AgentData Tech Update: Sprint 024 Launched (2023−04−20)

Hey everyone!

I know you’ve been having sleepless nights wondering, “What did those AgentData guys-and-girls add to their software in the last two weeks since the last update?!”

Well, now you’ll be able to go to sleep again because here are the latest changes:

* You know how our system works, where if a voicemail recipient isn’t authorized to receive voicemails (you know, “Do not call” – we try as hard as we can to follow all laws!), it used to fall back to only sending an email to the primary email address. But now, in that case, it sends the email to ALL the email addresses we have on file for the owner. (It already sends emails to all the addresses on file for the normal case, the standard email touches.)

* What used to happen when a payment failed? Sometimes, there are credit cards that go over limits. We used to have to go in and manually pause the campaign in the system. But now, if a payment fails, the campaign is automatically paused.

* Perhaps the most exciting change is one that internally we think is super-awesome but externally, you won’t see anything different: error monitoring. What would happen if something broke, somewhere, somehow? For example, let’s say we use an API to integrate with a partner and there was a problem with the connection or API response at that very moment. Or let’s say we sent out an email but there was an error sending it. And so forth. In the past, we’d rely on bug reports and our own constant use of the software to find problems, and fix them. But now we have–dum-de-dum!–error monitoring. That means that we now have a system in place so that, any time there’s an error, we’ll be notified – so we can run and fix it, before anyone tells us. You’re probably thinking, “Guys, that sounds awesome, but why didn’t you do that long ago?” and the answer is, the reality of modern software development, especially in a startup context: there is so much to be done, and we try to go so fast, that we’ve always prioritized the basics and core functionality, and the features requested, not back-end details like this that make our system more robut. But now was the right time to get to this! BTW, we already found, caught, and fixed four errors as a result of this system!

* One of our most under-used features is the ability to write your own text for the content. You don’t like our email text for example? Write your own! We provide defaults so you don’t need to think or customize it – but if you want to, you can! And when you customize it, it used to be that you would just write your text but you could use a code in the text for the user’s name, like “Hey $FIRST_NAME” and it would substitute the target’s first name for “$FIRST_NAME”, as an example. But now we’ve added many more variables that you can add in, to customize it more – like their address or their town name, for example. That way, you can make the messages more unique and personalized, by doing things like mentioning the town they’re in by name.

Sound exciting? Wait until you see what we release next week! 🚀