We’ve done all of our support on Discourse for the last few years, other than billing which is done over email. It’s been a big success for us, and customers frequently help each other without input from our staff, who only step in when deeper troubleshooting is need, or for unlisting of sensitive topics, etc.
However, as our company has grown we’re considering a broader approach to CRM, mostly to streamline how we communicate with the outside world in other areas of the company. For support purposes, we are thinking of moving to a model where the initial support happens on Discourse, but trickier technical issues and extended troubleshooting can be escalated to a ticketing system like Zendesk.
The Zendesk plugin seems like it will help us with that escalation path, but sometimes support issues still come in via the wrong method, whether that’s email, website contact form, FB messages, etc.
So, what we really need is a way to deescalate issues that come into Zendesk back to Discourse.
My preference would be that these are forwarded to a staff inbox on Community, who can explain to users how we deal with support, and confirm before making the question public. I’m not convinced we can do this smoothly, but I’d like to ensure support happens in the right place whenever possible. Our community is active enough that many “how to” questions will get great feedback from other users if I can shift them over efficiently.
Any ideas about how to accomplish this are welcome!