Use discussions and mentions to coordinate internal work

Mentions bring a colleague’s attention to work without separating the conversation from its context. Discussions on cases, articles, companies, and contacts help B2B teams coordinate across roles while keeping the relevant history close to the customer or knowledge record.

Choose a mention, task, or customer reply  ·  Write a useful internal discussion  ·  Work through the Mention Center  ·  Build a reliable collaboration habit  ·  Coordinate an account issue without losing the next action  ·  Troubleshoot missing attention or context

Choose a mention, task, or customer reply

A mention is an attention mechanism. It does not automatically transfer the case, create a deadline, or send the customer a response.

Write a useful internal discussion

1. Open the record that best matches the subject. Use a case for a specific incident, an article for knowledge work, or a company/contact for that relationship.
2. Open the discussion area and write the context the recipient needs: what happened, what you checked, and the decision or action you need.
3. Type @ and select the intended available recipient. Review the selection rather than relying on a typed name alone.
4. Post the discussion using the available action. Verify that it appears on the intended record and that the mention is present.
5. If the work is time-sensitive, record an explicit owner and next action in the appropriate case or task workflow. Keep customer commitments in the case history.

Work through the Mention Center

1. Open the Mentions control in the app utility rail. The Mention Center opens. Needs Action shows unread threads mentioning you; it is not a task queue.
2. Use My Posts to follow discussions you started, or switch between Cases, Articles, Companies, and Contacts to focus on a record type.
3. Read the linked context before replying. The center’s recent-history window is the last 30 days; use the underlying record when you need older context.
4. When you have discussion-edit permission for the record, choose Reply and Post reply with the answer, evidence, or next step. Pin an item when you need to return to it.
5. Mark items viewed as appropriate after review. Treat viewed state as attention tracking, not proof that the underlying issue is resolved.

Build a reliable collaboration habit

• Mention only the people who need to act or decide. Broad mentions make important requests harder to notice.
• Keep one discussion about one question. If the topic moves to a different case or account, link the context and continue on the appropriate record.
• Summarize the outcome in the case or article when a discussion changes the work. The next reader should not have to reconstruct the decision from many replies.
• Review Needs Action during daily triage and before handing over a shift. Pinning helps you return; it does not replace a due date.

Coordinate an account issue without losing the next action

A customer’s operations manager needs an answer before a planned maintenance window. You have a diagnostic result but need a specialist to interpret it. Keep the discussion on the case so the decision stays with the evidence.

1. Open the case’s discussion and type @. Select the intended specialist from the picker; text that merely looks like a name is not proof of a selected mention.
2. State the question, relevant evidence and what you need decided. For example: “The retry succeeds only after the connection is restarted. The two request timestamps are linked below. Can you confirm the next diagnostic step before the maintenance review? I retain the customer update.”
3. Post and verify the discussion on the correct case. If a deliverable has a due date, create the appropriate task as well. Do not assume a mention establishes ownership or a deadline.
4. The specialist opens the mention, reads the linked evidence and replies with a result or a clearly bounded next investigation. If they cannot act, they should say so rather than simply mark the thread viewed.
5. Summarize the decision in the case’s ongoing record and send the appropriate customer update separately. The customer does not receive the internal discussion.

Use a company discussion when the question concerns the broader relationship, such as coordinating an account review across cases. Link the relevant cases, but keep each case’s concrete work and promises in that case. Use an article discussion for editorial decisions so knowledge history is not mixed into a customer incident.

Troubleshoot missing attention or context

Continue learning

• Coordinate work in the case workspace
• Configure agent messages and notifications
• Understand company and contact context