Remember when we mentioned the possibility of switching over to a more practical support desk for all of our community support needs? Well, that possibility has finally become a reality and we’re very happy to announce that, as of today, we have fully moved from SupportPress to Help Scout as our community support desk.
The Benefits
It’s been no secret that, while SupportPress worked, it had a number of insurmountable issues that were always going to be there. With that in mind, we set to work on finding a new support desk that would better suit our needs by allowing us to support the community without being dragged down by missing features. After looking at a number of options and evaluating their features (as well as their prices), we settled on Help Scout as the best solution for supporting the global WordPress community.
There are a ton of features in Help Scout that we will be making extensive use of – there’s too many to list them all here, but here are a few of the important ones that really helped to motivate us to move over from SupportPress:
- Ticket assignments
- Chronological notes
- Full-featured notifications with per-user controls
- Collision detection (to prevent simultaneous replies from multiple people)
- Conversation branching & merging
- A powerful advanced search
- The ability to follow conversations
- Rich text formatting
Even with those features alone the move would have been worth it, but there’s a whole lot more that Help Scout offers that will be of huge benefit to the community – you can see their full feature list here. One distinct advantage that Help Scout has over all of the other support desk options, is that their free plan includes everything that we need. With the possible exception of workflows and the ability to build custom integrations, there aren’t really any features that we’re missing out on by sticking with the free plan. Those items are not essential though, so there’s no real loss there.
Up Next
There are a few processes we should be sure we all agree on and document if needed. Primarily we’ve noticed the following things:
- Internal notes and privacy
- When to assign and unassign tickets
- When to change customers on tickets
If you are an active community deputy Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. then you will be added to the Help Scout instance shortly. You will receive an email in your inbox instructing you how to proceed with setting up your profile. If you have not received an email by Feb 13th, then please comment here and we’ll make sure to have you setup in no time.