Manage cases in Customer Service
Managing the case lifecycle
Cases are the core record in Customer Service and the anchor for entitlements, SLAs, queues, and routing. Understand the status/status reason model: a case is Active, Resolved, or Cancelled, and each status has its own set of valid status reasons. Only Active cases are freely editable - once resolved the case becomes read-only until it is reactivated. Cancelled cases cannot be reactivated, so cancel only when the issue was never really worked. Resolving goes through the Resolve Case dialog, which captures resolution details; cancelling uses a similar dialog.
Cases are created manually, by email through record creation and update rules (Power Automate flows that create or update records from activities), from portals and social channels through omnichannel, and from other entities through relationships. Parent and child cases model a related set of issues; merging cases into a primary case moves activities and cancels the merged ones. Subjects form a classification tree used by rules, routing, and reporting. Queues hold unassigned work, and queue items move through states (In process, Picked, Removed) as agents take and release work.
Traps: candidates confuse case origin with the channel field; they assume a resolved case can be edited without reactivation; and they assume deleting a parent always cascades to children.
Rule of thumb: if the record must stay auditable and count in reporting, keep it Active and resolve it - never delete it. Worked example: two emails report the same outage. Merge the newer into the older primary case so the SLA timer and entitlement terms remain on the case with the earliest creation time.