Civicase appropriate for complaints reporting?

[Anthony F. Camilleri]

Hi all,

I'm a civicase newbie, and before diving in, I wanted to share my usage scenario with you to see if it would be an appropriate tool for the job. A client has asked me to design a complaint-reporting system whereby:

- Users should report complaints by e-mail or by a web-form on the front-end of a website (preferably wordpress)
- A complaint-manager is notified by e-mail
- The complaint-manager assigns the complaint to an official who will deal with it (reporter is sent an e-mail)
- Official updates complaint, and marks it as resolved / pending / unresolved. Each status update is sent to user.

Would civicase do the job cleanly?

Anthony

[Coleman Watts]

If you want any kind of front-end for CiviCase (i.e. a webform open to the public) you need to use Drupal and the webform civicrm module. CiviCRM's built-in profile forms do not support civicase. If you're willing to use drupal then your front-end would be great.
In terms of the back-end stuff, I think yes, civicase can do what you want - it will send emails when activities are updated, cases can be assigned to different people, etc.

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey there,

I know an organisation that uses activities for a complaints system and it works well for them (and can do what you have outlined below).

So depending on the complexity of your use case, you might think about doing this with activities rather than cases.

To clarify, cases are a group of activities with a more complex structure. That structure is good if you need it but can get in the way if you don't.

If you aren't sure, you could always start out / prototype this with activities and then move on to cases if activities aren't doing what you need them to do.

Michael