Case Management and Assisted Service

Assisted Service lets your staff members act on behalf of other users to help them complete tasks on your website.

It was originally designed with staff assisting your service users (eg members of the public) in mind, and allows form submissions and workflow activities to appear as if they had been performed by the user being assisted.

For example, if you start a case while assisting a user, that user will be set as the case owner, will receive updates about the case, and could log into your site and track the case via their account.

Assisted Service does not change the security permissions of your staff members. When you assist someone you do not gain or lose any security groups, so secure content on your site remains secured. This is key in preventing escalation of privileges - you wouldn't want a regular user "assisting" your HR Manager and gaining access to all of the HR content on your intranet.

However, we've found that Assisted Service isn't only used for raising cases and completing tasks. Many organisations start assisting a user whenever they have contact with them (ie a user phones up to ask a question) because Assisted Service's interaction logging feature is a great way to record all sorts of interactions, not just when submitting forms. Assisted Service is also being used to assist other staff members who need help when working on a case.

This article explains how Assisted Service and Case Management's User Roles interact, and what you can and can't do when assisting a user.

Note that these rules apply from Case management version 1.30.594

Raising a Case

If you are assisting a user and raise a case, Case Management treats the person being assisted as the person who raised it. The staff member who did the assisting is recorded and can be seen on the case details screen.

The user who was assisted can see and track the case if they later log into their account, in exactly the same way as if they had raised the case without being assisted.

If the person being assisted doesn't have an account, the case can be raised against the anonymous user.

Case Search

Your case search article should be secured to appropriate staff security groups. Assisting another user won't change access to the article.

Search results are not affected by user permissions or assisting. If you can access the search article, you can search for any cases from the case types the search article is set up to display.

Viewing Case Details

In each search result, the "View case" button:

• Always appears if you are a member of the case type's case manager group, even when assisting a user who wouldn't have access
• Always appears if you are a member of the case type's monitor (enquiry) groups, even when assisting a user who wouldn't have access
• Will appear when you are assisting an appropriate case manager or monitor, even if you aren't in one of those groups
• Will appear when assisting the user who raised the case
• Will not appear if you aren't a case manager or monitor and aren't assisting a user who has access

Note that viewing case details opens a view of the case in a new browser tab. This is the "pathEnquiry" article set in the Environment Configuration. This article will be secured to staff users and anyone who wants to view case details will also need to be able to access this article for the button to appear.

Performing Actions

From the case view, users have the ability to perform actions, like updating contact details. The following rules apply:

• If you are not assisting, you will need to be a case manager or monitor for the case type
• If you are assisting an appropriate case manager or monitor, you can perform actions
• If you are assisting the case owner, you can perform actions
• If you are assisting a user who wouldn't normally be able to perform actions, you will not be able to perform actions (even if you otherwise could)
• Any user can always add notes to a case

Self Service

The Self Service template has a toggle in its article extras that controls how it behaves when assisting a user. It can be set to:

• Always display the tasks of the current user
• Display the tasks of the user being assisted