Case relationships

Service center users can manage relationships between cases. There are two types of relationship:

Parent-child relationships
Related relationships

The parent/child feature can be used when a service center opens multiple cases about a common issue. For example, an agent who receives multiple calls about a server outage can open a case for each call. The agent can link the cases through the parent-child relationship. When the issue is resolved, agents close the child cases. All agents can close child cases individually before closing the parent. Agents who have parent-child cascade closing rights can close all child cases simultaneously with the parent case. Service center users can choose to have the close case email notification sent to the employees who are associated with the child cases. An agent who does not have parent-child cascade closing rights must close all child cases individually before closing a parent case.

Parent/Child Cases

This relationship type establishes relationships between one or more cases and a parent case. Parent/child relationships have a dependency that prevents the parent case from being closed until all related cases, known as child cases, have been closed. In other words, all child cases must be closed before a parent case can be closed. This type of case relationship is used when a task cannot be marked as complete until all related sub-tasks are complete. This type of relationship is most useful for cases that center on a single issue and that can be resolved simultaneously.

A service center user can create a parent in two ways:

by adding the parent to a case
See Adding a parent to a case.
by creating a designated parent case from scratch

When an agent adds a note to a parent case, the agent has the option to automatically copy the note to all open child cases. If case note editing is allowed, then updates to a note are copied to the open child cases as a new note.

The standard business rule dictates that a parent case cannot be closed until all of its child cases are closed. This rule can be overwritten for various service center roles so that service center users can close a parent and pending child cases simultaneously. This is referred to as cascading case closing rights. These rights are determined by service center user role.

Related Cases

Related cases include one or more cases that are linked to a parent case. Unlike parent-child relationships, related cases have no dependencies between cases. The parent case can be closed before the related cases are closed. This type of case relationship is used to cross-reference one case to one or more other cases. When you relate cases, it is important to state the reason that the cases are related. This information can be added to the Reason field.