I previously managed a support community and advised our moderation team to only mark a question as accepted when it was very clear that the OP was satisfied with the answer and that it had actually solved their question. That is, they had replied that all was well but just hadn't marked it. On a support community you do want to encourage the use of solutions and have as many threads as possible with marked solutions, but you would never want your team to be marking solutions that might not have answered the OP's question.
Jason
Admins, Moderators and Support staff will all mark solutions on our community but with a few guidelines to ensure that we are not 'forcing/telling' customers this is the answer so if it doesn't work its their fault (which is how some people can take it).
Our Moderators and Admins mark solutions when browsing the community where a community member has answered a post AND enough time has passed allowing the original poster to come back and mark the solution themselves. This allows members time to use the feature themselves. We also post a note on these threads saying we have marked the solution, which educates members about the feature.
Our Support team review every post on our forum after a period of time, which allows the community members to respond first. Where a community member has answered the post then the same logic as the above applies and the solution is marked.
We do not mark our own posts as solutions unless the customer comes back and specifically states it is resolved and fails to mark themselves.
We find that without the above steps solution marking is relatively low as many users will not return when their issue is resolved.
Our Moderators and Admins mark solutions when browsing the community where a community member has answered a post AND enough time has passed allowing the original poster to come back and mark the solution themselves. This allows members time to use the feature themselves. We also post a note on these threads saying we have marked the solution, which educates members about the feature.
Our Support team review every post on our forum after a period of time, which allows the community members to respond first. Where a community member has answered the post then the same logic as the above applies and the solution is marked.
We do not mark our own posts as solutions unless the customer comes back and specifically states it is resolved and fails to mark themselves.
We find that without the above steps solution marking is relatively low as many users will not return when their issue is resolved.
I will back up the other replies so far. If the poster of the question clearly states that a reply has solved the issue but don't mark it a such, I bookmark the thread. We have a reminder email go out after 7 days asking if their post was solved. If they still don't mark it, I'll mark it for them a few days later.
We've started doing this recently but mainly focusing on the most viewed topics. Also usually after the topic has been around for a while so the original poster already had the opportunity to accept. From that perspective, marking as a solutions provides more benefits for the majority of people just viewing the post than the small risk of annoying the original poster.
Franz
Late to the party but we do allow moderators to mark as accepted only if the customer clearly states it helped/solved the issue and it appears he/she forgot to the click the button.
Cheers
Wendy
Learning from others and helping where I can!
Community Passionista!
Community Passionista!
