Building your Community with Forums in Freshdesk

With Freshdesk, you can set up a community to provide your customers with a platform to interact with each other. This will be useful both from a customer support as well as a branding standpoint. For example, customers can ask questions and get quick answers from other users in the community who might have asked the same question earlier or help with a workaround that they found useful. 

Here is an image of how Freshdesk categorizes its forums:

Once you have set up your Freshdesk account, you can create new topics from the Forums tab. You can also customize your community to drive different kinds of discussions. For example, you can invite users to share ideas, suggest features and drive your products or services through Idea forums. 

You can make sure that the important topics are always on top by making them Sticky, or close the discussion on a stale topic by locking it. These options can be found under Edit Topic inside a forum topic:

Sometimes, customers might reach out on forums with bugs that they are facing to get help from other customers. To bring topics like these right into your helpdesk and get your team working on the issue, your agents can use the Convert Topic to Ticket option to create a new ticket with a link to the corresponding forum topic.

To make sure your agents are on top of important customer conversations on a forum, they can monitor a topic by clicking on the follow button. This ensures they are notified by email each time there is a new update to the thread.

Categorize your forums based on type - Announcements, Questions, Ideas or Problems, with specific functionalities based on your requirements. 

You can also have your forums displayed publicly and make them available for everybody, instead of just your existing users. If you want to run the community only for logged-in users, you can make the community exclusive by managing access levels from Admin > Channels > Portals > Settings

Set the visibility rights for each of your forums by clicking on the corresponding Edit Forum button:

The Visible to option can be set to one of the four visibility types:

All - This makes it publicly visible to anyone who accesses your self-service portal.

Logged In Users - This makes it visible only to those who have signed up and logged in with their credentials.

Agents - This makes it private, so only agents on your helpdesk can view them. This is useful for internal knowledge sharing.

Select Companies - This makes it visible only to certain companies that you select from your contacts. This will let you run a private community for a specific group of users if necessary. For example, you could mix and match different types of forums and take feature requests from your users publicly, and setup a private forum for your premium customers to let them know about upcoming beta releases.

With Freshdesk, you can set up a community to provide your customers a platform to interact with each other. This will be useful both from a customer support as well as a branding standpoint. For example: Customers can ask questions and get quick answers from other users in the community who might have asked the same question earlier or help with a workaround that they found useful. 

Here is an image of how Freshdesk categorises its Forums:

Once you have set up your Freshdesk account, you can create new Topics from the Forums tab. You can also customize your community to drive different kinds of discussions. For example, you can invite users to share ideas, suggest features and drive your products or services through Idea forums.

You can make sure that the important Forum topics are always on top by making them Sticky, or close the discussion on a stale topic by Locking it. These options would be available upon clicking on Edit Topic button inside a forum topic:

Sometimes, customers might reach out on forums with bugs that they are facing to get help from other customers. To bring topics like these right into your helpdesk and get your team working on the issue, your agents can use the Convert Topic to Ticket option to create a new ticket with a link to the corresponding forum topic.

To make sure your agents are on top of important customer conversations on a forum, they can monitor a topic by clicking on the follow button. This ensures they are notified on email each time there is a new update to the thread.

Categorize your forums based on type - Announcements, Questions, Ideas or Problems with specific functionalities based on your requirements. 

You can also have your forums displayed publicly and make them available for everybody instead of just your existing users. If you want to run the community only for logged in users, you can make the community exclusive by managing access levels from Admin > Channels > Portals > Settings

Set the visibility rights for each of your forums by clicking on the corresponding Edit Forum button:

The Visible to option can be set to one of the four visibility types:

All - This makes it publicly visible to anyone who accesses your self-service portal.

Logged In Users - This makes it visible only to those who have signed up and logged in with their credentials.

Agents - This makes it private, so only agents on your helpdesk can view them. This is useful for internal knowledge sharing.

Select Companies - This makes it visible only to certain companies that you select from your contacts. This will let you run a private community for a specific group of users if necessary. For example, you could mix and match different types of forums and take feature requests from your users publicly, and setup a private forum for your premium customers to let them know about upcoming beta releases.