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by mkohlmyr 2411 days ago
Having worked in this field for a while, you should look at tiered and tagged assignment. E.g. escalation tiers / priority assignment and assignment by browser language / geo up. From what I recall these were important as you look at supporting large organisations. Customisability (design) and pre-chat forms were also headline features.
2 comments
trynewideas 2411 days ago
Email channels and pre-ticket forms are dealbreakers for being a Zendesk replacement. I can live without a lot of ZD's features (and be happier for it) but those two are table stakes for me. I could see this being a replacement for Intercom, but Intercom isn't a fit for us either.

The stuff ZD and Intercom (and SFDC) are awful at, where there are opportunities for something else to swoop in: even partial Markdown support for incoming messages, integrations with third-party docs/KB sources, live queue dashboards/visualizations, toggling features based on different support plans, and facilitating handoffs for follow-the-sun support (multiple queues, defined regions/hours per queue, auto-reassigning active tickets across agents and queues, cleaner or richer ticket summarization options).

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mkohlmyr 2411 days ago
Yeah agreed, KB integration was another big one, as well as shortcuts when you have agents who do 3-4 chats at the same time. In fact the ability to define agent capacity individually and by role to begin with is important.

The ability to define different capacities for the same agent across different queues and how to aggregate that is also an advanced feature which is useful. E.g. I can take 3 in English or one in French and one in English. Or I can take 4 tier one tickets or 2 tier two tickets. Or I can do x tickets for customers on basic support but if I'm on with a customer who has priority... Etc

Queueing and assignment logic gets tricky because requirements can be vastly different across organisations. Hence why there are companies at the high end charging enterprise money.

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sojanofficial 2411 days ago
Co-Founder here: These are all great suggestions. We are reworking our roadmap based on the feedback from HN. Thanks a lot for these.
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