Bernie Thompson

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.

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

We use http://getsatisfaction.com/ currently, because we need to be able to treat a public customer question as a request for our customer service team, just like a private email.

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

Why is a ticketing system important? Why not just use email lists and not pay for zendesk?  The answers are the same for public (community) support: When a customer has a problem, it's our responsibility to help. We need to be able to assign the issue to a single agent, not lose track of it, and do our best to help the customer.  The reason why we want separate public and private support systems is because not every customer wants to (or can) discuss their problems on a public forum.  But if they do, it's great -- because by solving that problem for them, in public, it makes that solution visible to everyone via google search. We don't have to answer questions over and over again if customers can self-solve by looking at our public support history.

• 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.

@Gary - How do you know there is a new community post, so that you can manually create a ticket?  Or is there a way to just automatically have a ticket created? Thanks!

@Zendesk support: Update? I'm afraid since this is a community post, and since Zendesk community posts don't have any ticket functionality, that you've lost track of this extremely important issue and will miss any of your customers replying here ...

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

We use http://getsatisfaction.com/ currently, because we need to be able to treat a public customer question as a request for our customer service team, just like a private email.

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

Why is a ticketing system important? Why not just use email lists and not pay for zendesk?  The answers are the same for public (community) support: When a customer has a problem, it's our responsibility to help. We need to be able to assign the issue to a single agent, not lose track of it, and do our best to help the customer.  The reason why we want separate public and private support systems is because not every customer wants to (or can) discuss their problems on a public forum.  But if they do, it's great -- because by solving that problem for them, in public, it makes that solution visible to everyone via google search. We don't have to answer questions over and over again if customers can self-solve by looking at our public support history.

• 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.

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What is stopping Zendesk from supporting tickets for publicly visible customer service requests (e.g. via Community)?