Hey Maxime,





thanks for sharing your quesstion with us!





There are several ways to handle this. My personal favorite are Moderation Labels. With them you can easily mark topics which still need an official response, or where an update needs to be shared once your second line support (or other department) comes back with more information.





Moderation Label workflow


If a question cannot be answered directly, then you can "park" topics for another agent to handle later.





You can define Moderator Labels in your Control Environment:


1. Go to [Forum settings] - [Moderation Labels] and define the labels which you want to use.


2. After that, Moderators can (de-)activate these in each topic when necessary:

3. At the beginning of a shift, Moderators then should check for all topics where these labels are active:

This way no topic will be forgotten.





PM workflow


This is tricky, as Moderators usually do not have access to each others' inbox. In my opinion a user can also wait until the next day with a response on a private message. Only if I send someone a message and I know that I am not in the office tomorrow, I will inform the user that my response will be delayed.





In general, my advise would be to try avoid to handle support via private message as much as possible.





Private messages are 1:1 support and your community will not benefit from it. Private messages should be used mostly for these two cases:

• User has broken the rules / needs to be informed about moderation actions
  
  
• User has an issue where personal information needs to be shared to solve the issue
  
  

In all other cases I would ask the user to share the question on the community. You could think of a template, e.g. "When you share your question on the community other users can help and people with the same question will benefit from it in the future.".





I hope that helps a bit, let me know if there are questions!





Cheers,





Julian

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Thanks Julian, much appreciated 😉

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No worries! :)





One more tip: You can also advise everybody to save this as an advanced filter:





1. Go to "advanced filter" and select [label] - [equals to] - [needs response]


2. Click on [update]


3. Click on [save filter] and give it a name, e.g. "needs response"





It will then show up in the list on the left. This way they will only need one click to see what's important:

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