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Community (Forums)

If you are on the Support Desk or Enterprise edition AND you have the Advanced Portal added to your account, you can enable a Community (or what some call forums) on your portal at no additional cost and let your customers help each other, and also converse with your team.

Note: Some customers may want to create a new ticket type called Community or Forum (your choice) but it is not needed and also a Group called Community.  Any ticket type can be designated to the Community as can any Group.  To learn how to customize your Ticket Types, see here.  See more about Groups here.

Enable Community by going to Admin/My Portal/Community tab.  Check the Enable box at the top and click Save.  Refresh your browser and you will see a new Community section appear on the left navigation under Knowledge Base.  This is where all of your forum posts will appear.

Add a Category, then add your Sub Categories.  The Sub Category is where the discussion happens.  These Sub Categories are "tickets" within your main account, but to your customers, they appear in the community (forum) format.  This makes it easy for your team to manage the exchanges.

Here is an example from our account.  You can also see what this looks like on the portal by clicking Help/Support Portal in the upper right corner of your TeamSupport account.


In the picture below, you can see how to define what ticket type we want to be created when a customer creates a new Topic on the Community.  Again, you can choose to create a ticket type called Community, Form, etc - or you can tie these to types you already have.  See here to learn more about ticket types.

You can also define a default group to assign these two as well as a product (Enterprise only on the Products selection).




Posting to the Community:
Once you have created your categories and sub's, click create new ticket at the top of your TeamSupport account.  The ticket name will be the topic name and the description will be the body of the post.

Now select the sub category you want to post in, mark the ticket visible to customers and save it.  That's it!

If you want to lock the post from further customer comments, set the ticket status to Closed.  It will still be visible/searchable on the portal, but your customers will not be able to comment on it further.  If you want to unlock it, set the status to something other than Closed.


When your customers add a comment on the advanced portal, it will create a new action in the community ticket - so this works exactly the same way when you are dealing with a customer one on one using web conversations.


When you enable the community, it will appear like this on your advanced portal:

Once inside the Community section, your customers will see the Categories you have created.  They can click on them and drill down into the comments and also create new topcis.   

Note - a Topic on the community is = to a Ticket in your main account.




This is the comment view within a topic.


Making Topics Sticky

In some cases, community topics can become busy and important items moved to the bottom out of view.  If this is the case in your community, then you have the ability to make topics "sticky".  Do to this, open the community ticket within the main TeamSupport app and set the Knowledge base flag to Yes and also make sure the ticket description is in the Knowledge base.  

Example:




When you do this, you will see the word Sticky appear on those topics and they will always remain at the top of the list.