We tried automating it initially, but without results. Probably the “what’s in it for me” was missing. Also, Discourse was not really easy to set up for on-boarding as part of another on-boarding master process for the user’s perspective.
Instead, we switched at some time to making the forum for product-related questions the first stop with no exceptions. That dramatically increased traffic and - more important - also increased customer retention since they started finding answers themselves without additional costs. Some users have been repelled by the new approach, that is a downside that you need to account for. In our case typically some users with a less investigative mindset are leaving since they can not call anymore for every question, but that is not considered a problem for reasons:
- it is in the individual relationship less nice, but the global world is socially helped by sharing knowledge.
- the net margin of users leaving was typically negative: they consumed more resources than their financial and intellectual contribution accounted for.
- the remaining users better fit the ideal user profile targeted for.
Hope it helps.