The Facilities Requests That Nobody Owns
Cityside's facilities team handles 500 requests a month. Agents create them as ordinary cases, typing 'Facilities' into the category field and choosing an assignment group by hand. Nothing else is set: no SLA, no mandatory location or access-instruction fields, and no consistent structure, so reporting on facilities requests is a free-text search on the category. Twenty-two percent take more than five days, and the facilities manager cannot tell a lightbulb replacement from a building evacuation in the queue. A portal request form exists but produces a bare case with no category. A case template and the case type capability are both available and unused. The team wants the portal, phone and email channels to behave the same way.
1. Why is the category-field approach failing, and what does a case type give you that the category does not?
Read the worked answer
A category is a label on a record; a case type is a contract about how that record behaves.
What the category cannot do, and the case type can:
- Defaults at insert: assignment group and priority applied by configuration rather than by an agent remembering. That is the direct cause of unowned cases.
- Mandatory, type-specific fields: location, access instructions, evacuation flag. Free-text category values cannot enforce structure, so the facilities manager's queue is unclassifiable.
- SLA binding: an SLA definition scoped to the facilities case type and its priorities, so the 22% long-tail is measurable rather than anecdotal.
- A playbook of steps the agent follows in the workspace, which is how you get consistent handling across channels.
- Stable reporting: reports and dashboards keyed on case type instead of a string that agents misspell.
Where the case type record in your release does not carry every default you need, add a before-insert rule keyed on case type - but keep the type as the anchor so future channels inherit the behaviour for free.
2. Would you use the case template, the record producer, or the case type - and for what?
Read the worked answer
All three, in different roles. They are not alternatives.
- Case type is the model: it defines the fields, defaults, SLA and playbook for 'Facilities request'. Build this first; everything else references it.
- Record producer / portal form is the creation experience for the portal channel. The producer should create a case of the facilities type and set the type and required fields, so a portal submission and a phone submission produce structurally identical cases.
- Case template is agent convenience: pre-filled content for common recurring requests (for example, a standard access-request wording). It speeds up authoring and must not be the mechanism that determines type, routing or SLA - templates are optional, and a case created without one must still behave correctly.
Rule of thumb: if an agent skipped the template, nothing should break. If an agent skipped the case type, everything does - which is why the type has to be set by configuration on every channel, not chosen by the agent.
3. What must be true for a facilities case to be owned and timed from the moment it is created, on every channel?
Read the worked answer
Ownership and timing must not depend on a human step after save.
- Default assignment group set at insert by the case type (or a before-insert rule), so phone, portal and email all produce an owned case. An agent typing a group is a defect, not a process.
- SLA definition scoped to the facilities case type, with its start condition true at creation - not conditioned on a field the portal form does not collect.
- Mandatory fields enforced where they can be bypassed: the portal form and the workspace form must both require location and access instructions. A UI policy alone fails on email-created cases; enforce with a data policy or server-side rule so all channels comply.
- A playbook with the triage steps, including the evacuation flag that escalates out of the normal queue.
- Test matrix before go-live: one case per channel (workspace, portal, inbound email), verifying the same assignment group, the same SLA attached at creation, and the same mandatory fields enforced.
If any channel can create a facilities case that lands unassigned, the design is not finished.