Support Management connects your Forum with an internal ticket management workspace.

When a member publishes a qualifying Forum post, Gradual can automatically create a Ticket for your support team. The Ticket keeps the original post available for context while giving your team internal tools to assign ownership, set priority, track progress, and manage the request through completion.

Support and Idea Tickets can also share their current status with the member who created the original post. General Tickets remain internal.

Support Management is available as an add-on module. Contact the Gradual team if you would like to enable it for your community.

Support Staff and Support Admins can access the Support Workspace from Gradual: On the Select Dashboard page, choose the Customer Support dashboard. It will display all the Customer Support Dashboards you have access to, then click on a specific one to enter the workspace.
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The workspace provides the following primary areas:

Support Staff can also set their availability to Online or Away. Staff are automatically shown as Offline after leaving the Support Workspace. Online availability is used when Gradual automatically distributes Tickets to team members.

Tickets are created from Forum posts through Escalation Rules. You do not need to manually create a Ticket for each incoming post.

When a Forum post matches an active rule, Gradual creates a Ticket and uses that rule to determine:

The Ticket initially copies the title and content of the Forum post. Changes made to the original post later do not update the Ticket title or content automatically.

Each Forum post can have only one Ticket. Closing and later reopening a Ticket continues to use the same Ticket rather than creating another one.

Gradual includes three Ticket Types:

Support and Idea Ticket statuses can be displayed on their original Forum posts and used to notify the post author. General Ticket statuses remain internal.

My Tickets gives each Support Staff member a focused list of the Tickets currently assigned to them.

You can switch between open and closed Tickets and sort Tickets by:

Select a Ticket to open its details and begin working on it.

The Unassigned page contains open Tickets owned by the Support Team that do not currently have an assignee.

You can filter the list by Ticket Type, Forum Board, or Priority.

To take ownership of an unassigned Ticket:

Once assigned, the Ticket is removed from the Unassigned list and appears in the assignee’s My Tickets.

Use All Tickets when you need to find Tickets across the entire Support Workspace, including open, closed, assigned, and unassigned Tickets.

You can search by Ticket title or content and narrow the list using:

You can also sort the results by creation time or priority.

When you open a Ticket and return to the list, your filters, sorting, and previous position are preserved.

Selecting a Ticket opens its details alongside your Ticket list.

The Ticket details bring together the original Forum conversation, Ticket information, and member context so your team can handle the request without switching between multiple areas of Gradual.

You can review:

You can also select Open in Forum to open the original post directly.

Replies sent from the Ticket appear publicly as comments on the original Forum post.

To reply:

This allows Support Staff to respond to the member while continuing to work from the Support Workspace.

Each Ticket can have one assignee.

Support Staff can assign an unassigned Ticket to themselves using Assign to me, or assign it to another active member of their Support Team.

If a Ticket is assigned to another Staff member, you can change the assignee. To make other updates to that Ticket, such as changing its State or Priority or replying to the member, assign the Ticket to yourself first.

Changing a Ticket’s assignee does not change its existing Ticket history.

Priorities help your team identify which Tickets require attention first.

Tickets use five priority levels:

A Ticket’s initial priority can be set automatically by its Escalation Rule and updated later while the Ticket is being processed.

Support Admins can customize how Support and Idea Tickets move through their workflows.

Navigate to:

Support Workspace > Settings > Ticket Workflow

Tickets move through three overall phases:

Within these phases, you can use States to represent the stages that make sense for your support process.

For example, the default Support workflow includes:

Received → In Review → In Progress → Resolved

The default Idea workflow includes:

Received → In Review → Planned → In Progress → Released / Not Planned
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Support and Idea workflows can be configured independently. You can rename and reorder States and add additional States within the available limits.

General Tickets use the standard Unassigned, Assigned, and Closed States and cannot be customized.

Moving a Ticket to a Closed State closes the Ticket.

When reopening a closed Ticket, select an assignee and an Assigned State so that the Ticket can return to active work.

If the Forum post connected to an open Ticket is deleted, the Ticket is moved to Source Deleted. The Ticket remains available for your team’s records, but its Ticket fields can no longer be processed normally.

Escalation Rules control which Forum posts become Tickets and how those Tickets enter your support workflow.

Navigate to:

Support Workspace > Settings > Escalation Rules

A rule contains two parts:

You can create conditions based on information including:

For each rule, configure three actions:

Rules are evaluated in the order shown. When a post matches a rule, Gradual uses that rule and stops checking the rules below it.

Escalation Rules run when a post is first published. Editing the post or its author information afterward does not run the rules again.

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Gradual includes default rules for Support and Idea posts.

By default, these rules create the corresponding Ticket Type with Medium Priority and assign the Ticket to an available Online Staff member. If no Staff member is available, the Ticket enters the Support Team’s Unassigned queue.

You can enable or disable these default rules. Their conditions and actions cannot be edited.

Support Admins can manage the people who work with Tickets from:

Support Workspace > Settings > Team Accounts

Support Management includes one Support Team. You can add community members to the team and remove existing Staff accounts.

Up to 50 Staff accounts can be authorized for Support Management.

Before removing a Staff member, any open Tickets assigned to that person must be reassigned to another Staff member or returned to the Unassigned queue. Their historical Ticket activity remains available after their Support access is removed.

Views let Support Staff and Admins create reusable boards for specific groups of Tickets.

Instead of working from one long Ticket list, you can create a View for workflows such as:

A View updates automatically as Ticket information changes. Tickets are not copied into the View, and deleting a View does not delete its Tickets.

To create a View:

New Views start with Phase is none of Closed as a preset filter, so the initial board focuses on active work. You can change this filter as needed.

Filters define which Tickets belong in your View.

Available criteria include Ticket Type, Phase, State, Priority, Assignee, Staff availability, Post Type, Board, Post Topic, Product & Service Area, Author, Author Space, Ticket creation time, and closed time.

You can choose whether Tickets must match all configured conditions or any configured condition.

Every View uses one Group By field to organize Tickets into columns.

You can group Tickets by:

For example, grouping by Priority creates separate columns for P0 through P4. Grouping by Assignee gives you columns for individual Staff members and Unassigned Tickets.

You can choose which columns are visible and drag them into your preferred display order.

Ticket cards automatically move between columns when the information used to group them changes. For example, if a View is grouped by Assignee and a Ticket is reassigned, its card moves to the new assignee’s column.

One sorting option applies across every column in a View.

Tickets can be sorted by:

The default is Ticket Created Time — Newest first.

Ticket cards can display the information your team needs while reviewing a View.

The Ticket title is always displayed. You can select up to six additional fields, including Author, Ticket Type, State, Priority, Assignee, Product & Service Area, Board, creation or closed time, and engagement information from the original Forum post.

Support Staff and Admins can create Personal Views for their own workflows.

Support Admins can also publish their Personal Views as Shared Views, making them available to all Support Staff.

Once a View has been shared, Support Admins can manage it centrally. Each Staff member can arrange Views in their own sidebar without changing the navigation order for anyone else.

Each account can create up to 10 Views. Shared Views created by other users do not count toward this limit, and Gradual’s preset Views are also excluded.

Gradual provides two Shared Views when Support Management is enabled:

Team’s Priority Queue organizes active Tickets by Priority, making it easier to identify higher-priority work.

Current Team Work organizes active Tickets by Assignee, including an Unassigned column, so your team can review how Tickets are currently distributed.

The Team Overview gives Support Admins visibility into current and historical Ticket activity.

You can select This Week, Last Week, This Month, Last Month, or a custom date range and review information including:

Current Tickets always represents the Tickets currently assigned to each Staff member. The other activity metrics reflect the selected reporting period.

These counts describe Ticket assignment and activity and should not be interpreted as individual workload or performance measurements, since the amount of work required for each Ticket can vary.

Support Management also keeps members informed without exposing your team’s internal Ticket information.

When a member creates a Support or Idea post, they select a Product & Service Area and can choose an available post template to help structure their request.

For Support and Idea Tickets, the current Ticket State is displayed as the status of the original Forum post. When your team changes that State, the post author can receive a notification in Gradual and by email.

Members do not see internal Ticket information such as the Ticket assignee or Support Team. General Ticket States also remain internal and are not displayed to community members.

Customer support request: A member publishes a Support post about a product issue. An Escalation Rule creates a Support Ticket, assigns it to an Online Staff member, and sets its Priority. The Staff member responds from the Ticket and moves it from Received to In Review, In Progress, and finally Resolved. The member can see the updated status on their original post.

Product feedback: A member submits an Idea. Gradual creates an Idea Ticket, and the team tracks it through States such as In Review, Planned, In Progress, and Released. A Shared View grouped by State can give the team a board-style overview of active Ideas.

Priority monitoring: A Support Admin creates a View filtered to active Support Tickets and groups them by Priority. The team can monitor P0 and P1 Tickets alongside lower-priority work without changing the Tickets themselves.