This will solve the following issue:
  1. It can frustrating and confusing to both the staff themselves and the user requesting support when a user keeps getting 'transferred' to new staff every few hours and thus having to constantly re-start the conversation from scratch with someone new.
  2. Users can waste staff resources and cause extra confusion by creating parallel conversation threads about the same issue. A user might send 10 different emails about the same issue within just a day or two, causing staff as a whole to spend 10x as much time on that issue as needed to fix it, causing other members and reviewers to be left to wait while the staff do needless redundant work.
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Updates: We are rolling this out with the support chat system first, before rolling it out on the shared support email inboxes. Also, for the support chats, we will have a support chat shown to all staff if the user does not get a reply within 48 hours.
The following suggestion will help ease into this implementation on the author-support side: