Hello I’m Patrick with SUMO’s Helpdesk. I’ve gotten to meet a few of you at the Summit in Toronto, but for those who I haven’t met yet I wanted to explain the role that Helpdesk can play within SUMO and how we can help contributors fill in the gaps on the forums. Things like getting us to 100% question replied to in 24 hours and increasing our solution rate.

For Q4 we’re working on using the existing forum tagging system to start leveraging the skills of our long time contributors, as well as getting the Helpdesk involved when you don’t know know the answer.

The tag that I’m most excited about is Escalated, which you can use when you just can’t figure out the solution to customer’s problem. There will be new filters which you can use to only look at the Escalated case if you want to work on the hard stuff. In addition escalating a post will send a ping to the Helpdesk with the forum URL, so we can get involved if needed. Posts can be also be automatically tagged as Escalated after it has gone 12 hours with No Replies.

A few people have asked what kind of posts should be escalated? If you’re unsure of how to reply mark it escalated. Since everyone is able to see escalated tagged post, anyone can answer them.

This tag along with new Filtering options, will allow all of us all to see what posts need our attention and get the customer a more timely response.

We’re hoping to have all of this rolled out before the end of December. There is a bug tracking the work for this feature here Bug 932348 – Escalated threads should create zendesk ticket, so please let us know what you think and if you’re interested in focusing on these escalated cases I’d love to hear from you.