Offering "private support" as part of a public support community

[tobiaseigen]

I think the lowest hanging fruit here is door number 3, improving group inboxes so they work well for providing support to people who log in, not just to people who email for support.

@RGJ

• Messages sent to the Support group are hard to find (actually, IMHO all messages are hard to find if you don’t have a notification to click on) and although support staff has a good overview, a user does not. Where the staff users working on the tickets see a separate group inbox, users that have created the tickets can only find them between their ‘regular’ PM’s.
• Lack of tagging support in PM’s: Only staff can tag PM’s and users cannot see or filter on tags.
• There is no “place” where one can go and send a message to. The possibility to message the Support team must explicitly be advertised somewhere (and I find it hard to find a logical place for this, most of the time it ends up in some kind of banner).

Your main complaints about group inboxes seem to be about the lack of functionality on the user end, which is legit if your users are logging in to pursue tickets and are also using PMs to talk to other people on the site. I have not encountered this very much so far in our use of group inboxes to provide support here on meta. Most of the people we provide support to via the group inboxes don’t ever come to log in - they mostly use their own email and so can use their email to organize and archive their correspondence with us as they see fit.

I do have a few users I communicate with via @support-teams here on meta, so will ask them how it works for them and if they have any suggestions. I’ll also do some more testing on my own to see how this actually works now. It seems to me the request is:

• allow non-staff users to see message tags (currently only staff see tags. maybe we can use tag groups for this, to provide some tags that non-staff can see in messages? )
• provide a link to group inboxes on the messages menu for users when they are messaging groups, to see own messages with groups (this works already for staff, not sure how it works for non-staff. there are issues here with inbox vs archive, which are not individually controlled on a per user basis)
• provide a link to start a new message to a group (I think this exists on the group page if messaging the group is allowed)

The ability to start a new message to a group is something even I have noticed, as a member of the @support-teams group to provide Discourse for Teams email support. If I want to start a new message from the support team, I have to include both the support team and the email address of the person I want to write to. This is a bit clunky.

Also, the way we use group inboxes, we do not usually close messages as we would topics when they are resolved. We just archive them. This allows us to get them out of sight for ourselves when they are resolved, but also to allow the customer to follow up by email and move the message back to the inbox.