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Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a widely used tool by customer service teams to manage issues ("cases") for their customer base.
The concept is fairly straight forward: a customer has an issue and reaches out to the Customer Service team. An agent connects with the customer and works to resolve the issue in a timely fashion, ensuring the customer gets the high quality service they deserve.
The ultimate goal is simple: delight customers, so they remain engaged with your company.
Microsoft has invested heavily in the product offerings in recent years, adding features and functions that support customer service teams in their pursuit of excellence.
You can learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Service here.
A scenario that occasionally arises for customer service agents is working with a customer that reaches out for a single issue, then realizes there's a secondary issue to deal with.
For example, I may reach out to the manufacturer of my coffee maker requesting support in how to clean the machine properly. In doing so, the agent may direct me through various suggestions which lead to my discovery that the water reservoir is cracked and needs replacing.
The customer service agent now has one customer but two distinct issues.
Fret not!
Dynamics 365 has the ability to create a 'child case'. The process is pretty much exactly as you'd expect: the agent creates the first case and begins the process of resolving it. During the interaction the agent hears the secondary issue that needs a completely separate process to find resolution.
The agent taps "Create Child Case" and the Case quick create form flies open on the right allowing the agent to input the details of the secondary case.
When this happens, it's logical that some of the information from the initial case automatically appears on the case quick create form. This is entirely doable, as shown in the image, but this is where I uncovered an odd situation.
Administrators can ensure the right information is moved over when a user clicks create child case.
To do this, the administrator can navigate into the Customer Service Hub app and navigate to the "Service Management" area. Here they'll find the Parent Child Case Settings, as shown:
The following screen will be displayed:
On this screen you can select which attributes from the initial case will appear on the new case.
Simply select the attributes in the "Available" pane and move them over to the "Selected" pane.
Tap Save in the lower right (not shown) and voila, it's set and on the very next click of Create Child Case you'll find the attribute sweeping over.
In the example below I added the "Subject" field to the Selected attributes and then created a child case.
Easy as pie.
In the situation that prompted writing this, I uncovered something interesting.
The customer had about 23 fields listed in the "Selected" column. They wanted to pare that back, so we went in to scale them back to just the few they wanted. This is where we uncovered something interesting.
After clearing a bunch of them out, I attempted to save the record and was greeted with this, message:
Initially I thought that they meant required fields, though it struck me as odd they called it "mandatory" instead.
I proceeded to add the required fields and tried again - same error.
What this could mean? After a few minutes it occurred to me that it might be the fields that were defined on the case > case relationship mapping, so I went over to have a look.
Sure enough, once I made note of the fields identified in the mapping and added them to the Parent-Child Case Settings area described above - presto!
It all worked beautifully.
Note, however, that I was a bit thrown by the "Master Case" and "Parent Case" items on this list. That was quickly resolved as I realized those options were not on the Parent-Child Case Settings mapping area.
It should be noted that you'll need to navigate into the legacy admin center for this as of time of writing this post (June 2021). As we all know, that may well change in the near future, so don't be surprised if you need to take a slightly different approach!
We hope this helps you save a bit of head scratching if you decide to do something similar!
Got questions about the values of Dynamics 365 Customer Service? Reach out to C5 Insight to chat!
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