Suggest a Satisfaction question as solved

You're absolutely right. We should really mark the questions that have at least one well received answer and it's something that's on the drawing board. I'm hoping we prioritize this feature.

That's an excellent idea. The next roll out of the Problem and Question topics will be better about asking people to choose Solutions and Answers! It would be really great to show that a Problem/Question has a Solution/Answer on the list view. Thanks for the great idea!

out before the end of the year on this one is our goal.

Well, the end of the year came and went. However, I'm just wrapping up work on a brand spanking new layout for this topic page. The new layout will include controls for company reps and--as I'm proposing right now as I post this--the person who originally posted the topic so set a status for that topic. We'll integrate display of that status in topic lists and other sensible places as we have time to revise them.

Yeah, Cam is doing an awesome job implementing the topic pages, and we're all excited for the release of our new ideas.

The new topic pages will allow company employees to set the status of a topic ("solved", "answered", "in the works", etc.). I like the idea of allowing the person who posted the topic to *also* have the ability to set the status for the topic.
This seems to open up a bit of a tug of war though. A customer could continue to state that something is unanswered or unsolved because they want more then what they originally asked. And conversly the company could abuse the tool and state that things are done when they are not. So maybe we have two statuses? This might cause a bit of info bloat (especially when we display both statuses on the topic listings on the company home page, and your dashboard etc.).

I'm more for the simplicity of only the company setting the status. If we see that companies aren't using the status setting as planned, or that customers need more of a voice adding a customer status setting might be the next step! Or maybe something even simpler, like a check box that allows the orginal poster to endorse the company status. (Kind of like a "thank-you, job well done." button).

Great thoughts Leslie! I just realized that we didn't have a way for the original poster to affirm that they had been helped.

daniel, those are some great suggestions, and your point about the customers having equal control with the companies is spot on and something to make sure we maintain.

we're very close to releasing new versions of these pages that solve some of your issues, but we're still working through how to manage the company/customer relationship when it comes to marking something as "solved" or "answered," and we still have a bit of work to do it get it right. i think your suggestions definitely point the way to an even better way to handle it than we already had planned, so i'll work with the design team to figure out how we can incorporate them.