This week’s tip is an intro to forum functionality that’s great for trial customers, new users and even veterans who haven’t yet used the Knowledge Base feature in Zendesk. You’ll be able to use these features whether you’re creating a customer-facing and/or agent-only Knowledge Base. The features mentioned below are available during your free 30-day trial and within our Regular, Plus+ and Enterprise plans. To help everyone get familiar, we’re going to cover the following:
- Categories
- The three forum types
- Escalating users’ forum comments to tickets
Categories
Categories allow you to organize your forums under common interests. This is extremely helpful if you want to place a number of forums under, let’s say “frequently asked questions” (FAQs), or if they need to be organized by a particular product or service. To add a category, navigate to your forums tab > select add category from the upper right.
Once you’ve created your categories, you can start organizing your forums. To move a forum from one category to another, select the forum in question > click edit from the upper right > select the category from the drop-down list as seen below.
You can create as many categories as you need and they’ll always be listed in the category drop-down list in any edit forum page.
Three Forum Types
Within your Knowledge Base you can use three different types of forums to support your end-users and/or agents. When creating a new forum you can select from the content drop-down list(seen below) whether you want to create an article, idea or question forum.
For example, we use an idea forum for feature requests, which allows users to both post ideas and vote up or down other users’ requests. The latter of which helps our product managers prioritize requests for development.
Escalating Comments to Tickets
In addition to the features mentioned above, you can also escalate an end-user’s forum comment to a ticket within your Knowledge Base. This functionality allows you to discuss a comment made by an end-user with other agents privately before replying with a public comment. To escalate a comment from a forum topic simply select escalate to ticket from the upper right of any forum topic.
You can also see any other tickets that have been previously created from this topic in the “discussed in…” area.
Once you’ve created your Knowledge Base, you can then use Forum Analytics to track how your users are engaging with your site. To sign up for a 30-day free trial, click on the “Try Zendesk Free” button at the bottom of the page.
