Support case
A support case is one thing a customer needs sorted out after they have bought: a subject, the detail, the person it belongs to, the conversation it came from, a priority, and a state — open, waiting on the customer, resolved or closed. It exists so that *what is still open for this customer?* has an answer without a second product.
What it holds, and what it deliberately does not#
The record is small on purpose. There are no queues, no service-level clocks and no support tiers, because those are the machinery of a helpdesk and a helpdesk is a product a business buys when it has a support team to run. What Connect needs is narrower: enough structure that an open issue is visible next to the relationship it belongs to, and that a reply on the thread knows the issue exists.
| State | Meaning | Who moves it next |
|---|---|---|
| open | Live, and the workspace owes the next move | You, or Connect drafting a reply |
| waiting_on_customer | Answered; the customer owes the next move | The customer, whose reply reopens the conversation |
| resolved | Fixed, recently enough to still be watched | Nobody, unless it recurs |
| closed | Done | Nobody |
*Waiting on the customer* is the state most often skipped and the one that pays for itself. Without it, every unanswered case looks like neglect on your side, and the genuinely neglected ones stop standing out.
How a case connects to the rest#
- It belongs to a person, so it appears in Customer 360 beside their calls, messages and deals.
- It remembers the thread it came from, so a reply can be read in context rather than as a message on its own.
- When it has been put in front of somebody, it carries the approval it was raised as — which is what stops the case and Needs You from drifting apart and showing two different pictures of the same problem.
- It is one of the sheets in Data, so cases can be sorted, filtered and bulk-edited like any other record.
Four things it is confused with#
- A conversation
- The exchange of messages. One conversation can raise two cases, and one long-running case can span several conversations across channels.
- An opportunity
- Money coming in. A case is a problem to fix. The same customer usually has both, and a support complaint arriving mid-deal is worth seeing next to it.
- A follow-up
- A dated commitment to make contact. A case may generate several; the case is the issue, the follow-up is one act of chasing it.
- An onboarding record
- The structured start of a new client relationship, which is progress rather than a problem — see onboarding.
The distinction that matters commercially is the first one. Counting conversations as cases inflates the number of problems a business appears to have; counting cases as conversations hides how much of a customer's contact is one unresolved thing being raised repeatedly.
Questions#
Does Connect open cases by itself?
It can raise one from a conversation it has classified as support, and the Connect Assistant has tools to create and resolve them. Whether that happens without asking is an autonomy question like any other action.
What happens when a customer replies to a resolved case?
The reply arrives as a message on the conversation, which is where the case is reachable from. Reopening is a decision — a new question on an old thread is often a new case rather than the old one returning.
Is there a service-level clock?
No. Priority is stored, and an old open case is visible as an old open case, but Connect makes no timing promise and shows no countdown, because it would be a promise nothing enforces.