So, when would you use a case?
Cases shine in situations where investigation, collaboration, or judgment calls are needed. They're perfect for workflows that can't be fully automated because the context changes, the stakes are high, or multiple people need to weigh in before taking action.
Let's look at just some real-world scenarios where cases make sense.
Customer support escalations
A high-value customer reports an issue that your support team can't resolve with standard playbooks. Automation can gather account details, pull recent activity, and check for known issues, but diagnosing the root cause and coordinating a fix across multiple teams requires collaboration.
💡 How cases help: A case gives your support, engineering, and product teams a shared space to investigate, share findings, and track progress. The customer's support ticket is linked, all the context is attached, and everyone can see what's been tried and what's next.
Compliance reviews
Your workflow flags a policy violation, like an employee accessing data they shouldn't have. A story can collect the evidence, identify the policy that was violated, and notify the right people, but investigating whether it was intentional, determining the appropriate response, and documenting the outcome needs careful human review.
💡 How cases help: A case provides an audit trail of who reviewed the violation, what they found, and what action was taken. It ensures nothing falls through the cracks and gives you documentation for compliance reporting.
❗️Important
IT access request
An employee requests access to a sensitive system. Your workflow can automatically verify they're a current employee, check their role, and pull their manager's contact information, but approving or denying the request, especially for edge cases, needs a human decision.
💡 How cases help: A case routes the request to the right approvers, tracks who reviewed it and when, and lets them collaborate if there are questions. Once approved, a case button can trigger the workflow that provisions the access automatically.
The common thread
Notice the pattern? In each scenario, stories handle the heavy lifting (gathering data, enriching context, routing to the right people), but cases provide the structure for human collaboration and decision-making.