signposts to the right folk within Alteryx for more technical questions

[SeanAdams]

Hi @LeahK

On of the challenges with the discussion board is that every-so-often you come across one like this:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Salesforce-Output-Dreaded-INVALID-FIELD-e...

or like this

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Can-the-Drive-Distance-Tool-output-a-rout...

Where this may be beyond the technical ability of the community team, and really needs someone from within the Alteryx Dev team who knows the internals of the tool to provide a technical response.   

However - unlike the "meet the community" post - there's no similar idea for the technical folk so we don't know where to send these.

I don't think that relying on you and your team to spot these kind of items is a workable / scalable answer either - there's just too many posts on the fora for you to read every one and make this kind of determination.

I can think of three ways to address this:

a) create a similar post for "meet the tech team" to identify 4 or 5 technical people who are willing to jump onto these more technical items (like MattD; Chad; Sophia / Sofia), and then when we come across these one of us can just tag the relevant technical person onto the thread.

b) we add this to the new functionality that you're thinking about under "report content" - we add another option called "escalate to technical folk"

c) we create a generic @ sign for something like @TechnicalTeamNeeded where when we spot one of these, we can then just reply and tag the technical team, which would put this into the right people's queues.

The vast majority of questions and issues can be solved by the community, so I'm keen that whatever solution we come up with doesn't deluge your technical folk - but at the same time it's important that we create a channel for the small subset that need extra assistance, to be able to get these into the right hands without your tech teams having to trawl through hundreds of community posts daily.

[LeahK]

Great feedback @SeanAdams. To be clear. the "report content" feature we leverage today sends items to a queue that is shared between a number of technical resources (like MattD and Sophia). We also have an integration in place with our support case system, that allows us to escalate posts from the community straight to our Customer Support Engineers.

With regards to the "report content" feature, the ideal solution would be to provide unique escalation types... One for inappropriate content, one to evaluate accepted solutions, and one to request move (for posts that aren't in the correct discussion board).

I really love the idea of creating a @technicalteamneeded or @alteryxexpertneeded function. I would add that it would be even more powerful if we created a collaborative group of both Alteryx Employee's (subject matter experts) AND members of the community.  I do think that there would need to be some sort of restriction to who is able to use this particular escalation method... otherwise, what's the point of even asking the community? ;)

[SeanAdams]

:-) you make a good point @LeahK and I was thinking the same thing myself.   If anyone at all can escalate to @TechnicalTeamNeeded then everyone will, which then just destroys the purpose.

This is exciting stuff - and it's really fantastic that you have cultivated such a vibrant and committed community that you have these kinds of problems (of managing enthusiasm) as opposed to the opposite problem (managing apathy or trying to be the sheriff of a ghost-town).

As I was saying to @MattD - let me know how I can help

Have a good weekend

Sean

[WillM]

I love this idea, but implementing some kind of "Meet the Dev Team" post can be hard, because since they don't always live in the community (like us nerds) it's easy for them to miss notifications that come from it.  Leah's idea of using the report content or reaching out to one of the community managers is likely the easiest way for us to route these specific discussions to the appropriate people.