC-123, made from characters that cannot be confused when read aloud, so you can safely quote it to a customer.
Search finds it in any spelling. “CS-ABC-123”, “cs abc123” and “csabc123” all reach the same case.
Categories route the case
Section titled “Categories route the case”The category does more than describe the case. It decides which section’s queue the case sits in, and can pre-set a department and SLA targets.
A category carries:
- Its name, availability and display position.
- The Workspace Section it routes to: Sales, Customer Services or Credit Control.
- A Default Department, applied when the case is created. It must have at least one user who can sign in.
- A First Response Target and a Resolution Target, in calendar hours. Leave them blank for no target.
The supplied categories are Billing Question, Service Request, Account Update, Other, Instruction Question (all Customer Services), Proposal Question and Sales Email (Sales), and Payment Delay (Credit Control). None carry SLA targets or a default department out of the box, so set those to suit your team.
Important: the section follows the category on every save. Re-categorising a case moves it between queues, and you cannot move a case into a section you do not hold, because it would vanish from your view and cases cannot be deleted.
Categories are maintained in CRM Setup.
Statuses
Section titled “Statuses”| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Awaiting Our Reply | The ball is with you |
| With Customer | You have replied and are waiting |
| On Hold | Parked, but still open |
| Waiting on Supplier | Parked pending somebody outside |
| Resolved | Answered. A customer reply reopens it |
| Closed | Finished. A customer reply also reopens it |
The first four count as open. Resolved is the soft ending and Closed the hard one, but both reopen if the customer comes back, which is what stops a conversation being lost.
The queues
Section titled “The queues”The Cases page serves all three sections, one at a time. Every tab shows a live count.
| Tab | Shows |
|---|---|
| Awaiting reply | Everything waiting on you, claimed or not |
| Unassigned | Open cases nobody owns - the pool to pick from |
| My department | Open cases in your departments’ queues |
| Mine | Open cases you own |
| With customer | Waiting on the customer |
| Waiting on supplier | Waiting on somebody outside |
| On hold | Parked |
| Breaching | Past an SLA target, or 80% of the way through one |
| Drafts to review | Cases holding an unsent draft reply |
| Closed | Closed and resolved |
Breaching appears only where at least one case sits in a category with an SLA target. Drafts to review appears only when a draft exists. Neither is a permanent fixture, so their absence means there is nothing there.
Filters: category, priority and owner. The owner filter is hidden on the Unassigned and Mine tabs, where it would contradict the tab.
Showing switches between the team’s cases and your own, for holders of the Customer Services (or Sales, or Credit Control) team queues permission. Under My cases the status tabs show your cases plus unclaimed ones, never a colleague’s claimed work.
Columns are Customer, Case, Category, Priority, Status, Assigned and how long it has been Waiting. On the parked tabs the last column becomes the follow-up date; on Closed it becomes the last activity.
Status chips flag what needs attention: red SLA breached, amber SLA due in 3h, and Draft ready.
Take next case
Section titled “Take next case”Take next case claims the most urgent, longest-waiting unassigned case awaiting a reply, honouring your current category and priority filters. From the My department tab it stays inside your departments.
It deliberately ignores cases that are with the customer or parked, because nothing needs doing on those.
Two operators can press it at the same time safely. Each gets a different case, and if somebody beats you to the last one the page says so rather than pretending.
SLA targets
Section titled “SLA targets”Where a category carries targets, the CRM runs two clocks from the moment the case was created:
- The first-response clock runs while the case is awaiting your reply, and stops permanently at your first sent reply.
- The resolution clock runs while the case is being actively worked, either awaiting your reply or with the customer.
A case turns amber at 80% of a target and red once it is past. Chips read in minutes under two hours, hours under two days, and days beyond that.
Two things to understand about the clocks:
- They run in calendar hours, not working hours. A target of 24 hours set on a Friday afternoon is breached by Saturday afternoon.
- Parking a case removes it from every SLA surface, but does not move the deadline. On Hold and Waiting on Supplier cases drop out of the Breaching tab, the chips, the badge and the digest. When you resume one that has passed its target, it is breaching again immediately.
Working a case
Section titled “Working a case”The case page shows the thread on the left and the case’s state on the right.
The thread
Section titled “The thread”Four kinds of entry appear:
| Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
| Message | A real message, from the customer or from staff |
| Internal note | Staff-only text, never sent |
| System event | An assignment or status change, recorded automatically |
| Draft reply | A reply written but not sent, tagged Draft - not sent |
Extra chips flag an unverified sender on inbound email, and not sent yet on an outbound message still waiting on approval or the send queue. Staff see that; the customer does not.
Attachments from inbound email are listed and downloadable, and inline images display in place.
Replying
Section titled “Replying”Reply / Add Note opens the reply form with three choices:
- A reply goes to the customer. The case moves to With Customer, your first-response clock stops, and the customer gets an email carrying a link to read and answer on the web.
- Internal note records something that happened off-system, such as a phone call, without notifying anybody.
- Save as draft leaves the reply on the thread for a colleague to review and send.
Canned replies appear above the box as a picker. Choosing one appends its text to what you have written, so nothing you have typed is lost. Canned replies are configured per category, or for every category, in CRM Setup, and can carry customer merge fields.
Important: if an inbound customer message lands while your reply is in flight, the inbound wins. The case stays awaiting a reply rather than being handed back to the customer.
Draft replies
Section titled “Draft replies”If you do not hold CRM Case Sending for the case’s section, every reply you write is saved as a draft, whatever you tick. The button on the case even relabels itself Draft Reply / Add Note so you know before you start.
This is how a trainee, or an AI assistant working through the API, can write replies safely.
A draft sits on the thread with Send, Edit and Discard controls. Editing and discarding belong to the draft’s author or anybody with the send permission; sending needs the send permission. Where one person drafts and another sends, the thread records both.
Important: a draft changes nothing about the case. It stays exactly where it was, which is why the Drafts tab, the Draft ready chip, the menu badge and the digest row all exist.
If a colleague edits a draft after your page was drawn, sending is refused and you are asked to read the new version first.
Actions
Section titled “Actions”Take Case and Assign
Section titled “Take Case and Assign”Take Case claims an unowned case for you. Assign sets an Owner and a Department, either or both. Leave the owner blank to return it to the unassigned queue; leave the department blank to take it out of a department queue.
Important: the person you assign to must be able to work CRM cases and must hold this case’s section for the customer’s dealer, or the case would disappear into a queue nobody can open. A department must have at least one user who can sign in.
Priority / Follow-up
Section titled “Priority / Follow-up”Changes the priority (Low, Normal, High or Urgent) and the follow-up date. A blank follow-up date clears it. Follow-up dates appear on the calendar and in the Today strip.
Resolve and Close
Section titled “Resolve and Close”Resolve marks the case answered, with an optional staff-only note. Close is for threads that should not simply reopen. Both leave the thread visible to the customer, and both reopen if the customer replies.
Hold and Waiting on Supplier
Section titled “Hold and Waiting on Supplier”Park the case. Hold takes it out of the working queues; Waiting on Supplier puts it in its own queue. Both take an optional follow-up date so it resurfaces, and an optional staff-only reason. Leaving the follow-up blank keeps the existing date.
Resume
Section titled “Resume”Takes the case off hold and returns it to the awaiting-reply queue.
Record Dispute and Resolve Dispute
Section titled “Record Dispute and Resolve Dispute”Record a billing dispute against the case, citing the invoice in question. While it is open, Credit Control chasing of that invoice is held.
Escalate to Complaint
Section titled “Escalate to Complaint”Records the case as a formal complaint on the Ofcom register, carrying the case with it.
Required: the complaint Category, the Channel it arrived by, and the date Received (which defaults to today and cannot be in the future).
Optional: Pause Credit Control chasing for the customer while the complaint is unresolved.
Important: only fixed-choice fields are recorded on the complaint. The case thread remains the narrative, deliberately.
Inbound email into cases
Section titled “Inbound email into cases”Where Inbound Mail Opens Cases is switched on for a dealer, unmatched email from a recognised customer opens a case instead of raising a ticket.
The recipient address chooses the category, using the Inbound Case Address Categories setting - one line per mapping, an address fragment then a category, for example billing@ billing-question. The longest matching fragment wins, and anything unmatched uses the Other category.
Three rules keep it sane:
- It joins rather than duplicates. Where the customer already has an open case in that category, the email is added to it and the case is reopened.
- A thread caps at 200 customer-visible messages. Past that a fresh case is opened.
- A customer caps at 20 open cases. Past that, inbound mail falls back to the ticket flow rather than being lost.
New inbound cases arrive unassigned, in the category’s section and default department, with a TODO raised so somebody picks them up.
Things to know
Section titled “Things to know”- A case can never be deleted, and can never be moved to a different customer. The thread is the record.
- A staff-started case opens With Customer, not awaiting a reply. Creating it contacts nobody; use Reply to send the opening message.
- Every assignment and status change is written to the thread as a staff-only event, and those events deliberately do not restart the queue’s waiting clock.
Field reference
Section titled “Field reference”Customer context, subject, ownership and current state of the case.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Reference | Customer-quotable case reference (CS-XXX-XXX), assigned automatically |
| Customer | Customer this case belongs to |
| Deal | CRM deal this case was raised against (proposal questions) |
| Proposal | Proposal this case was raised from |
| Confirmation | Confirmation of Instructions this case was raised from |
| Chase Case | Credit Control case this case was raised from |
| Payment Arrangement | Payment promise that caused this case |
| Source Correspondence | Outbound correspondence this case thread was started by (email threads) |
| Category | What the case is about; routes it to the sales, customer services or credit control queue and may set the starting department |
| Priority | How urgently this case should be worked |
| Subject | Short summary of what the customer is asking |
| Status | Whether the case is awaiting our reply, with the customer, on hold, waiting on a supplier, resolved or closed |
| Owner | Operator handling this case |
| Department | Department whose shared queue holds this case until a user claims it |
| Source | Where the case was started (MyAccount, proposal page, or by an operator) |
| Follow-up Date | When this case should next be looked at; surfaces on the calendar and Today strip |
| Last Message | When the most recent message was added |
| First Responded | When the first staff reply was sent; the first-response clock stops here |
| Resolved | When the case was marked resolved |
| Resolved By | Operator who marked the case resolved |
| Closed | When the case was closed |
| Closed By | Operator who closed the case |
System Information
Section titled “System Information”| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Created | When this case was started |
| Last Modified | Timestamp of the most recent modification to this case |
| Last Updated By | User who last updated this case |
Case message fields
Section titled “Case message fields”Message
Section titled “Message”Sender, audience, content and delivery details for this message.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Case | Case this message belongs to |
| Customer | Customer the case belongs to |
| Direction | Whether the message came from the customer or from our team |
| Kind | A customer-visible message, a staff-only internal note (e.g. logging an off-system email or call), a system event (assignment or status change), or a draft reply awaiting review and send |
| Author | Operator who wrote this message (staff messages only) |
| Contact | Customer contact who wrote this message (customer messages only) |
| Email Address | Email address associated with the customer message |
| Message | The message text (plain text; customer messages are always escaped on display) |
| HTML Body | Sanitised HTML body for messages that arrived or were sent by email (the plain Message text is the fallback rendering) |
| Sent | When this message was added |
| Read | When the message was first read by the other party |
| Sent Email | Delivery record for a staff message sent by email |
| Received Email ID | Inbound email log record this customer message arrived as |
| Correspondence | Correspondence record a staff email message was sent as |
| Email Message-ID | RFC 5322 Message-ID header of the email this message travelled as |
| In Reply To | Message-ID the sender replied to, when their mail client provided one |
| Sender Email | From address an inbound message arrived from |
| Sender Verified | Whether the inbound message passed sender authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) checks |
| Pending Send | A composed email waiting on approval or the send queue: staff can see it, the customer cannot until it has been sent |
System Information
Section titled “System Information”No fields defined for this section.