We are scaling support requests

Hi everyone! In a few weeks since launch, almost 1000 people purchased Text Animator for Unity 3.X and we found ourselves with a peak of 22 open support requests at the same time in our Discord server.

It's just me (for now) taking care of the Unity support, and it's becoming really difficult to keep track of what we have already replied to, what still needs our intervention, what needs more info from the users to move forward and similar.

Requests are usually a coin flip too: sometimes they are fixed from a few minutes to a few hours, and other times they take a week or more and demand a lot of trial and error. Sometimes they are opened while we are at work (allowing us to reply as soon as we see the message), and other times they stack up during the weekends/Holidays and days pass making it seem that we're not active.

Today some of these requests are taking a week, and even if we are managing to reply and keeping everyone up to date (thanks to the rest of the team helping me in tracking stuff), we need a better way to manage support requests internally.

Whenever we create a new task for a bugfix or a feature request, we paste all the relevant info from the Discord post in our project management system and start working on it straight away.
However, if the user sends more messages or if new people join the forum post, we need to check which task the post is assigned to and which info should be added to it.

Users usually ask for help in six different channels too: "#general" and "#gamedev" (wrong ones), "#tanim-general" and "#tanim-forums" (correct ones), DMs (occasionally) and then there's email as well.

We want to spend more time developing new features and improving the tool than looking for the right task to update or the correct channel. So we wrote a huge plan to fix this issue as soon as possible.

What we're working on

This December we're focusing all of our resources to fix this problem ( while we keep giving support on discord, of course ) in a way that would make us even faster in the future.

We are centralizing support requests in our backed, so that whenever you write (emails or Discord) our project management system will create the correct tasks, reference the right channels and automatically update them when new info arrives, allowing us to check one singe place instead of many different ones.

If a task needs extra info, we'll be able to flag it there and the users will be notified. And if the user sends new updates we'll be notified and find the task updated as well.

We're also reworking our discord structure so that users won't be able to post anywhere talking about anything. We have almost 1000 members and we have 3 tools released, a blog and future tools coming too. Someone entering the Discord and posting in "#general" their questions without even mentioning which tool they need support with, simply doesn't help anyone.

Finally, we're making it clearer how to ask for support as well. We're glad that most of our users are educated on it (giving us full logs, ways to reproduce the issue and the versions they are using), but other times we find ourselves asking for the same missing and important information. Hopefully we can modify the discord bot and automatically ask these information when you're sending a support request there, making it mandatory, so that people read how to ask for support on the same place they would ask for it.

In conlcusion

All in all, I would say that this is a nice problem to have! But it's still a problem that we need to solve, and I'm super excited about experimenting these solutions and to give you even a better experience.

We are timing this now so that if you have any issue from January/February, which we suppose people will be rushing more because of Steam Next Fest, we will be able to reply to you and fix the issues even faster, allowing you to focus on your demo.

We have many plans for this and future tools, so having this infrastructure (including other elements/improvements not included in this post, like adding extra people to work on the tool) will really help a lot.

Thank you so much for your support as always and hear you soon with new updates!