Merging of Cases

Multiple channels are available for customers to raise the incident, hence same customer who is eager for quick resolution for his /her issue, may call the call center, send email or even raise it in the portal. In this case customer service representative may observe the duplicate cases are created in the system for the same issue. Now to avoid the duplicate cases, we can identify the duplicate cases and keep single case to track and delete rest of the cases. However this is not efficient way to address this issue. We will lose track of all other cases which are raised by other channels and there might be some activities already worked on, some might be in progress. If we do not want to lose all such important information, we can actually merge all the duplicate cases into a single case. Let us see how to achieve this in D365 and what are the thumb rules for the same.

Let us consider two duplicate cases are identified and we want to merge those. Just follow the below step. Select the cases to be merged and then click on “Merge cases” button.

In the popup, it will show a list of selected cases and Merge button will be disabled.

Select the Master case in which we want to merge rest of the cases and click on Merge

It will merge the cases to the master case

The cases which are merged will be set as “Cancelled” and we can see those cases under the master case, in Case Relationships tab under Merged section.

All the activities under these cancelled cases will be associated under this master case and this way we will not lose the track of the existing activities

Merging of cases is really easy to understand and apply, however there are some rules we need to understand while merging as mentioned below

• We can select and merge up to 10 cases at a time
• We can only merge a child case into another child case if both of the child cases have the same parent case

In short the Merging will have below impact

• When a case is merged, the state of the case is changed to canceled, and the status is changed to merged. This is because it is merged into another case and all of the open case activities, emails, and attachments are now associated with the case it was merged into.
• When we merge a case that has child cases, those child cases become child cases of the parent case they were merged into

Hope we discussed all basics of merging of cases in this post 🙂