Customer Service centers on the Case table (historically called “Incident”) — a single customer issue, tracked from creation through resolution.
Cases and queues
New Cases typically land in a queue — a shared holding area agents pull work from, rather than every case being pre-assigned to a specific person. Queues can route automatically based on rules (by product, by customer tier, by channel) and support both pull (agent picks up) and push (system assigns) models.
SLAs (Service Level Agreements)
An SLA defines time-based commitments — first response within 4 hours, resolution within 2 business days — and tracks whether a Case is on track, at risk, or has breached that commitment, often visualized with a countdown timer on the Case form. SLAs can have multiple KPIs and apply different timelines based on case priority or customer entitlement.
Entitlements
An entitlement defines what level of support a specific customer or product is actually owed — a number of support hours, a number of cases, or unlimited support for a time period — and is what an SLA’s terms are often conditioned on. This is the mechanism behind “this customer’s support contract allows 10 cases per year.”
Knowledge base
Knowledge articles let agents (and, via a portal, customers) search for existing solutions before creating or escalating a new case. Well-maintained knowledge content directly reduces average case volume and resolution time — a frequent target of serious Customer Service implementations, not just a nice-to-have.