Case Management
The case is the unit of work
Know the standard object model cold: Case relates to Account, Contact, Asset, Entitlement, Service Contract, and Knowledge, plus child cases through the parent/child hierarchy. Case fields that carry design weight: Status (lifecycle), Priority, Origin, Type/Reason, Case Owner, and Record Type bound to a support process.
Configuration tools to name: queues and queue membership, assignment rules, escalation rules, auto-response rules, case teams with roles so more than the owner can work a case, case comments and the case feed, Email-to-Case threading, case merge for duplicates, and case close reasons for reporting quality.
Traps: building a custom status field instead of using the standard lifecycle; expecting queues to distribute work automatically; assuming case team membership grants access when the sharing model does not allow it; merging duplicates and losing track of the surviving record; forgetting that auto-response rules can fire before routing and mislead customers about who owns their case.
Rule of thumb: model the lifecycle first - the statuses a case actually passes through - then map each transition to a rule, a validation, or a milestone. Every status should have an owner and an exit condition.
Worked example: Cases sit in "New" for days. Investigation shows the assignment rule sends them to a queue, but no Omni-Channel routing or queue membership is active, so nobody is notified. Fixing staffing and routing - not adding a field - resolves the backlog.