Purpose: This table is used to manage external customer support requests. It is set up to be accessed by the Customer group and the Base Technical Group.

Use Case

The following sections examine use cases for end users and technicians, respectively.

End User Record Submission

Customers may create support cases using the tab in the end user interface or by sending an email if they have an inbound email address set up.

When a customer submits a support case, the contact information fields automatically populate based on the details in his/her user record. If the user record doesn't contain a value in the Customer Name or Email fields, the customer will be required to enter a value in those fields manually.

The Type of Issue is set by default to Question. If the customer changes it to Installation Issue or Bug, they will be required to fill out the Steps to Reproduce field. The case is assigned by default to the Support Team and the default status is Open.

Technician Record Submission

Power user members may also submit support cases on behalf of a customer, associating the customer with the case. If an internal power user creates a case, they may assign it directly to an individual or a team other than the Support Team and may set its starting status to Open, Assigned, or Closed.

When the record is created, emails are sent to the customer acknowledging receipt of the support case and to the assigned team (or person) telling them the case has been assigned to them.

If a Support Staff technician creates a record in a status of Closed an email is sent to the customer telling them how to reopen their case.

Workflow actions send these emails automatically, but power users can override them if given permission to override workflow actions.

Processing of Records

When a technician works on a case, if they need more information from the customer in order to take further action, they can set the status to Sent to Customer. This will automatically send an email to the customer requesting further information and include the content of the Additional Notes field, an append-only field that is used to communicate with the customer. The email includes a hyperlink for the customer to click to login to edit the case directly.

When the customer edits the case or replies to the email, the status changes to Updated by Customer and an email notifies the assigned person that the customer has replied. The customer is able to update the Additional Notes field directly and any text from an email reply to a system email maps to that same field.

If the customer updates the case at any point, an email notifies the assigned person of the update.

If the technician needs to reassign the case to someone else, they simply change the Assigned Person field to that person's name and the system will email the new assignee notifying them of the reassignment.

The Staff Only Notes field holds working notes that should not be visible to the customer.

When the technician has completed work on the case, they set the Status field to Closed and puts the solution notes into the Solution field. This triggers an email to the customer that includes the content of the Solution field and tells the customer that the work is done. This closing email gives the customer a hotlink back to the record if they wish to reopen it and instructs them to explain why they are not satisfied with the solution. Clicking the hotlink will automatically change the "I Would Like To Reopen My Ticket" field to Yes, which in turn sets the Status of the ticket to Reopened and notifies the assigned person.

By default, no escalation rules are set up for the Support Case table.



Ownership

Records in this table are owned by the individual customer. This means each record is associated with a particular customer login and no other customers will be able to edit that record, though members of the Customer Manager group can view all records submitted by other people at their company.