🧵 Bootstrapping a customer support system with #nocode: A practical example of leveraging software building blocks to create a little efficiency in your product/business workflow. Build time <1 hour. Thread: 
Context: I had more inbound than I anticipated when I beta released eloquent.works. Needed a solution to track + manage feedback. Thought I could build a free one faster than the time it'd take to research a bunch of Sass options.
My minimal customer support system requirements 📝: structured data for tickets, an FAQ/resource center, a user input form, notifications, and a customer conversation interface.
Setup: I use airtable's built-in input form w/ conditional logic to receive user feedback. I delineate between my main request types (bugs/suggestions) and ask guiding questions to route+filter on. I also link to my FAQ doc in notion to pre-empt inbound.
I create two airtable data views filtered by the types - these are used to trigger respective automations (zaps) in Zapier via the "New Record in View" event. The action: Send an email to my support alias w/ all of the ticket info.
🔑 Major Key: I set the reply_to field to the user’s email so I can instantly reply and start a convo w/ all context in the thread. Ticket title + id in the subject line. Gmail sends me notifications, I use inbox + filters to triage.
💡 Support Tip: I add a formulated airtable deeplink w/ the record ID to the bottom of the emails. After responding to the user, I can tap the link to quickly jump to the ticket and label, assign, or add more context.
💡 Product Tip: I associate all tickets (via airtable linked records) to an internal work unit (user problem, backlog item, resource) - this is how I ensure user feedback gets used. I can perform lookups for frequent asks/confusion points.
Advantages: This simple system is customized, only as complex as I need right now, and can easily be extended (slack notifications, dashboard, reports, etc). Plus it’s already integrated into my core product dev workflow.
And the big #nocode benefit: speed! Sure I might need something more robust down the line - but the ROI from just piecing together a few powerful building blocks is 💯. I can always sprinkle on a little code to get more mileage out of this setup.
This was just a quick example demonstrating a tangible #nocode use case - hope it helps someone! I'm also writing a longer-form article on designing product-oriented customer feedback systems from first principles. ✍️ //
