What a case carries
A case does not store the history it is answered from — it reads it, at the moment somebody works it. The person, their identities, the company, the lifecycle stage, the timeline, open follow-ups, past deals and earlier cases are assembled to a fixed grounding budget alongside Knowledge and memory. Reading rather than copying is why a case opened in March is answered from what is true in June.
Assembled, not stored#
The distinction sounds academic until a customer changes address, consolidates two of their email accounts, or has a second deal closed while an old case is still open. A case that had copied the relationship at opening time would answer from a snapshot of a world that has moved. Connect keeps the case thin and reads the relationship on demand, so the answer is drawn from the record as it stands now.
The cost of that choice is query work, which is why assembling one relationship is treated as an engineering problem rather than an afterthought. The same discipline that took the operator's customer list from 5,574 database statements to 3 applies here: the history behind a case is fetched in set-based queries, not one row at a time per channel.
What is assembled#
| Source | What it contributes | Why it matters to the answer |
|---|---|---|
| The Person and their identities | Who this is, and every address they reach you from | A reply on WhatsApp knows what the email thread said |
| The Company | The organisation and the other people in it | A colleague's earlier case is not a stranger's |
| Lifecycle stage | Where the relationship has got to | A client and a prospect asking the same question deserve different answers |
| The timeline | Calls, messages and events in the order the customer met them | Stops Connect repeating what was already said, or contradicting it |
| Open follow-ups | What is still owed to this person | A promise made last week is part of the answer to today's complaint |
| Deals and earlier cases | What was bought, and what has gone wrong before | A recurring fault reads as recurring instead of new |
| Knowledge and memory | Grounded facts about the business, and what Connect remembers about this person | The answer is the workspace's answer, not the model's general knowledge |
The budget it is assembled to#
Context is bounded on purpose. Grounding is assembled to roughly 2,000 characters and four facts of Knowledge, about 700 characters of memory and about 600 characters for the contact block. A budget is not a limitation being apologised for: an answer built from everything the workspace knows is a summary of the workspace, and an answer built from the four most relevant facts is an answer to the customer.
What is deliberately left out#
- Anything belonging to another workspace. Isolation is enforced in three independent layers, so this is not a policy the assembly step can be talked out of.
- The full text of every past message. The timeline gives order and substance; the budget decides how much text travels with it.
- Commercial terms Knowledge does not support. A price, an SLA or a warranty that cannot be grounded is refused and escalated rather than improvised — the refusal is the correct behaviour.
- Facts nobody supplied. Connect does not fill a gap in a customer's record with a plausible guess in order to make an answer read better.
- Another customer's case, even in the same company, where the workspace's own rules keep them apart.
When the context is wrong#
Check the person first: an answer that ignores an obvious earlier conversation usually means that conversation is attached to a second record for the same human.
Result Merging the two records brings both sides' identities, follow-ups, deals and cases onto one person, and the next answer sees all of it.
If a fact is wrong rather than missing, correct it where it lives — in Knowledge, or as a memory — rather than in the reply.
Result The correction changes what every future case is answered from, instead of one message.
If the case is answering from too little, look at what the relationship actually holds before assuming the budget is at fault.
Result An empty timeline is a records problem; a full timeline with a thin answer is a grounding problem, and they are fixed in different places.
Questions#
Does a case freeze the customer's history when it is opened?
No. The history is read when the case is worked, so a case opened months ago is answered from the relationship as it stands today, including deals and conversations that happened after it was opened.
Why does the answer not quote every earlier message?
Because grounding is budgeted — roughly 2,000 characters and four facts of Knowledge, about 700 characters of memory, about 600 for the contact block. Selecting the relevant history is what makes the reply specific instead of a recital of the account.
Can a case see anything from another workspace?
No. Every record belongs to exactly one workspace and three independent isolation layers enforce it. A customer's case cannot read another customer's anything, and neither can the operator's.