The Stabilizer

I had the enormous privilege to work in the Customer Support department at Webflow. I get to work on a fantastic product with even more amazing people, and I love it. As a part of that work, I help track issues that customers may be facing.

To improve our processes and make sure that we keep customers’ issues at the very core and forefront of what we’re doing, I built v3 of the Stabilizer App.

The Problem + History

A lot of software companies have different methods and processes for tracking customer issues when building a product. I won’t get into the details and particulars of how that happens at Webflow, but I can provide a general outline of some of the difficulties and problems that arise.

In our situation, we keep our issues in Github. This presents a few challenges:

Github isn’t good at project management and makes tracking difficult
Github has a lot of code and issues that aren’t related to customers. This creates a lot of noise for Customer Support Specialists
Talking about issues in Github ends up pinging a lot of people (engineers, product managers, QA, etc.) - and sometimes we need to have a conversation about how to support the customer
Prioritization - it’s hard to rank or prioritize the what and when of which issues should be addressed

The Solution

The solution to these issues was to build a bug tracking app in Webflow. This is a super complicated process, and I started by just sketching out the overall process and how to approach it.

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I needed to start with sketching out the process since I needed to make sure that the no-code tools we were using would make this tool possible. As an overview, here’s the tools I would be using and the process and flow for the app:

Tools

Zapier
Google Sheets
Webflow
GitHub
AppScript
JavaScript
ChartJS

Process

Using the GitHub API, we use Zapier to trigger a Zap if an issue meets a certain threshold (at the core, we only want issues that are customer-facing)
- If it’s a new issue:
- - Look at labels and split the string
  - Use Zapier math to perform operations to prioritize
  - Create a new item in Webflow with the issue details
  - Add that same information to a Google Sheet for future tracking
  - Add in the item ID into Webflow
- If it’s a current issue:
- - Check the Google Sheet to see if the issue exists
  - Update the issue in the Google Sheet
  - Update the item in the Webflow site

This means when engineers, pm’s, or QA updates an issue in GitHub, it’s automatically updated in the Stabilizer App. Other apps allow us to have even more functionality.

Using the Sheets and Zapier:
- We run a reporting process every week and every month
- - Do math in the Google Sheets to see how many issues were closed
  - Do some math in the Google Sheets to see how it impacts customers
  - Do some math in the Google Sheets to see which way issues, etc. is trending
  - Pass all that back to Webflow as monthly/weekly reports

Using Webflow forms and Zapier customer support specialists can categorize and rearrange issues in the Stabilizer App
- To mark an issue as a production fire
- - Zapier then uses Slack to ping the team to get eyes on the issue
- To add in copy and snippets to share with customers, so we’re on the same page

The Result

This leaves us with a really clean site that allows us to easily track what’s impacting customers. The team can view by prioritization, by date, by what’s recently filed and updated, etc. With the ability to customize your views and to focus on only the customer-facing things, it helps the team be more efficient and better informed.

You can view some images of the Stabilizer here. For security and privacy reasons, this site can’t be shared publicly.

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