Reference documentation for case management in Dynamics 365 Customer Service: the case lifecycle, queues and routing, service-level agreements, the knowledge base and a recommended setup.
A case is the unit of work in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. It gathers the enquiry, the customer, the communication and the resolution in one place, so everyone who works with the customer sees the same history. This page describes how case management fits together and what you should configure before the solution goes live.
A case is created from a phone call, an email, a web form, a chat or manually by an agent. The channel is stored in the Origin field, so you can later measure which channels generate the most work. A case always has one of three statuses:
Cases about the same underlying problem can be merged, and a parent case can have child cases that are resolved together. Use this when several customers report the same fault.
Queues hold cases that are waiting for an agent. A case can be routed to a queue automatically based on subject, channel, priority or customer, and agents pick cases from the queues they have access to. With unified routing, cases are assigned further to individual agents based on capacity and skills, so no queue is left unattended.
A service-level agreement defines how quickly a case must be answered and resolved. The two most common KPIs are First Response By and Resolve By. Deadlines are calculated from the organisation's business hours, and the system can warn the agent and the manager when a deadline is approaching or has been missed. Different customers or priorities can have different SLAs through the entitlements linked to the customer.
Knowledge articles give agents documented answers they can reuse. Articles follow their own lifecycle from draft through approval to published, and can expire or be archived when the content is no longer valid. Articles that are published externally can be shown in the customer portal, so customers find the answer themselves before creating a case.