Converting community posts into tickets

It seems silly to me that this conversation has been going on for 5 years with promises that "it's being looked" into by the Product team. 

From the perspective of the customers here it seems like such an obvious feature that comments on articles / guide, etc would generate a ticket and route into our Zendesk instance. I'm not asking to connect two different companies here - but rather the products offered by the same company (Zendesk) that we're paying for should have a tight integration. 

I'm excited to see that Gather will support the ability to convert forum posts into support tickets. However, at this time we're only able to do that manually, post by post.

Because my team intends to use Gather primarily for product support, it would be ideal for us to be able to convert posts into tickets automatically. This way, whenever a team member is scheduled to cover our ticket queue, they can quickly reply to support-related forum posts at the same time as emailed support requests without continuously checking Gather and creating tickets individually - a process which could become time consuming and could make it easy to miss new posts on busy days.

Would others find this helpful? Does Zendesk have any plans to add an automation setting to this feature?

Hello Nicole, is there any beta test of this functuiality inside Zendesk happing now?

What can be soultion for me if I do not have developer's resources levaraging API...

I also need this tickets' autocration based on forum's posts...

We tried for a few years to get Zendesk's attention about the importance of tickets for customer contacts that come in on a public-facing support site (like Zendesk Communities). We've since moved to Discourse and implemented a custom solution to automatically generate Zendesk tickets when our customers post.  We're happy with the solution.

Hi, my current company also requires this feature; I know there is a manual way to "Create Ticket" for a community post, but is there an automatic way to have every community post turn into a ticket? Much appreciated.

Similar to the "Auto-Convert Topics to Tickets" feature within Freshdesk (https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/225182-how-to-automatically-convert-forum-topics-to-tickets-)

• Tell me about if/how you use content moderation feature now?

We do not use Community Moderation as a way of staying on top of Community activity. We do not want to rely on Community Moderation because our community moderators are not responsible for approving and rejecting community content. Our community team is responsible for encouraging discussion by commenting on posts when they feel it is appropriate.

• Why do you want/need to escalate every post/comment to a ticket?

Aggregating Community activity in a completely separate platform requires that we share credentials and manage separate accounts and subscriptions. The biggest pain point of this workaround is that there is no way to apply a unified priorities system to agents' tasks so they are required to make decisions on the fly about whether they should contribute to the Community or reply to a direct support request. I anticipate that Zendesk's support team is large enough that have the luxury two independent teams, one for Community moderation and one for direct support requests. Unfortunately, we are nowhere near large enough to differentiate between Community moderation and support requests so we are forced to have a single team that is dedicated to both tasks.

My experience has been that when you require people to think on the fly, things fall through the cracks and resources are allocated inefficiently. If that doesn't ring any bells for you, consider that, if my understanding of Explore is correct, the inefficient allocation of resources because agents were required to recognize patterns is the primary motivation behind why Explore was released in the first place.

All new comments and posts are an opportunity for us to contribute to the discussion and be made aware of issues that the user may have not considered contacting us about directly. We see our Community as no different than any of the other communication channels that we receive tickets from in Zendesk. We do not think of moving a conversation from the Community to Zendesk as escalation because we do not determine priority solely by the channel from which a customer's comment was received.

Agents spend their time answering tickets in Zendesk. If agents are required to manage two sets of credentials, in two separate platforms that require different workflows, they will be less efficient and the system is inevitably going to break down because a lot of the processes will be held together by nothing more than the agent's personal knowledge. We can start making helpful decisions on behalf of the agent only after their tasks are aggregated into a single platform. Nothing breeds chaos like the entropy of information.

• Tell me about your ideal workflow. If there were no limitation what would you like to have?

Basic Workflow:

A Community Channel exists in Zendesk that allows an Administrator to subscribe to different topics. Each time a new post is added to the Community a new ticket is created. Each time a new comment is added (not by an agent) to an existing post a public comment is added to the existing ticket. Agents can take ownership of "Community tickets" in the exact same way that they would take ownership of any other ticket.

Short term: a link to the post is included in the public comment so the agent can navigate to and comment on the post directly. Long term: the agent can comment directly on the post by replying to the ticket with a public comment.

If the conversation has drawn to a close the agent the ticket is set to Solved. If the conversation will likely continue in the future the ticket is set to On Hold or Pending, at the discretion of the organization's internal practices (we would choose Pending).

If an agent sets a community ticket to Solved but does not close the post for comments, a new "follow-up" ticket will be created if someone comments on the post (just like how regular tickets are handled today).

Long term: A Post's status could be managed directly within the ticket interface via a popup in the Open/Pending/Solved/On Hold action button that would only appear for "Community tickets". Actions included in this channel specific action popup would include be same as what is available in "Post options" on the Community. Agents would have similar "Comment options" button available in the body each public comment, allowing them to Edit, Delete, Mark as spam, Permalink, and Create a ticket.

Message Contents:

The ticket subject is the title of the post and the ticket's public comment is populated with the body of the post.

Files attached to the post or comment are attached to the ticket. Short term: limit the type of attachment that can be attached to "Community tickets". Long term: synchronize the attachment support between community comments and tickets as community supports more file formats into the future.

TLDR; Companies that can't afford to sustain two teams where one is dedicated to community management and one is dedicated to support request are required to teach all of their agents about two completely different platforms. Different systems in the same team encourage entropy. Entropy encourages chaos. Chaos allows things to fall through the cracks.

As Patrick Henry once said at the Second Virginia Convention, "Give me a single platform on which I can manage my agents' responsibilities, or give me death!"

Thanks for your time

+1

Here's some elaboration on this one:

• Tell me about your ideal workflow. If there were no limitation what would you like to have?

Create a new ticket on each new post. Re-open that ticket if there are new comments (not by an agent).  If the associated ticket is closed (unchangable), close comments also on the public post.

Right now, I can mark a public post as 'Answered,' leave comments open, and close the Support ticket. If a non-agent comments on that public post later, I want to re-open the original Support ticket.

Why? If a non-agent has a problem that is so similar, they might make a comment instead of make a new post. It is important for us to respond to that request.

Why else? Community management. If a non-agent is trolling our posts, I want my team to be able to manage that behavior. Automating the reaction and flagging that behavior within Support isn't achievable.

It does not make sense for every agent on my team to follow every post in our public forum. I understand that following topics lets me get emails in my inbox, but managing support through email is exactly why we chose Zendesk in the first place. Email doesn't scale or have visibility across the team.

If there are other solutions within Zendesk that can do this today, please let me know.