Case management and routing

Cases arrive by email, web forms, phone, chat, and messaging. Rules then decide who owns each case, what reply the customer gets, and what happens when a case sits too long. A support process controls which status values a case can move through.

Case channels

• Email-to-Case: Turns emails sent to a support address into cases and threads replies back onto the same case. On-Demand Email-to-Case runs in Salesforce with no software to install.
• Web-to-Case: Generates an HTML form that creates cases from your website, with a daily limit.
• Messaging and chat: Customers reach agents through web chat or messaging apps, and conversations link to cases.
• Experience Cloud sites: Customer portals and help centers where customers log cases, search Knowledge, and help each other.

Routing rules

• Case assignment rules: One active rule with ordered entries. The first matching entry assigns the case to a user or queue.
• Auto-response rules: Send the customer an email template when a case is created from email or the web, chosen by ordered entries.
• Escalation rules: Act when a case stays open too long: reassign it, notify someone, or both. Age can be counted in business hours, and a rule can have several time-based actions.
• Queues: Group cases for a team. Members take ownership from the queue's list view, and queues can send an email when a case arrives.
• Omni-Channel: Pushes work to available agents based on their capacity and, optionally, skills, instead of agents picking from a queue.

Support processes and case setup

• Support process: The set of Case Status values for a case record type, so billing and technical cases can follow different steps.
• Case teams: Named roles (such as escalation engineer) with set access levels, added to a case so several people can work it.
• Contact matching: Email-to-Case and Web-to-Case match the sender's email to an existing contact and link the case to that contact and its account.
• Closed status values close a case. Customize the close case page layout if agents need to fill in resolution details.