Hi Helga, this is my personal opinion but the issue of a support forum is the “cue” the unknown wait for a response deters a userbase. Most Saas services offer support tickets instead of a community because of that regard and emphasize heavily on an alert base notification for submission as users can indicate a level of priority i.e. low/high/critical which a community forum doesn’t have.
AI adoption has curved the flow and the depth of a response in quick time which a large userbase are finding most useful, however it still lacks the persona that one gets from others who’ve faced similar issues, the conversational factor tends to ensure peace of mind in a user, so a support forum will still remain valid.
A suggestion if I may, consider with your team, creating an active digital support agent that does query the base information that’s required in small cases either through discourse ai bot or using an mcp, and a remote agent for instance a response could be:
Hi Helga, I got alerted of the issue you just shared with CompanyName I’ve got a log of similar cases and can possible give you some suggestions and notify CompanyName team right away if you’d like, CompanyName team can also scheule a one on one conversation just let me know how urgent the matter is.
This is all a suggestion, given I’m not aware of what type of company you are a part of. And how you feel about automated responses. Hope it all works out for you.
BTW follow my topic, I will share some support integrations I’m working on that would enhance any self hosted discourse forum.