When one fault takes out service for many customers at once, such as a failed exchange, a supplier outage or a platform problem, each customer raises their own case. Without a way to tie those cases together, your team updates each one separately, customers hear different things at different times, and afterwards nobody can say for certain who was affected, what caused it or what was done.
A Major Case fixes that. It is one parent case that your MSO team runs the incident from. Each affected customer keeps their own case, linked to the Major Case as a child case. Notes, customer updates and the final resolution flow from the Major Case down to every child.
Why use a Major Case
One place to work the incident. The MSO team writes notes, records affected assets and tracks progress on a single case.
One update reaches everyone. Write the update once and it is posted on every affected customer's case and emailed to their contacts and watchers, with a clear list of who will and won't receive it.
Every customer's case closes together. Closing the Major Case resolves every open child case with the same status and a note pointing back to the incident.
A proper review before closure. The Major Case can't be closed until a Structured Review records what happened, the root cause and the fix.
A formal Reason For Outage. After closure, a customer-facing RFO is drafted, approved by a second person, and published as a PDF to every affected customer, with a target date so it doesn't get forgotten.
Your customer data stays clean. Major Cases live on a dedicated internal MSO customer, which can be kept out of customer reports and is never surveyed.
How a Major Case works, start to finish
Promote. A member of the MSO team opens one affected customer's case and clicks Promote to Major Case. A new Major Case is raised on your MSO customer, and the original case becomes its first child. See Promote a case to a Major Case.
Link the other affected cases. Each other affected customer's case is linked to the Major Case as a child. See Link affected customers' cases to a Major Case.
Work the incident and keep people updated. Notes can be copied onto every child case, and Send customer update emails everyone affected. See Keep everyone updated during a Major Case and Affected assets on a Major Case.
Complete the Structured Review. Record what happened and finalise the review. See Complete the Structured Review for a Major Case.
Close. Close Major Case resolves every open child case, sends the resolution note and starts the Reason For Outage. See Close a Major Case.
Publish the Reason For Outage. The RFO is drafted, approved and published as a PDF to every affected customer. See Publish a Reason For Outage (RFO) for a Major Case.
There is no Major Case option on the New Case screen. A Major Case always starts from a real customer's case, which becomes its first child, so the first affected customer is always on it from the start.
Words used in this guide
Term | What it means |
Major Case | The parent case the incident is run from. It shows a MAJOR badge. |
Child case | An affected customer's own case, linked to the Major Case. A case can belong to only one Major Case. |
MSO customer | A dedicated internal customer record that every Major Case is created on, so real customers' records, reports and portals are untouched. |
MSO team | The team new Major Cases are assigned to. Permissions come from the MSO Team and MSO Manager roles, not from team membership. |
MSO approver group | The team whose members approve a Reason For Outage. One approval is enough. |
Named Incident Manager | The person who owns the Major Case, its Structured Review and its Reason For Outage. |
Structured Review | The internal record of the incident: timeline, root cause, solution and follow-up. It must be finalised before the Major Case can close. |
Reason For Outage (RFO) | The customer-facing account of the incident, published as a PDF to every affected customer after closure. |
Who uses it
Major Cases are run by users with the MSO Team or MSO Manager role. Everyone else can open a Major Case and read it, but not change it. Their own customers' child cases work as normal, except that a child case is closed by the MSO team when the Major Case closes. The full list is in Major Cases: who can do what.
Getting started
An administrator switches Major Cases on and sets up the MSO customer, teams and roles once. See Set up Major Cases for your company.
Linking cases and copying notes to child cases are done on the Case Management Screen, so make sure the MSO team uses it.