Creating at a community on Zendesk

Hi Christophe

In its current form, you can certainly use Zendesk Community feature to host conversations between you and customer and customer to customer. You have a lot of options to convert comments to tickets, mark topics as answered and provide official answers. You can also mark suggestions as planned or not planned to show that you listen and actually plan to implement some of the suggestions that your users come up with!

When it comes to "gamification" of the users and giving them more rights in the community it isn't something that you can do - yet... I have heard rumors that Zendesk is working on making real moderator tools, so you can give moderators access to more tools to help run your community but not have them as agents in your Zendesk. They are also looking more on reporting and ways to promote active users. How, when, if and in what order any of this becomes available I don't know, but I would highly suggest you keep an eye on this article for upcoming EAP's and Beta's: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207106547-Current-and-upcoming-Zendesk-betas 

Hello Carsten,

Thank you very much for this update.

As our app will target millennials, it is very important that our community forum is designed for them. Do you know if there is an app in the marketplace that can cover our needs ?

On the analytics side, is there way to know how many people have joined the community and when? How often they are present/ contribute ( posts and comments)

Hey Christophe, 

Carsten already covered most of the bases, but to add to what he said and share a little about how we manage this community here at Zendesk: 

What are the tools available to track the activity of the various members?

Some of this depends what activities you want to track and how granular you want to get with it. There's a lot of user level information available via the API. We also recommend using Google Analytics and leverage the custom dimensions. Pendo is a partner we work with to track user data on our Help Center as well. 

Can we created different categories of members (not only agents) with different rights?

Not yet, but there are some things along these lines in the works. As Carsten indicated, the product team is working on a moderator role, and that functionality will allow admins to give different levels of permissions to different users. They're also looking into including badging. 

You can currently restrict visibility of a given topic to specific groups of users, so you could set it up that your power users unlock areas of the community or that sort of thing. 

Is there a way to award badges to the active members?

Badges may be coming with these additional permissions currently in development. There's also a JS hack that will allow you to do it now, as we do in our community: 

How to add cool agent badges in Communities

Any best practices to shares?

Here are some posts and articles on Community related best practices: 

Hey Christophe!

Sounds like a really great awesome use case for our community, if support is one of the main purposes of your community I think it makes a lot of sense to create a community within your Zendesk ecosystem. 

I don't have a lot to add to what Nicole said above as I believe it is really great content and guidance she is providing. I just wanted to let you know we are always keen to hear your feedback and work with customers to provide to help them provide a great community experience for their customers.  

Thank you all for your great feedback, these are very valuable and useful input.

So far our " forum" is on reddit, there are great staff there and by extracting the data through the API, you can track the activity of every users (post, comments, ....) and we reward the most active users. We want to do the same here so i will try Pendo as suggested by Nicole ( will see how i can differentiate the activity linked with the support and the activity linked with the forum). The main reason we want to move away from Reddit is that the solution is not enough main strain and user friendly but if we can find a way to gamify the Zendesk forum we will most likely not move forward with this solution ( gamification is a must have to interact and engage with millennials) 

Hi Nicole ( and everybody else)

Thank you for your transparency and clear answer this really help us move forward. Very happy to be using Zendesk and this is good example of how a community forum can work.

I have checked out Pendo but as we are already using MixPanel, so there is no use in adding this app on top of it (but thanks for the recommendation). Crowdvocate doesn't have an integration with Zendesk unless you use Zappier but Mixpanel can cover most of our needs on this side as well.

If we cannot find the right community forum, we will indeed build our own (this is in our the roadmap for 2020).

is there a way to have more granularity in your report ? Having the name of the people that voted, subscribed, commented,....or do we have to retreat the data ourselves ? By having this datas we could already implement a first level of gamification.

Cheers,

Christophe

Thank you all so much for your help. Developing the community the way we want using the currently available tools will imply too much tech resources and this is not a high priority at this stage so i will have to put this project on hold.

Again thank you for your help