Here's how we handle feedbacks in Yet Another Mail Merge

Post date: Sep 17, 2015 10:39:38 AM

Luckily for us, Google is listening to developers' feedbacks and for a few weeks, add-ons creators can now redirect users to their own support platform instead of the default one provided by Google.

When we saw this new feature was available, we began comparing different tools, trying to find the best one based on our needs and users' expectations. At Revevol, people handling Google Apps support are using Zendesk and are very happy with it. We have also seen add-ons developers, like Andrew Stillman, handling support via Google+ Communities, something we are also doing for Awesome Table (already more than 700 users in our community!).

But in the end, I decided to use the add-on itself to handle support. And specifically the ability we have to publish a script both as an add-on and as a web app. Yet Another Mail Merge is now also deployed as a web app, executed by users. They don't have to re-authorize anything since they have already granted permissions to the add-on and it means I can retrieve many information automatically (of course their email address, to be able to answer them, but also many other parameters, like their language, web browser, remaining quota,...).

I've also used Material Design Lite to build this web app (it is still better to use the default CSS provided by Google in add-ons as Google Sheet UI isn't using yet Material Design but here the web app is opened in a new window so there's no such design limitation).

There are now more than 50 000 active users on Yet Another Mail Merge every month (users who have sent at least 1 email with our add-on) and even if it's working great for most people, we are still receiving many support requests, so I've tagged / categorized all those requests to guide users when they are asking for help.

Also, yesterday I released a new version with some missing optimizations, that broke the add-on for many users and I was able to quickly update my support page to let users know we were fixing the issue.

All support requests end up in a spreadsheet, and with the new data we collected we can better understand the user issue and quickly answer to people by email from the sheet, using Yet Another Mail Merge :)