I will also share that we use our meta community here this way at Discourse.
When customers email us, rather than have it go to a category as described here[1], it creates a PM here in a group inbox that we use as our ticketing system. We’ve added some lightweight embellishments to the inbox view over time to help with that, but mostly are using built-in features.
The essential bits of our workflow are 1) to use a group inbox where anyone on the support team can respond 2) to archive PMs when we have handled the most recent response.
When a customer replies, the archived PM is brought back in to the inbox automatically so the whole team sees it again.
The team also can whisper on these PMs to collaborate with each other, and we’ve recently started to experiment with AI whispers as well, where some initial research is shared with the team up front.
We do also use private categories in certain cases, but that is now more the exception than the rule – the group inbox workflow is what has become the norm for us. ↩︎