Case: Merged vs. Child Cases

We will go back to the basics and see one of the basic features of case entity which is confusing at times to the beginners, Merged Case vs. Child Case. What are they? Why and when to use them?

Merge Case:

What is Merged Case?

When a case is merged, the state of the case is changed to cancelled, and the status is changed to merged. All of the open case activities, emails, and attachments that a case has are now associated with the case it is merged into.
When you merge a case that has child cases, those child cases become child cases of the new parent case they get merged into.

How?

The unselected cases will be marked as canceled and will be mapped under the selected case.

Why and When?

There are scenarios where a customer opens multiple cases about the same issue through different support channels and wants to relate the cases or when a customer wants to merge the cases that are raised from same address or from the same number.
It reduces the number of active cases and it makes a huge impact on call centers that need to report the total of active cases for a specific period of time.

Points to remember:

By default, you can merge up to 10 cases at a time.
You cannot merge two child cases of different parent case.

Reference:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-customer-center/merge-similar-cases-customer-service.aspx

Child Case:

What is Child Case?

It works similar to merged case the case’s status is not changed to Cancel. All of the related cases will appear in the reports for active cases.
Used when cases that need to be resolved all together to fix more complex scenarios

How?

Adding child for a parent case
Select the cases that you want to associate with parent and child case(s). You must select at least two cases.

Why and When?

When there is a case where work needs to be done by multiple teams or when one issue affects multiple customers, now a customer service rep can open a primary case, called the parent case, and then create a secondary case, called the child case.