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Why do support cases have their own statuses instead of reusing the sales pipeline?

· 2 min read
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Senior Web Developer

The question: the CRM roadmap planned support cases as "a light support-ticket record that reuses the pipeline engine for its statuses". When it came to building them, should they?

Context​

The sales pipeline lives in an optional module. Its stages belong to pipelines that a manager edits, and each stage carries a win probability and a "stalled after N days" rule; deals end as won or lost. A support case needs four plain states: new, open, waiting on the customer, solved.

Options considered​

Reuse pipelines and stages. One board engine for both. But Support cases would then need the Sales pipeline module switched on, a "support pipeline" would show up among the sales pipelines and in the sales reports, and every case status would carry a probability and a won/lost ending that mean nothing for a support request.

Own statuses, shared look (chosen). Cases get their own table with four fixed statuses (developers can rename or add through a filter). The board reuses the deals board's styles and drag behaviour, and the conversation reuses the CRM timeline, so nothing is built twice that a user would see.

Decision​

Cases have their own statuses and do not depend on the Sales pipeline. What they share with deals is the look of the board and the timeline, not the data model. Replies thread back by the case number in the subject ([Case #12]).

Why​

A site that only does support should not have to switch on sales to get cases, and the sales reports should never count a support request as an open deal. The parts worth sharing (the board, the timeline) are shared; the parts that mean something different stay separate.

Status: Accepted (CRM 1.0.72).