One of the nice things about being young company is that we are still not bogged down by past decisions, and when something doesn’t work we just move forward and try something else.
We wanted to have a very simple support workflow – people leave a support request (implemented as a simple comment form) and from there we do everything over email. We wanted to avoid public threads of comments or forum as it might be good for SEO, but in our opinion it is a strange experience to everybody as obviously some things should not be made public and therefor you need to be able to mark what is public and what not, and for the casual reader it is also rarely helpful as he usually can see the question but not the resolution of it.
It proved to be an interesting idea but one that just don’t work when there is more then one person answering support queries. Email clients are not exactly built for it, and it is hard for someone to track what the other person said. Therefor we decided to just go with dedicate tools for support and selected Help Scout (yes price was an important factor 😉 ). Hopefully a better support workflow for us will translate into better support experiance for our clients.
Side note: We are talking here about our “pro” offerings, the free plugins will keep being supported at the wordpress.org forums.