Hello @indust, I hope you are doing well. I understand where you are coming from. The flow that you’d mentioned here is more of a usecase rather than a functionality and it’s partly possible with portal customization. 

The idea here is to remove the submit a new ticket button in the portal and add it at the end of every solution article so that the user would have to read the articles first and they’ll see the button only in the end of the article. 

To give you a clear picture, this is how the article would look before adding the code: 

You can also choose to add a disclaimer like below: 

The code has to be added under Admin → Portal → Customize portal → Layouts and Pages → Portal pages → Article view. Once you add the code here, the button would be visible in all the solution articles. 

<p><button type="button"><a href="https://yourfreshdeskurl/support/tickets/new">New Ticket</a></button></p>

You can modify the styling of the button using CSS. 

Additionally you can use this code in Admin->Support Channels->Portals->Customize Portal->Layout & Pages->Portal Pages->Portal Home to remove the new support ticket button in the homepage. 

<script>
jQuery(document).ready(function(){  //document.ready begins
jQuery('.hc-nav adhref$="/support/tickets/new"]').remove() //To Remove New Ticket
});  // document.ready ends
</script>

I hope this workaround helps you in dealing with tickets better. Let us know your thoughts on this :) 

Thanks.

This isn’t quite what I’m looking for though, to be honest.

Rather than a workaround I think Freshdesk has to put more resources in to forcing users to use the solution centre.

Some might say this offers a bad user experience but, fundamentally, a great deal of small companies simply can’t handle support on a large scale and forcing lazy users to search the knowledge base FIRST is absolutely crucial to running their businesses.

Also - what is the point in writing 500+ articles if most users simply ignore them?

FD need to put more focus on Solutions > Ticket, not the other way round.

Hi @indust, thank you for your honest feedback. We’ll definitely pass this to our team to see how we can incorporate it in the upcoming features.

Right now, you can customize your portal as mentioned to achieve this. I’m able to think of a couple of other solutions here: 

1. Help Widget

You can remove the new ticket button and prompt the user to raise a ticket using help widget. You can navigate to Admin → Widgets → Help Widget and in the settings, choose ‘Optimize for deflection’. 

 Once you do that, you can embed the widget in your website. Please find the steps here on how you can do it. When a user clicks on the widget, the flow would be : Search for articles → Select an article → Only if they choose ‘Not helpful option’, ticket form would be shown.

2. Automations

Another option here is to handle such tickets after they are raised. The idea here is to set up an automation rule that runs on ticket creation to send out auto-replies with details. 

This appraoch combined with either of the options mentioned above could be effective in handling chunks of tickets. 

You can add a drop-down ticket field under Admin → Ticket fields, add the most asked questions in the dropdown and make this visible for customers in the ticket form. 

When they are creating the ticket, they can choose this option if query is related. The automation rule should be set up in such a way that when ticket is created and drop down field value is option 1, send email to requester and close the ticket. You can additionally add a tag here so that you can filter these tickets later. 

This way you can esnure they are closed yet the response is sent. It’s bit of a work but can be helpful in handling very frequent cases. 

Freshdesk is a configrable product and yes, you can set it up in such a way that it’s most helpful for you. We hear you and we can see how better we can enforce the customers to seach first before they raise a ticket.

Thanks!