Data Management and Data Model for Service
The model behind the service record
Anchor on standard objects and their relationships: Account (the company), Contact (the person), Case (the work), Asset (what they own), Entitlement and Service Contract (what they are owed), Knowledge (the answer), and Work Order / Service Appointment (field work). Cases relate to Accounts and Contacts; entitlements and contracts hang off the Account; assets connect the installed base to the case.
Access is a design decision: organization-wide defaults, role hierarchy, sharing rules, queues, case teams, and manual sharing combine to answer "who can see this case?" Console agents often need the broadest access - but do not open OWD to Public Read/Write just to make a list view work.
Data operations: Data Import Wizard for modest, simple loads; Data Loader for volume, automation, and upsert via external IDs; duplicate rules and matching rules to keep Accounts and Contacts clean; validation rules and field history for integrity.
Traps: ownership skew (one user owning a large share of records) degrades sharing performance; large data volumes need indexes and archiving before they become an incident; deleting a parent record can cascade in ways teams don't expect; migrations without a rollback plan.
Rule of thumb: design the data model and the sharing model together, and archive old cases to a Big Object rather than letting the primary object bloat.
Worked example: A 12-million-case org where an integration user owns most records sees slow list views. Reassigning ownership and archiving closed cases beyond the retention window restores performance without new hardware.