Ask for help on a case, and bring in the account team
When a case gets stuck, asking for help used to mean writing "@someone please help" in an internal note and hoping. Now the request has a queue, an owner and a clock, and the answer comes back into the case.
When a case gets stuck, asking for help used to mean writing "@someone please help" in an internal note and hoping. Now the request has a queue, an owner and a clock, and the answer comes back into the case.
Asking for help
Open the case, find the Ask for help panel, write what is blocking you and say who you are asking:
- Whoever coordinates: you are stuck and someone who runs the operation should look.
- Another team: this belongs to a different queue. Pick the queue.
- A specialist: you need whoever knows a subject. Pick the skill, the person, or both.
- The account team: sales and success, whoever answers for this customer.
Mark it urgent when it should go to the top of the queue. Asking for help does NOT reassign the case: the owner stays the owner, and whoever picks the request up commits to answering, not to taking over.
One live request per case. While one is open or picked up, the form is replaced by the request itself; the history of earlier requests stays on the case.
Who to call
When you ask a specialist, the panel suggests people by crossing two things the product already knows:
- the skills registered under Settings and Skills, with the level of each person;
- who solved similar cases before, judged by category, product and the words in the subject.
Each name comes with the reason it is there, and with whoever is out of rotation or at their open case limit shown at the bottom, with that reason written out. If your workspace has no skills registered and no similar case solved yet, the list comes back empty and says so: an alphabetical list of colleagues would not be a suggestion.
The Needs help queue
The supervision wallboard has a Needs help panel: what is waiting, what nobody picked up yet, and the median time until someone does. Anyone who attends cases can pick a request up and answer it, on purpose: the point is that whoever knows the answer answers.
Answering closes the request and writes the answer back into the case as an internal note, so the next person to open the case can see what was concluded.
When writing is not enough
Turn the request into a swarm session with one click. The session keeps the roles (reporter, expert, scribe), the deadline and the outcome; whoever had picked the request up joins as expert.
A swarm session can also get a channel: a group in the team chat with everyone in the session, the question written in the first message and the outcome written at the end. It is the team chat you already use, not a second inbox, and it is not a Slack or Teams channel.
Sales and success
On a company, an opportunity or a contact, the Support on this account panel shows how the customer is doing with support: open cases, critical ones, cases past their target, what has been untouched for over a month, and who answers for the account.
When a case at an account turns critical, whoever answers for that account is notified: the account owner and the owners of open deals. The owner of the case is not notified, because that person is already looking at it, and the same case does not become news again tomorrow.
What this does not do
Slack and Teams receive one way messages through the incoming webhook your workspace sets up under Integrations. There is no Slack channel per case, no answering from inside Slack and no Teams channel: that needs a published app and workspace level authorisation, which is a separate decision.