Discourse for helpdesk use cases?

Today, I was looking for new way to manage help desk inquires.

Most of todays solutions are available as SaaS plans. Other open source projects (osTicket) feeling pretty lame… 1990-2000 like …

It would be much better to get something that feels responsive as Discourse does. But the integration between Discourse and the help desk has to be much better.

That’s why, I came to the point, http://helpy.io could possiply fit to our workflow.

Some questions to other community admins:

  1. Are you using some kind of standalone self-hosted help desk?
  • Did you find some way to connect Discourse with it? (users, faqs,…)

For Discourse core team and other contributers:

  1. Which help desk approach could you reccomand me in combination with Discourse?
  • What about some additional attributes like pending status, internal notes, text templates, etc. … for a new help desk plugin?

Best

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Short answer: No.

Long answer: I am a moderator for the Stonehearth Discourse. The forum is the primary community site for a game in active development. The Discourse serves a number of roles, including suggestions, gameplay discussion, announcements, etc., but is also the primary support site for the game. Most support requests are bug reports, but we do get a number of non-bug related requests, including crash reports, purchase issues, and a few other topics. 95% of the reports are handled in a public thread, many times with help from the community. In rare cases, usually billing related but sometimes in other cases, the discussion may be taken “offline”, as we refer to it, and discussed via PM.

pending status

internal notes

text templates

https://meta.discourse.org/t/best-way-to-create-an-interface-for-templates/38016?u=falco

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The most important numbers are:

  1. Your support traffic: How many new mails a day?
  2. Your support staff: How many people are answering mails?

Slight digression here, since you’re asking about Discourse co-existing with other helpdesk solutions, but: If you’re looking at ~10 mails (new exchanges, not replies) a day and 2-3 people checking in part-time, you’d be perfectly well off with Discourse’s inbuilt support features. I’ve managed a couple different helpdesks, and at moderate traffic volumes they’re all completely interchangeable; it’s just a shared inbox.

Getting back on the main topic, @jesselperry set up an example of a simple integration between Discourse and Intercom.

We also touched a bit on this in my Coinbase interview with @john_mardlin.

p.s. Did you check out getbrimir.com? I haven’t tested it myself, but it’s another very promising open source helpdesk.

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