Customer support when releasing my first plugin?

[mmprod]

Hi all, I'm getting to the stage of wrapping up a fx plugin project which I plan on polishing up and releasing. What should I expect when it comes to customer support? Are complaint emails common? Has customer support been time-consuming for you? How do you deal with customer problems you cannot solve?

Thanks!

(Also, first post in newbie category :D)

[d.healey]

@mmprod said in Customer support when releasing my first plugin?:

Are complaint emails common?

Only if your product doesn't work, so test test test test. Virtual machines are your friends.

@mmprod said in Customer support when releasing my first plugin?:

Has customer support been time-consuming for you?

I don't get too many support tickets. What I do though is if I get say 10 support tickets all with roughly the same issue, then I see that as a problem with the product or with my communication with customers. So at that point I will change the product, the documentation, or the product webpage/faq to eliminate the issue.

@mmprod said in Customer support when releasing my first plugin?:

How do you deal with customer problems you cannot solve?

What kind of problem cannot be solved?

I also recommend you setup a proper support ticket system rather than relying on emails. There are many times when emails will go to spam and then customers will think you're ignoring them and will complain publicly about it (hasn't happened to me but I've seen it with others).

[aaronventure]

@mmprod Try to predict as many product questions as possible and have them answered on your website product page. Be as clear as possible about what your product does and how it sounds. Your documentation needs to be crystal clear, and do your best to describe how things work instead of relying on "magic sauce" descriptions. Describe every single control in as much detail as possible.

At the end of the day, you're selling a tool to (in 95%+ of cases) a guy who likes fiddling around with software in order to make sounds. We're all computer nerds here in this space, to one degree or another (it varies a bit based on what kind of a plugin it is and the target usage like music genre etc.). So treat your potential customers as such.

[mmprod]

@d-healey Thanks for the advice!

@d-healey said in Customer support when releasing my first plugin?:

What kind of problem cannot be solved?

Perhaps a user is experiencing crashes when using the plugin and submit a support ticket. What if after multiple attempts, you are unable to solve their problem and it just doesn't work (even after having tested beforehand multiple times)?

[d.healey]

@mmprod said in Customer support when releasing my first plugin?:

Perhaps a user is experiencing crashes when using the plugin and submit a support ticket. What if after multiple attempts, you are unable to solve their problem and it just doesn't work (even after having tested beforehand multiple times)?

Give them a refund.

This is where VMs are very useful because you can create a system that is as close as possible to theirs to try and recreate the issue. The only time I have ran into a problem that was unsolvable was where the user had a specific audio interface that seemed to be the cause of the issue and I wasn't able to recreate the problem because I didn't have the hardware.

[cassettedeath]

Great thread - very helpful, thank you.

How often do you have to update the plug-in build so it runs on new OS updates? Is this quite regular or do builds generally work on new OS releases?

I haven’t really had to upgrade many if any VST/plug-ins after a personal computer OS update…

Do you warn people not to upgrade their OS or post that it hasn’t been tested on that OS?

Have you had any customers contact to say the Hise serial key system isn’t working?

Many thanks

[d.healey]

@cassettedeath said in Customer support when releasing my first plugin?:

Is this quite regular or do builds generally work on new OS releases

The only time I've had to is when Apple added the notarization requirement and when Apple Silicon was introduced.

@cassettedeath said in Customer support when releasing my first plugin?:

Do you warn people not to upgrade their OS or post that it hasn’t been tested on that OS?

Nope.

@cassettedeath said in Customer support when releasing my first plugin?:

Have you had any customers contact to say the Hise serial key system isn’t working?

I haven't used it.

[Lindon]

@cassettedeath said in Customer support when releasing my first plugin?:

Great thread - very helpful, thank you.

How often do you have to update the plug-in build so it runs on new OS updates? Is this quite regular or do builds generally work on new OS releases?

Like Dave says - its mainly Apple futzing about with silicon changes every few years - otherwise they should work fine across OSes - winodw sis much more reliable/backwards compatible

Have you had any customers contact to say the Hise serial key system isn’t working?

Which key system? RSA - works fine - HISE Authorise - works fine.

Many thanks