Forum Support or Tickets?

Daniel wrote:

Tickets have the advantage that you can't miss one. A forum post always has the chance of slipping through the cracks.

But the forum post does get several sets of eyes on it. Both have benefits eh.

Definitely and, I think each have their own merits that shouldn't be overlooked. For instance, a forum reply has many eyes on it and develops a [greater] sense of community whereas a ticket, as you say, can't really be missed.

I regularly use a technical service elsewhere that has both and both work very well; the forum tends to be the first port of call and then a ticket. (Mind you the ticket is almost always for interventionist technical support rather than just help and pointers for the user to resolve an issue themselves.)

Agree. Both have their merits. My personal order of preference when seeking support/help: forum, knowledge base, ticket. A ticket or phone call is almost always the last resort for me as I like to fix things myself.

Both.

Interestingly Dan started this thread way before the time when I anything more than a general interest in preferences.

Since that time a lot has happened and, for me, bringing Ninja Hosting almost to fruition means I've a keener interest in this :)

Ninja Hosting has been delayed a little bit, but it'll be here soon as you can blink!!

why not a support forum, a knowledgebase, AND a support ticket system in the form of a single, unified joomla extension that takes the strengths of each and eliminates their respective faults? (Then sell this extension too.)

Magento open source eCommerce is doing something like this now; the only problem is they don't answer forum posts or respond to support tickets. Not even when a ticket includes a request for a price quote on custom development (somethign they allow you to do in their ticketing system) and you even mention a budget of $20k+ for a small project wanted by a major client.

*Key thing: if you offer a means for users to get responses, you have to respond.*

Best & Worst Practices/Features in Support Forums, Knowledgebases, and Ticket Systems -- what if you got all the good together?

Support forums are widely used and preferred except when queries go unanswered or unresolved, or when users phrase questions poorly or repeat questions that have already been answered. Redundant queries are often due to weak search engine sand poorly organized discussion categories, alongside user ignorance and laziness. Support forums commonly suffer from terse and often incomplete answers that assume knowledge or context users will lack, especially a year or mroe after the thread began. Nobody likes finding answers buried over multiple posts in a 20 page thread, or answers that subsequent replies or threads reveal as insufficient, wrong, or otherwise lacking.

Self-help knowledgebases are good when they fix your problem; they often won't and can't offer responses to you. They are also commonly used to indicate to users, "this is all you're going to get in terms of support from us!"

Ticket systems are good and well-liked when they get timely responses and guarantee all issues will be brought to a resolution. They are also a magnet for abuse and people skipping self-help in a knowledgebase or forum to hit the panic button directly.

So what if you had:

A well organized forum that cross-promoted a wiki-like knowledgebase where admins and veteran/"pro" users accumulated important material from the forum. (Some pruning and updating or directing users to the knowledgebase from various threads would avoid some of the forum problems mentioned above.) Knowledgebase articles might also direct to certain forum threads when people are not looking for static "fixit" answers but more general and subjective advice on the ways in which they might accomplish something.

A prominent search-for-answers function could relate search terms to possibly relevant knowledgebase articles and head off forum posts that pose an old/already solved problem.

The ticket system might reveal itself only to users who have moved from a forum search to the knowledgebase. Prior to accepting a ticket, the user's query would be parsed for keywords with relevant knowledgebase and forum areas appearing as suggested reading BEFORE submitting a ticket. "Pro" or trusted users might be given a more direct path to the ticket system.

Keeping it simpler, suppose you just treated forum posts as tickets under certain conditions. Say if I post a request and others see it is a new and real issue with no immediate answer, so they "vote" that it get a ticket status, or key moderators put it in a ticket queue. It would be an incentive to form real, good, helpful questions if gaining ticket status required meeting certain requirements for posing a good, answerable question.

DPK, you make some very good points, in fact I'd meant to reply yesterday but something else took my time.

In the time that I've been putting together Ninja Hosting I've been thinking a lot more about support and how important it is to get it right for customers.

For the past few weeks I've been firming up my thoughts. There is need to have a discussion with the rest of the Ninja team but you'll see the results of these discussions soon :)

I just noticed the email alerts for new posts in the forum here do not include the base URL in the link.

Daniel, what are your thoughts behind this:

A 'support' forum and a 'discussion' forum have different needs and uses, but this isn't explored or taken advantage of very often.

The same software is typically used for both purposes, but it was really designed for "discussion"--broad "democratic" communication--not "support," which is usually a more restricted communication between people whose inequality and possibly clashing interests is often clear behind the cheery canned phrases of "how can I help?" and "do not hesitate to ask..." Discussion forums for support are the open source or cluetrain antidote to stereotypical "customer service."

But problems arise from this. These problems can be headed off if you rigorously run your forum or have trusted deputies to do this in a way that sets the tone you want and keeps it all organized. The time investment this requires might be saved by a more suitable software design.

Common "support forum" problems:

* Many users are accustomed to very libertarian discussion forums, and they may assume or believe that all forums should operate on a "virtually anything goes" model. This is naive and misguided in any discussion forum, more so when you have a business or product, or personal reputation attached. In a wide open forum, your business or product can be maligned by people who are quick to blast you for a problem they have with your product. Or they may just be jerks to others. Exiling such people--or anyone--is a pain, a time sink, and it might have some lashback you don't want. It's time and effort to manage this stuff, and you can slip up easily some day when you are really fed up.

* Many users will also assume that your forum is to be a home to your part of the open source community (or really theirs), and this will bring in some bad things with the good. One of the best things that can happen is you get "fans" who are "gurus" with your software and offer free support services of a kind in your forum. This can also lead to some of the worst problems, especially if the guru starts to take a proprietary interest in your forum and/or software. In this weird world a n00b with a simple technical problem can get told off by a "guru" who is not your official technical support, not under your control, and not really someone you want to exile.

Those are some of the main human dynamics I see with a typical "forum" interface for communication. There are more, but I think those are examples that are typical of the main currents. Personality, emotion, and socializing are the dominant traits--NOT the forming of good questions that can be expeditiously answered and then available for easy discovery to people with the same problem later on. The "clutter" of forums from Joomla to Dell or Linksys is accepted and left to Google to make manageable.

How could you make a more manageable, efficient way to get support and answer technical questions without inhibiting the obviously popular social dimension--keeping in mind too that some people are going to come in, no matter what, in a state of irritation and/or ignorance? (This is good to the extent that it is a motivation toward enlightenment. :cheer: )

Discussion boards are a very old and popular online technology, going back to BBSes, and they seem to have a strong populist appeal. People with low technical abilities will use email and forums. Everyone finds these technologies simple, accessible, and fun. Forums are even used in lieu of a CMS for citizen journalism purposes where people post news and questions about the place where they live. By contrast, comments are a similar but less popular way to communicate with others through a website. I think this is because comments are hierarchical and commenters (who are usually not article authors on the same site) are constrained by the dominant article they respond to. The article limits the subject, sets a tone, and is visually "authorial"/authoritative while comments are marginal, subordinate, less authoritative. That's why comments on a knowledgebase article might be appropriate as opposed to making the knowledgebase a wiki anyone could change. (Which works, but only if you put in the time to police users and their posts.)

If you are trying to create a knowledgebase and give authoritative answers to questions about software you authored, you want quality contributions, which are hard to glean out of a populist-anarchic "community" of users, but there is that undeniable wisdom-of-the-crowd effect. How do you get elite results in your information quality while also maximizing your community base and user contributions?

What if you built your whole site on something like Elgg? Elgg is as an open source social networking platform that can be used as a CMS. It was originally built and is still used for collaborative classroom/educational environments. Every user is an author, and like Facebook you have finely-grained control over who can see what in your profile and the content you author. Self-organization and internal communication is possible so there is a lot of freedom for users within the parameters that administrators scale and shape to their needs. Elgg also has an interesting feature where you can switch from a forum to a comment view so you see content and responses to it as threads in a forum or as articles with comments.

This might be very accessible, well organized, and allow users to feel free to participate in many different ways. It might also provide the tools for elite users to be really effective at collaborating. You could have your semi-static knowledgebase alongside an open discussion area and maybe build a support ticket feature where users could post a ticket visible or invisible to other users after being guided to check the knowledgebase and discussions.

A ticketing system implies a wholly different relationship with users, a one-on-one professional interaction between a consumer and a provider.

I have never installed Elgg myself, by the way. I've been recently interested in it and related approaches to websites as social media. These are just some rambling ideas on a subject that interests me in general--how the software interface affects/directs/constraints the human communication and relationships.