Hi.
I am with Stephen here. It's not in the best interest of the community to have unanswered posts to get a response through some sort of automation. Most communities benefit from Search Engine traffic and in the long run you may face the issue where more and more visitors will start to see these automated responses, referring to support. I would rather invest in an extra moderator to help guide the customer to the right answer, which perhaps, may already exist in your community.
Maybe you have an opportunity with content curation. Did you do some root cause analysis on this issue? Are you receiving so many new questions but are topics all the same/similar. Or are the customer questions incomplete and nobody can help easily.
You could create an FAQ or (taxonomy) to label/tag existing responses and float relevant solutions and share with experts and mods.
Is it because you have more questions than superusers? Perhaps a challenge/contest may give them a little extra motivation to do just a little more. Do your superusers have all the tools they need to easily find unanswered topics. We have filters on our board that allow experts to filter, per board, unanswered topics and filter further down to unanswered <24hours.
I just read Stephen mentioned the Autodesk Bot already, I was going to mention that as an example too .
Honestly, I would analyze the situation and based on the finding, try to enable the front line more and focus on the type of questions and answers available in the community and try to link that up.
Just a couple of more suggestions but hey, if Lithium think the auto-responder is a good idea...to me, that changes the dynamics of a community completely.
Good luck with it!
Wendy
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