How we automated our new Text Animator Support Workflow

Hey everyone! Developing a tool used thousands of developers is not easy, and in my last post I wrote that after the release of Text Animator 3.0, we received a huge number of support requests that made us question our current workflow.

Since we love improving workflows... we finally did it!! Here is how we have improved managing support requests from many developers, while still being a small team (and shipping for Unity, Godot and very soon also Unreal, with multiple stores for each... help).

Premise: we develop tools full time, and not only Text Animator (for Unity, Godot and Unreal). We have other plugins behind the scenes (coming out this year), and also some work for hire projects that we need to work on.

This means that the only way we can work on everything and keep our sanity is... through tasks management!

Issue N1 - Requests coming from anywhere

The first issue was that requests were coming from anywhere. Discord, email, social media, it was not sustainable.

Other than the fear of losing something (we want to reply to everyone!!), we also needed to create a task and paste all relevant information inside it, so that the whole team could be updated. For every. Single. One. When an user replied, we had to locate the task and update its info. Again and again.

Fixed!! Now if you write us on Discord, a task is created automatically on our backend and also updated if you send new messages. We see the requests all in one place, and can work on them right away. In the future we'll also implement email tracking too (if you ask for support via email, then it will be created and tracked like we do on Discord).

Issue N2 - Communicating what we do to users

The second issue was communicating to users what we were working on. This was confusing for us too, because we could have missed something through the manual copy back-and-forth and make us believe that we had replied when in reality we did not.

Now users get automatically notified about important updates! If we put the task to "in progress", our bot will send a notification. And if too much time passes and we do not have the necessary info yet - the task will be marked as inactive and the user will know about it too. No ambiguities!

The most important changes for me, personally, are the next two though:

• First, if someone asks for help in a weekend, the bot reminds that we will be back on Monday. It has been SIX years that I was scared about weekends. I have no idea why I didn't do this sooner.
• Second, people get bombarded with information about how to ask for support. This is to hopefully try to fix posts written in the wrong place, or with partial information.

You can read information about how to ask for support on: our website, when you enter our discord, when you activate your license AND when you make a post.

If someone still doesn't help us help them, sorry, we have a command that we can shoot, with a pre-made message there too. I want to focus on developing.

Unexpected work - Database and GDPR

Doing all these changes meant... reworking our ENTIRE database system, migrating users in production, have a fallback plan in case things did not work, and also rework our policies for GDPR (everything is encrypted, logged properly etc.). Staging environments, production environments, CI/CD with canary tests, two different systems, multiple webhooks all together...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH.

I am glad it is done now. That's what we have been working on. OOF!

In Conclusion

I believe this workflow is what we have been looking for for a long time. It allows us to keep track of all the support requests we have and focus more on developing and shipping.

And by the way (it's obvious if you know us) all these automated messages will not replace me, Daniel, or Gabriele! They are a great help, but we will always be there to respond to you in a human way and try to help you solve your problem. They are automated, pre-written messages - not AI!

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

I love making tools.

Ps.: In case you haven't seen us yet, we're also on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and we have big plans!

Ciao 🫶🏼