Converting community posts into tickets

I can see what you are trying to create, I support this issue aswell but:

What if a user creates a ticket on your helpdesk and he doesn't get an answer within 3-4 hours. So they move on to your forum and create a post about it.

Let's say after a day, the post is still unanswered, so zendesk would automatically create a 2e ticket with the same issue, a duplicate.

You'll also have to think about if a person create a forum post and somebody replies ' I want to know this answer aswell ', how would you determine if your post would be made into a ticket or not.

But no matter what the issue is, I like your idea and support it, we just need to find a good solution :-)

Kind regards
Decy

Hey, Stephen - 

The good news is we have something we're working on now, and we're doing research on the best ways to improve agent ability to respond to community posts and knowledge base comments. Nothing available immediately, but I'm going to reach out to you in a ticket as well.

OK so that was a year ago now :) Any progress on that? I too would like to be able to migrate a Community post to a support ticket as seamlessly as possible.

@Max : We need that too. It should be an option in the Help Center settings.

Any progress here? @Max: Please comment this feature request.

Hi,

Thanks for the questions and interest. The ability to better manage and monitor community posts and comments is a need we are aware of. Unfortunately I can't give an ETA this. If you would like to share a bit more with me about your problems and needs I would appreciate that. 

• Tell me about if/how you use content moderation feature now?
• Why do you want/need to escalate every post/comment to a ticket? 
• Tell me about your ideal workflow. If there were no limitation what would you like to have?

• Tell me about if/how you use content moderation feature now?

We use http://getsatisfaction.com/ currently, because we need to be able to treat a public customer question as a request for our customer service team, just like a private email.

• Why do you want/need to escalate every post/comment to a ticket? 

Why is a ticketing system important? Why not just use email lists and not pay for zendesk?  The answers are the same for public (community) support: When a customer has a problem, it's our responsibility to help. We need to be able to assign the issue to a single agent, not lose track of it, and do our best to help the customer.  The reason why we want separate public and private support systems is because not every customer wants to (or can) discuss their problems on a public forum.  But if they do, it's great -- because by solving that problem for them, in public, it makes that solution visible to everyone via google search. We don't have to answer questions over and over again if customers can self-solve by looking at our public support history.

• Tell me about your ideal workflow. If there were no limitation what would you like to have?

Create a new ticket on each new post. Re-open that ticket if there are new comments (not by an agent).  If the associated ticket is closed (unchangable), close comments also on the public post.

-------

What is stopping Zendesk from supporting tickets for publicly visible customer service requests (e.g. via Community)?

Hey Zendesk,

Any updates on this? We would really like to have this for similar use cases as described above. Is there a timeline for this feature?

Hi,

@Zendesk support: Do you have an update on that?? It a very nice feature for the community

@Zendesk support: Update? I'm afraid since this is a community post, and since Zendesk community posts don't have any ticket functionality, that you've lost track of this extremely important issue and will miss any of your customers replying here ...

The option is there now. I use it. 

@Gary - How do you know there is a new community post, so that you can manually create a ticket?  Or is there a way to just automatically have a ticket created? Thanks!

Hi Bernie,

If you use the follow functionality on community topics you should get notifications for new posts and comments. From there you should be able to go and escalate from there to tickets if you need to work with a customer directly.

If I understand what you're looking for correctly, it sounds like you want a ticket to automatically created any time there is a new post or comment? Did I get that right? Can you explain a bit more about that use case and why it's important to your team?

Thanks!

• Tell me about if/how you use content moderation feature now?

We use http://getsatisfaction.com/ currently, because we need to be able to treat a public customer question as a request for our customer service team, just like a private email.

• Why do you want/need to escalate every post/comment to a ticket? 

Why is a ticketing system important? Why not just use email lists and not pay for zendesk?  The answers are the same for public (community) support: When a customer has a problem, it's our responsibility to help. We need to be able to assign the issue to a single agent, not lose track of it, and do our best to help the customer.  The reason why we want separate public and private support systems is because not every customer wants to (or can) discuss their problems on a public forum.  But if they do, it's great -- because by solving that problem for them, in public, it makes that solution visible to everyone via google search. We don't have to answer questions over and over again if customers can self-solve by looking at our public support history.

• Tell me about your ideal workflow. If there were no limitation what would you like to have?

Create a new ticket on each new post. Re-open that ticket if there are new comments (not by an agent).  If the associated ticket is closed (unchangable), close comments also on the public post.

+1

Here's some elaboration on this one:

• Tell me about your ideal workflow. If there were no limitation what would you like to have?

Create a new ticket on each new post. Re-open that ticket if there are new comments (not by an agent).  If the associated ticket is closed (unchangable), close comments also on the public post.

Right now, I can mark a public post as 'Answered,' leave comments open, and close the Support ticket. If a non-agent comments on that public post later, I want to re-open the original Support ticket.

Why? If a non-agent has a problem that is so similar, they might make a comment instead of make a new post. It is important for us to respond to that request.

Why else? Community management. If a non-agent is trolling our posts, I want my team to be able to manage that behavior. Automating the reaction and flagging that behavior within Support isn't achievable.

It does not make sense for every agent on my team to follow every post in our public forum. I understand that following topics lets me get emails in my inbox, but managing support through email is exactly why we chose Zendesk in the first place. Email doesn't scale or have visibility across the team.

If there are other solutions within Zendesk that can do this today, please let me know.

• Tell me about if/how you use content moderation feature now?

We do not use Community Moderation as a way of staying on top of Community activity. We do not want to rely on Community Moderation because our community moderators are not responsible for approving and rejecting community content. Our community team is responsible for encouraging discussion by commenting on posts when they feel it is appropriate.

• Why do you want/need to escalate every post/comment to a ticket?

Aggregating Community activity in a completely separate platform requires that we share credentials and manage separate accounts and subscriptions. The biggest pain point of this workaround is that there is no way to apply a unified priorities system to agents' tasks so they are required to make decisions on the fly about whether they should contribute to the Community or reply to a direct support request. I anticipate that Zendesk's support team is large enough that have the luxury two independent teams, one for Community moderation and one for direct support requests. Unfortunately, we are nowhere near large enough to differentiate between Community moderation and support requests so we are forced to have a single team that is dedicated to both tasks.

My experience has been that when you require people to think on the fly, things fall through the cracks and resources are allocated inefficiently. If that doesn't ring any bells for you, consider that, if my understanding of Explore is correct, the inefficient allocation of resources because agents were required to recognize patterns is the primary motivation behind why Explore was released in the first place.

All new comments and posts are an opportunity for us to contribute to the discussion and be made aware of issues that the user may have not considered contacting us about directly. We see our Community as no different than any of the other communication channels that we receive tickets from in Zendesk. We do not think of moving a conversation from the Community to Zendesk as escalation because we do not determine priority solely by the channel from which a customer's comment was received.

Agents spend their time answering tickets in Zendesk. If agents are required to manage two sets of credentials, in two separate platforms that require different workflows, they will be less efficient and the system is inevitably going to break down because a lot of the processes will be held together by nothing more than the agent's personal knowledge. We can start making helpful decisions on behalf of the agent only after their tasks are aggregated into a single platform. Nothing breeds chaos like the entropy of information.

• Tell me about your ideal workflow. If there were no limitation what would you like to have?

Basic Workflow:

A Community Channel exists in Zendesk that allows an Administrator to subscribe to different topics. Each time a new post is added to the Community a new ticket is created. Each time a new comment is added (not by an agent) to an existing post a public comment is added to the existing ticket. Agents can take ownership of "Community tickets" in the exact same way that they would take ownership of any other ticket.

Short term: a link to the post is included in the public comment so the agent can navigate to and comment on the post directly. Long term: the agent can comment directly on the post by replying to the ticket with a public comment.

If the conversation has drawn to a close the agent the ticket is set to Solved. If the conversation will likely continue in the future the ticket is set to On Hold or Pending, at the discretion of the organization's internal practices (we would choose Pending).

If an agent sets a community ticket to Solved but does not close the post for comments, a new "follow-up" ticket will be created if someone comments on the post (just like how regular tickets are handled today).

Long term: A Post's status could be managed directly within the ticket interface via a popup in the Open/Pending/Solved/On Hold action button that would only appear for "Community tickets". Actions included in this channel specific action popup would include be same as what is available in "Post options" on the Community. Agents would have similar "Comment options" button available in the body each public comment, allowing them to Edit, Delete, Mark as spam, Permalink, and Create a ticket.

Message Contents:

The ticket subject is the title of the post and the ticket's public comment is populated with the body of the post.

Files attached to the post or comment are attached to the ticket. Short term: limit the type of attachment that can be attached to "Community tickets". Long term: synchronize the attachment support between community comments and tickets as community supports more file formats into the future.

TLDR; Companies that can't afford to sustain two teams where one is dedicated to community management and one is dedicated to support request are required to teach all of their agents about two completely different platforms. Different systems in the same team encourage entropy. Entropy encourages chaos. Chaos allows things to fall through the cracks.

As Patrick Henry once said at the Second Virginia Convention, "Give me a single platform on which I can manage my agents' responsibilities, or give me death!"

Thanks for your time

Hi, my current company also requires this feature; I know there is a manual way to "Create Ticket" for a community post, but is there an automatic way to have every community post turn into a ticket? Much appreciated.

Similar to the "Auto-Convert Topics to Tickets" feature within Freshdesk (https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/225182-how-to-automatically-convert-forum-topics-to-tickets-)

We tried for a few years to get Zendesk's attention about the importance of tickets for customer contacts that come in on a public-facing support site (like Zendesk Communities). We've since moved to Discourse and implemented a custom solution to automatically generate Zendesk tickets when our customers post.  We're happy with the solution.

Hello Nicole, is there any beta test of this functuiality inside Zendesk happing now?

What can be soultion for me if I do not have developer's resources levaraging API...

I also need this tickets' autocration based on forum's posts...

I'm excited to see that Gather will support the ability to convert forum posts into support tickets. However, at this time we're only able to do that manually, post by post.

Because my team intends to use Gather primarily for product support, it would be ideal for us to be able to convert posts into tickets automatically. This way, whenever a team member is scheduled to cover our ticket queue, they can quickly reply to support-related forum posts at the same time as emailed support requests without continuously checking Gather and creating tickets individually - a process which could become time consuming and could make it easy to miss new posts on busy days.

Would others find this helpful? Does Zendesk have any plans to add an automation setting to this feature?

It seems silly to me that this conversation has been going on for 5 years with promises that "it's being looked" into by the Product team. 

From the perspective of the customers here it seems like such an obvious feature that comments on articles / guide, etc would generate a ticket and route into our Zendesk instance. I'm not asking to connect two different companies here - but rather the products offered by the same company (Zendesk) that we're paying for should have a tight integration. 

Hi @Kris Parker,

I can definitely see the irony of what I'm about to say: It's being looked at. But it hasn't been prioritized for 2020. It's a very likely candidate for 2021.

Some background: The community functionality has obviously been around for a long time in Zendesk. But it was only recently that we made it a separate product with a dedicated team working on it. That's not to try and make bad excuses, but just to say that the functionality as a whole was not getting the love it deserved, by a team that was dedicated to the success of that specific functionality. Within the realm of Guide, we always managed to find more important things to work on in the space of knowledge management. With our launch of Gather as a dedicated product last year, I can say that this is changing. But we have a gap to close, too, and we cannot do it all at the same time. We've chosen a couple of projects in 2020 that we're actively working on. The first one will be user badges, which is also a long-standing request. That one will be available some time before/around summer. And there is more coming.

I hope this feedback gives you a sense of honesty in communication of what we're doing.