David Shedd

This is so unfortunate. One of the most critical functions to any support these days is an online customer knowledgeable/portal. It is also important that the client can take the control into their hands and not have to wait on a support rep to make changes to their ticket. Due to this limitation we must continue in this hybrid world of manually updating tickets for clients between email and an online support system. Here are just 2 business cases for the development team at Zendesk.

Ticket Creation and Priority Setting

We have been providing our clients an email address to our support for years to open a support case. We ask our client several questions as part of the ticket creation process that helps us determine priority, as well as potential support paths. This typically requires a lot of back and forth between the client and the support rep via email to figure out the urgency of their request. You can enable these questions/fields on the ticket creation page in the customer portal, which dramatically speeds up this process. Furthermore the portal will make article suggestions to the client which could solve their questions eliminating any support need at all. The holy grail.

However if a client still emails a support email address without this information, we cannot have it create the case and simply point them to a link to update these critical fields in the portal after ticket creation. We have to fall back on old ways of taking the case in, contacting them, and having our support reps fill in these fields manually to prioritize their ticket, as the fields are not editable in the portal after ticket creation. If we change our support email to a bounce back email saying please go to the portal and add your request there, this will make them unhappy, as they need to recreate the wheel. If they recreate the wheel and make a mistake in the process of choosing the wrong value and they cannot correct this, you will have mad customers on your hands (this has happened to us).

Ticket Escalation

In our older support system, our clients could edit the priority field in the portal after ticket creation to escalate their ticket if the issue had become more critical. They cannot do that now, as they cannot edit their field. They need to contact us, we need to do it manually, etc.

PLEASE FIX THIS!!!!