The best bots for support requests

A ticket system starts paying off the moment questions get lost in general chat. That happens earlier than most people expect — at two requests a day, nobody can tell whether anyone dealt with them.

What a ticket system provides is less technology than order: every request gets a place, a state and an owner. Whoever asks presses a button and lands in a channel only they and the responsible team can see.

Four things matter when choosing. Multiple topics need multiple paths — an application, a complaint and a technical question go to different people. A short form before opening saves the first follow-up question, which is the expensive one. Limits stop a bored member from opening fifty tickets. And transcripts decide whether you can reconstruct later what was agreed.

That last point deserves a second look. Support conversations routinely contain personal information. A transcript that automatically lands on the bot provider's servers is a disclosure to a third party. Where possible, pick a bot that posts the file into a channel you control.

And the least comfortable rule: set the system up once you know who answers. A button nobody responds to is worse than no button.