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Will Gather unburden our support team in the future?
Answered
Posted Jul 13, 2020
We'd like to switch to Zendesk as an all-in-one solution for our helpdesk and community forums. Right now, this doesn't appear to be possible because it looks like Gather doesn't fullfil our key objectives:
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Moderation
Once a user is rated trustworthy by a moderator all further postings by this user will be published without moderation. As far as I understand, each and every post in Gather needs to manually approved by a moderator. This means that there is no discussion in the forum outside our office hours.
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Integration
Forum posts should appear in the agents' helpdesk inbox alongside regular tickets. Agents can add internal comments and hand them over to other agents for review. All this doesn't seem to be possible with Gather yet.
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Internationalization
There should be sub-forums for different topics (like in "Guide") and each of these topics needs to be available in each language we support. I couldn't find a way to configure Gather like this although it is said to be multilingual.
Other Zendesk users employ third party forum solutions (Insided, Vanilla, Discourse ...). This is out of the question for us. Are there any solutions I have overlooked? Or can we expect that these points will be addressed in 2021 (see https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/204132436-Converting-community-posts-into-tickets)?
Regards,
Peter
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3 comments
Nicole Saunders
Hi Peter!
Thanks for your great questions. I manage Zendesk's community, and as you can see, we use Gather with a heavily customized theme. I'll share my insights about how we manage things at Zendesk, and will also see if someone from the product team can provide any insights on future development.
Moderation
You have the option to approve all posts before they are published, OR you can set it so all posts go through without approval, while leveraging the keyword moderation function to filter out any nefarious posts. The latter is generally my recommendation, (unless you're in a highly sensitive or private industry,) as your community engagement will be higher (and, as you said, can continue off-hours) if posts go live immediately.
Happy to talk more about content moderation practices.
Integration
You are correct that there is no out of the box integration between Gather and Support. However, several customers have built them by leveraging the API and channel framework, which allows them to have tickets generated automatically from community posts so that their team can manage posts from within the ticket queue. If you have some development resources, this is a possibility for you.
Sub-topics and Internationalization
The sub-topics would definitely be nice. As you can see from our home page, we decided to at least visually group topics, but the use-case for hierarchy is definitely there.
As far as localizing for different languages, Gather can do it in the sense that the navigation and words on the site can be localized. But the community content would not be translated. We have created individual topics for specific languages where users who speak those languages can talk to one another.
I hope that helps, and am happy to offer any other advice or recommendations that would be useful!
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Dimi Baitanciuc
+1 for Integration
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Josh
Zendesk really hasnt developed Gather or added any many features in a long time to the module. Kind of sad, this product could be great with just a little work. Check out insided.com
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