We’re excited to announce the latest member of the Zendesk family of products: Zendesk Gather. Gather is a community software solution that enables teams to create and manage online forums. Gather enables your organization to improve the overall customer experience by scaling and extending customer support, while also providing your customers a way to discuss feedback and ideas.
Zendesk Gather helps you pull together expertise from within and outside your company walls to share experiences, gauge feedback and product ideas, as well as solving concrete issues for your customers. Some users might see the community as an extension of the self-service help center, while others might use it as a place to build relationships with other users of your products. That’s why we call it Zendesk Gather, because it enables you to connect all the people who are important for your product.
Let’s look at how communities built on Gather can add value to your customer experience:
- Surface the most relevant content to your customers. Features such as unified search, featured posts, and content moderation enable you to promote and filter content. Voting enables your end users to decide what the best answers to particular questions are.
- Enable your users to get help, share ideas, and provide feedback to the community. Create rich content using the WYSIWYG editor, user profiles, @mentions, and social sharing. Stay in the loop by following specific topics, posts, or other users, to receive relevant notifications via email.
- Escalate critical questions into Support tickets to ensure that your customers get the best service available.
- Scale your community using the new Moderator Activities feature, which includes automatic spam filtering and audit logging, and enables you to monitor every moderation action taken.
- Get started easily, but go further with custom themes, API access, multiple brands, and access controls per topic.
Obviously there’s a lot more to discover in Zendesk Gather, and more to come as this new product continuously evolves to improve the customer experience through a community platform that complements the rest of the Zendesk product family.
Want to get started?
If you already have a community in Zendesk Guide, you will continue to have this functionality as part of the Gather Legacy plan. In addition, you'll also receive two newly launched bonus features, aliases and @mentions. The alias feature is available now in your account and the @mentions feature is rolling out slowly to existing communities by the end of October. For more information about Gather Legacy, visit the About Gather plan types page.
If you are new to the communities functionality and are interested in learning more about Zendesk Gather, you can learn more about the product, find plans and pricing information on the new Zendesk Gather area on our website.
For information about using Gather see our documentation in Using Gather.
25 Comments
Is this functionality replacing the Community feature that's part of Guide? If so, what is the migration process? If not, where will documentation about that live?
Sarah M, it appears that it effectively is replacing it. See their About Gather plan types article. Looks like it is just a rebranding and have to pay for additional features if you are a legacy customer.
Hey Sarah M - you can find all of the Gather documentation here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/360002299814-Gather
It's not a completely new platform, rather a rebranding of what was previously called Zendesk Communities, with some additional features and functionality added. It's also now being considered its own product, rather than a subset of Guide functionality.
Legacy customers now have access to @mentions and alias at no additional cost. The community moderator functionality is also now available, but does require an upgrade from the Legacy plan to Gather Professional.
Nicole - Community Manager
In regards to the mentions feature:
Does the feature have to be enabled if we are using custom theme?
Will users be notified that they were mentioned?
Is the name being mentioned based on the alias or real name?
Additionally, In order to see your name from the mentions list I had to type in "Nicole - C" before you were an available option for mentioning. Is this expected behavior?
Hi Jason K,
Hope that helps!
When will mentions begin to work? I have Gather enabled in my site but still cannot perform any mentions.
Jennifer Rowe
Thank you for the info! Similar to Brad Marshall, mentions do not work on my site either. Any tips?
Hmm...I believe it should work for you now.
Make sure user profiles are enabled. You can't use @mentioned if user profiles are not enabled.
Also, if a user has not yet submitted a post or comment, you can't @mention them.
Jennifer Rowe, ours is enabled and I am trying to reply to someone that initiated the post. It is not working like it is here.
Ok, sorry, Brad Marshall. Then I'm out of ideas. If I found out, I'll let you know!
Hi Jason -
I see that Jennifer already responded, but to add some further context, mentions are now turned on for all communities powered by Zendesk. It wouldn't be impacted by a theme customization, so yes, it would be enabled in this case.
Users do receive an email notification when they're mentioned, and the name being mentioned is based on the alias - i.e. the user name that appears when they post in the community or comment in the KB.
And yes, that is expected behavior. Since the population of the list is based on user name, it starts searching all the users with a given name who have created an account in the Help Center and posted or commented before. I suspect there are a number of Nicoles who have accounts, so the "- C" is the first place that starts eliminating the others from the list.
Let us know if you have any further questions!
I'll wait a little longer, but mentions it still is not working for me in my Community/Gather.
Nicole - Community Manager
Like Brad Marshall, mentions are still not working in our community. We have user profiles enabled. Is it possible that they have to also be set as public?
Mine are public and mentions still do not work.
Hey Jason K and Brad Marshall -
We're looking into it. I've raised these questions with the engineering team and will let you know once we hear back. Thanks for your patience!
Jason K - I have confirmation that yes, profiles do have to be set to public in order for @mentions to work.
Brad Marshall - still digging into potential troubleshooting steps for you.
If you want to create my comment into a ticket, I would be happy to provide any additional details.
Hi all, especially Brad Marshall and Jason K - the @mentions feature is being rolled out gradually to Legacy customers over the next couple of weeks. Sorry if this was not clear. We provide it immediately for all paying Gather Professional customers. If you're a grandfathered Gather Legacy customer, you'll get it soon!
Hi,
Will ZD Gather address the problem highlighted in the following thread?
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203448196-Multi-Level-Community-Forums
This is something we're seriously in need of and without it it's really hard to organise thing neatly on the ZD Community at the moment.
Hi Zunaira Elahi,
At the moment the Gather launch does not address that issue, no. But it continues to be a feature that we're evaluating.
Pretty disappointing, yet another Zendesk feature sliced off and charged per agent. It's getting increasingly difficult to pitch Zendesk to management as the cost is going up for features that used to be a part of the plans.
Lachlan Robbins nothing to add from my point of view! Meanwhile I am not wondering why more and more people joining the solution from Freshdesk!
I'm sorry if this is your perception Lachlan Robbins. It's certainly not how we think about it at Zendesk though. Rather we think of it as an investment into an area of our product portfolio that wasn't getting the amount of love that it deserved. We have several customers using the community as one of their main support channels. We also know that there are plenty of customers who would like to go more in this direction. Finally, we have a mission to improve the customer experience, which communities can play a big role in facilitating. They deserve dedication and focus from a team that's committed to their specific product.
Kasper Sørensen Thanks a lot for getting back to us with your explanation. You are right! The area you invested in deserved to get more and more the focus and attention that is needed to fulfil the mission to improve the customer experience. Also we are focusing since years on our community to enable our users to help each other.
Nevertheless, if you - as a Zendesk customer - are running the Enterprise Suite plan, which was sold as the biggest plan including all features, then you expect that we can take advantage immediately of such new technologies. You don't expect that you have to pay more and more on top for these features.
It's fine if you want to improve the product, but Zendesk continues to take out integral components of plans and then charges for the privilege of the same functionality. (E.g. Insights.) If there was a commensurate reduction in the base plan pricing, or better discounting for Agent volume that would be one thing, but as it stands it's just more money.
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