Major Case Management: the key to proactive customer service

Major Case Management enables you to efficiently manage the communication and resolution process for issues that impact multiple customers. With Major Issue Management, you can identify affected customers who have not yet reported the problem and proactively create cases for these customers. A major case is created with details about a particular issue, and child cases can be easily created for each customer or consumer affected by the problem.

What makes major case interesting is the proactive aspect. Why is being proactive important?

• Increases perceived quality of service – and consequently, increases customer’s loyalty;
• Decrease overall effort of your support staff – instead of handling potentially hundreds of similar cases, you face just one;
• Increased rate of self-service – addressing your customers through your preferred communication channel proactively;
• Control communication – by identifying, admitting, apologizing for your issues and promising to fix them, you can change the ‘tone’ of communication, even on issues that are a great inconvenience to your customers. Also, less chance of getting viral with your mishaps on social media.

Creating a major case

There are two options for creating a major case. First, if it’s an issue that affects many customers, you’re likely to start getting cases in high volume. Once identified, your agents can propose a major case (ServiceNow Predictive Intelligence can assist them by suggesting similar cases). Or the other way, which is even better, a major case can be created automatically from event management.

Major Case Management is a powerful functionality – this statement can be perceived as something positive, as well as a warning. Simply put, major case management is a functionality to automatically create a large number of cases for your customers. How many? Theoretically, you can create a case for each registered customer contact or consumer you have on the platform.

So, how to avoid a PR disaster? You should appoint Major Case Managers. Major Case Managers should be seasoned customer service professionals, who either confirm or reject major cases proposed by their colleagues (or event management) or even create new ones directly.

Major Case or Major Incident? 

Major Incident Management is a well-known process in ITIL and ServiceNow. This article introduced a similarly named process – Major Case Management. Which one to choose for what, then?

Let’s pretend for a moment that this is even a question. In fact, the choice is straightforward: for your customers, you should always use major cases. However, we believe that it is valuable to understand the difference between these similar functionalities offered by the ServiceNow platform.

The major case, at its core, is always proactive. You create cases for customers who might not even know they have an issue and maybe would not even notice (maybe they don’t use the product right now). Major incidents usually refer to existing incidents, so someone definitely noticed they have an issue.

Communication is another important difference. For major cases, the key is external communication. You can create hundreds of cases for a single major case. For major incidents, the communication is structured in communication plans and usually happens both inside ServiceNow and outside of it (phone calls/video conferences, etc.). A great deal of the communication is to inform the internal stakeholders (and management) about the progress in resolving a critical issue.

Major incidents are created for high-priority incidents (that means impact and urgency are both high). On the other hand, due to the potentially high volume of cases from your customers, it might be useful to create a major case simply if an issue impacts multiple customers even if it does not have a big impact.

Do you want to see how Major Case Management works? Check out the demo in our webinar on-demand!