Do we mark it as 'Best answer' or 'Trash' the topic

Hi Nikhil,

interesting that you are directing your support traffic via the community - of course this can help to increase the self-service support and decrease the workload for your support team.

The challenge which you are describing surely is something that I came across in the past sometimes, and I think it is something that is common to many support-focused communities out there. It happens that a customer sends in multiple support requests in different channels and in consequence receives a reply in a different channel earlier…

In general, you either want to respond and mark the question as solved, or, in hard cases, remove the question. If it is not possible to mark a reply as the valid solution to the question, then this is what I would do:

The question (or answer) has value for other users

In this case I would try to rephrase the response that your colleagues have sent. Mention that you are aware that customer support already has solved the issue (but that you will share it here to help others with the same question). It could look something like this:

Thank you for sharing your question, user123. I see that my colleagues already helped you, but let me share the solution here as well so that others can also benefit: You can retrieve your puk code by logging in to your account on our website, under “my subscription”.

In order to solve the question, other users need to contact the support team

If other customers could not solve their question or issue themselves, but an action from the support team is required, respond by stating this.

I see your question has been answered by a colleague already. In this case only our customer support team can solve this, as you need to verify your identity before such a change can be done. You can find our contact details on this page: Link.

The question has no value for other users

In this case, you could simply state that you know that the question has been answered by your colleagues already. Offer the customer to assist with any additional questions, in case a follow-up is needed.

The question is low-quality

In the case that:

• the question / description of the issue is very poorly written
• you think that the customer will most likely not re-visit the community
• you have covered this question in other topics already

you can also think about removing this topic. I would do this e.g. if the customer only has written half of a sentence to describe the issue / question, and if there is plenty of other (better) content on the community on this already.

I hope that this covered all the scenarios and questions you had - if not, please let me know! :)