Cases overview

A case is a piece of customer work that carries on after the conversation ends. A refund waiting on finance, a replacement waiting on the warehouse, a bug passed to your developers: closing the chat says the conversation is over, but it doesn't say whether the customer's problem is solved. Cases give that work its own record, with an owner, a state and a full history, so nothing slips through once the chat goes quiet.

Cases and escalations are different

OrbitBase has two ways to bring your team in, and they answer different questions:

Your agent can do both in the same conversation — hand the chat to a person and open a case for the follow-up work. See Escalate to Human and Create case.

What a case holds

Every case has:

• A number, such as CASE-1042, that your team and customers can quote.
• A requestor — the customer it's for, picked from your contacts.
• A title and description — what the problem is, in your team's words.
• A state — where the work stands, such as New, In progress or Resolved.
• A priority — Low, Normal, High or Urgent.
• An assignee and tags — who owns it and how it's grouped.
• An optional case type, such as Refund request or Bug report, which can add fields of its own.
• Custom fields, files and worknotes — the details, documents and internal commentary your team needs.
• History and linked conversations — every change, and the chats the case came from.

Case numbers

Each workspace numbers its cases in order: 1, 2, 3 and so on, shown with your prefix in front (CASE-1, CASE-2…). You choose the prefix — CASE, SUP, HELP or anything up to 10 letters and numbers — in Settings → Cases.

• A number is never reused, even after a case is deleted.
• Changing the prefix relabels every case, old and new, so you never have two numbering styles. The numbers themselves don't change, so links your team has shared keep working.
• When your agent opens a case, it gives the customer the number so they can refer to it later.

States and what they mean

Your workspace decides its own states. Every workspace starts with five — New, In progress, Waiting on customer, Resolved and Closed — and owners and admins can rename, recolour, reorder, add and remove them.

Whatever a state is called, it belongs to one of four groups that tell OrbitBase what it means:

• Open — still being worked on.
• Waiting — paused on someone outside the team; still counts as open work.
• Resolved — the customer's problem is solved.
• Closed — finished and filed away.

The groups decide which cases appear in the Open view and how cases are reported on the dashboard. See States and types.

The Cases page

Click Cases in the sidebar. The list has four built-in views:

• Open (the default) — cases in an open or waiting state.
• Assigned to me — cases you own.
• Unassigned — cases nobody owns yet.
• All — every case.

You can search by number, title or requestor, filter by assignee, case type, state, group, priority, who opened it, tags and date, and sort the list. Select rows to change their state, type, priority, assignee or tags in bulk, or export them. Export downloads the current view as a CSV, with one column per custom field.

The Dashboard has a Cases tab showing how many cases were opened and resolved, how many are open now and how long they take to resolve.

Plan allowance

Each plan includes a number of new cases per billing period:

Like your other plan limits, the allowance is shared by every workspace in your organisation. You can see where you stand in Usage.

• Owners and admins are emailed when the allowance is nearly used up.
• Once it's used up, new cases can't be opened until the period renews or you upgrade. Trying to open one shows how many of your plan's cases you've used and points you to Settings → Billing to upgrade.
• If your agent tries to open a case at the limit, no case is opened. The conversation is passed to your team instead, and the agent tells the customer the team will follow up.
• Existing cases are never limited — you can always edit, work, close and delete them.
• Deleting a case doesn't give its slot back.

Who can do what

Members can do everything else with a case, including closing it.

Next steps