We rolled out a new Support Density graph in Tender reporting. The density graph shows you when your support load is at it's peaks, giving you the ability to scale and meet the support demands of your users. There is also a Supporter Activity graph that shows outgoing supporter comments.

We just rolled out a new reporting feature for Tender. You can now access your account statistics, including discussion flow graphs, detailed response time data, and a full CSV export that encompasses advanced statistics for you number crunchers out there.

Discussion Flow includes Open, Closed and Assigned (synced with Lighthouse) discussions displayed across the graph. The data can be can be broken down into week, month, and year views.

Response Time provides a statistical summary of your overall response times. Detailed statistics for discussions are visible under the summary. Items in red are discussions that took an extended period of time to respond or resolve. We're currently calculating this based on your workflow in Tender (average + standard deviation).

There is also a CSV export option. We’ll have a full post about what all that includes soon, but if you’re a fan of number crunching, you can geek out on this one.

ALL Tender plans will have access to reporting for next 30 days while it's in beta. After that, basic reporting features will start on the Plus plan.

To get to the reporting area, just go to the Reporting link in your admin navigation bar:

It's an early implementation and we're excited to be rolling it out. If you have any feedback, please let us know on help.tenderapp.com.

One of our main goals with Tender is to provide a customer support tool with the simplest implementation possible. Between Single Sign-On, Lighthouse syncing, web hooks, and a wide array of open source tools, getting a support system up and running and in use for your team is a snap.

A few weeks ago, we set out to provide a number of tools to assist with implementing Tender’s Single Sign-On system for some popular systems. Sure, a seasoned developer can implement SSO relatively quickly, but it’s a huge win if you can get things rolling in as few steps as possible.

Naturally, we’ve decided to open source these tools. We’re a Ruby shop and as things advance within other systems or within our own, the tools available shouldn't have to wait on innovation. Being the bottleneck is never cool.

Announcing SSO integration tools for ExpressionsEngine, WordPress and Drupal:

ExpressionEngine SSO Add-On
http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/tender-support-sso/
http://github.com/entp/expression-engine-sso-plugin

Wordpress Plugin
http://github.com/entp/wordpress-sso-plugin

Drupal SSO Module
http://github.com/entp/drupal-sso-plugin

So here’s the deal...

If you're using ExpressionEngine, Wordpress, or Drupal, and sign up for a free 30 day Tender before September 2, 2010, just let us know (support@tenderapp.com) if you pick a paid plan and we’ll give you $25 credit on your Tender account.

Also, if you’ve got an Open Source project and want to use Tender for feedback/support or just to get a community going, let us know and we’ll hook you up with a free account.

Back in October of 2009 we decided to upgrade our products from our old Engine Yard cluster to the Engine Yard AppCloud. Being a small team with a lot on our plate, it took a while to redirect our full attention towards moving things over.

On July 1st we migrated Lighthouse over to the AppCloud, immediately noticing impressive results. The setup is a lot faster and more stable than ever before. As of last Thursday, our transition has been completed with the move of Tender Support.

Our old cluster configuration served us well, but we were starting to outgrow it. Engine Yard was also redirecting a lot of their focus towards newer hosting services with superior technology. Who wouldn't want to get on board with that? The AppCloud offered a number of appealing things, most notably the ability to scale the hardware easily from our end. Also, the AppCloud will give us the ability to offer dedicated instances of Lighthouse and Tender to our customers.

We’ve had a long relationship with Engine Yard. They helped us get Lighthouse off drawing boards and make it a reality. In turn, we've been able to provide an amazing service for our users and free accounts to the Open Source community. Not a day goes by that we're not thankful for their support during our early days.

Update: Tender in the cloud

Transitioning Tender to the AppCloud on Thursday night went relatively smooth. The server is faster and more responsive than we had even hoped. A number of customers have already mentioned how good things feel across the application.

As with any large move, we hit a few snags at the start. We quickly issued fixes for a number of problems we noticed on the new server that we were unable to catch during our testing. Job processing was backing up pretty heavily, so we spun up a large number of workers to keep up with the load while we addressed the problem.

We’re still seeing an issue with email attachment processing and are working as quickly as possible to get this resolved.

A number of users mentioned bugs in our marketing site last night. Those were addressed this morning. Outside of that, all other known issues have been fixed.

We'll be performing upgrades to Tender's servers tonight (July 29) at 8 p.m. PDT (-7 UTC). The maintenance window is expected to last for approximately 1 hour. Tender will be unavailable during this time.

Please follow @tenderapp on Twitter for live updates.

Updates:

7:35 p.m. PDT on July 29 - Maintenance window is now pushed back to 10 p.m. tonight.

9:33 p.m. PDT on July 29 - We're starting server maintenance. Tender availability will be intermittent while we are working. Downtime is expected.

10:23 p.m. PDT on July 29 - Getting ready to start the server migration. Running a little behind schedule. Just working carefully.

10:57 p.m. PDT on July 29 - Starting the move to the new servers.

11:25 p.m. PDT on July 29 - Just brought everything back online.

12:49 a.m. PDT on July 30 - We're having issues with inbound email attachments and jobs processing to Tender. Seeing some intermittent timeouts. Still working on it.

1:45 a.m. PDT on July 30 - Deployed a fix for some attachment uploading uploading issues. Inbound email attachments are still failing. We'll be working on this through the morning.

We recently completed a rewrite of Tender's admin JavaScript. The admin area is now running on jQuery after deciding it was time to move on from Prototype.

NewsCloud, a Seattle based Knight Foundation grant project, is working to pull newspapers out of the stone age and get them into the social media game. The application provides news organizations with a way to integrate their content directly into a customized Facebook application, helping them reach new audiences.

Earlier this week, the NewsCloud crew mentioned their use of both Lighthouse and Tender Support in their blog post, Development, Outreach and Financial Tools We Use - Managing Your Grant Project Series.

We'll be performing server upgrades to Lighthouse tonight at 8:00 p.m. PDT (UTC/GMT -8 hours). Lighthouse will be offline during the maintenance window is expected to take approximately 1 hour.

You can follow our Twitter account HERE for live updates.

Update:

9:02 p.m. - We just brought Lighthouse back online. So far so good. User avatars are currently broken.

9:12 p.m. - Working to get Avatars back up as soon as possible. It's no fun when nobody has a face.

9:43 p.m. - Known issue with attachment uploads hitting errors. We issued a quick fix. Large file uploads may time out from time to time until we have a permanent fix in place.

We built Tender for a few reasons, most of them pretty reactionary. We needed a better way than a shared email box or public Lighthouse project to handle customer support, but the solutions out there really didn't work for us from a user perspective. I personally think that's because most of them were created by people who came from a customer support or "Big IT" background, rather than coming from "just being a user" background. I think this shows mostly from the concept of SLAs and automated workflows.

(Side note: this is a similar rant along the lines of why we don't do priorities in Lighthouse. We do actually have priorities, but I stand by the assertion that priorities don't work).

Here's how it generally goes:

A customer opens an issue; they get an automated response back along the lines of "You are customer request number #425. We will respond to you shortly". Conveniently turned into a number, the customer now can be conveniently turned into a trackable metric. We can start judging the performance of our employees based on the speed with which they deal with this request.

Next, a support workflow kicks in, and a support operator has a limited amount of time to respond to the query, or they (presumably) get into trouble. The operator responds, and presumably they do the support dance with the customer until there's something to track down, a question unanswered, or there just isn't a suitable response.

A while passes, and the support workflow again kicks in, re-escalating the request or performing some sort of automated action on the ticket. Generally, this is "close the issue after a week of no replies." An automated response goes out informing the number, I mean customer, that their issue has been deemed solved.

I don't agree with this at all. It's a technical solution to a human problem. That being said, I also don't think we've solved it in Tender, either, from a human OR technical standpoint.

We're not perfect when it comes to responding to our own customer support discussions, and we're not fully there in providing tools to our customers to help them solve this themselves. But we do get responses like this, and it makes everyone on the team happy:

"Check the Tender forums for an example of how to engage with your customers in a genuine manner."

But we're working on it, in a few ways.

Step zero is to be authentically human and not pretend otherwise.

Next, we choose to not offer SLAs. They make everyone feel worthless and under pressure. (We may implement this at some point in the future, but that will rely on the successful state-changes outlined below).

We also got rid of all mention of support "tickets" or "issues" and made it uniformly "discussions". I feel that the nomenclature is important, and that the way you refer to your customer interactions actually colors the tone, emotion and ultimate success of the conversation.

Finally, we're modifying the discussion states, so you can have something that isn't strictly "resolved", but also isn't necessarily "open", either, so it doesn't weigh on your conscience.

So, if you're coming to Tender from a service where it encourages you to treat your customers like machines, it's worth taking a moment to to consider turning your intrahuman communications into something a bit more fleshy.

We’ve schedule an emergency maintenance window at 4 p.m. PDT (UTC/GMT -7 hours) to account for the slow response times users have been experiencing.

Maintenance is expected to take 30 minutes, with 5-10 minutes of downtime while we upgrade the current hardware and restart the servers. We apologize for the short notice and any inconvenience this may cause.

Updates:

Friday @ 4:17 p.m. PDT

We've pushed the maintenance window back to Saturday.

Sat @ 9:18 p.m. PDT Servers have been rebooted and are back online.

Over the last few weeks, we've received a large amount of user feedback regarding slow response times across our servers. Lighthouse users in particular have been experiencing intermittent delays that result it long load times, often resulting in errors.

The spikes on the database appeared to be random, but over time, a pattern unfolded. We've grown a lot over the last few months, and it's starting to take it's toll on the servers, affecting the stability of the applications and the users experience.

We sincerely apologize about the issues. Our products are just as critical to us as they are to our users and we're currently working with our host to implement a fix and secure stability to the servers.

That's right! We're moving to the Cloud

We've mumbled it in support discussions recently, but now that the reality is upon us, we're proud to announce that we're moving both Lighthouse and Tender Support to the Engine Yard Cloud.

Last month, we diverted a large portion of our attention towards preparing for the move. The good news is that we're almost there. Over the next few days, we'll start migrating key portions of the applications, followed by the applications themselves.

The most exciting part is the scalability and large performance gains. The core setup of our cloud infrastructure is a lot more hardware than we're currently running on. It feels like I'm trading in my Volkswagen for a Porsche.

We'll post more details about the move soon.

We've got two new faces on the crowd here at ENTP, Chris Rhee and Josh Pyles.

I dropped the ball a while back and forgot to do a warm welcome for Chris when he started working with us. Since he made nifty signs so we wouldn't forget our leftovers in the fridge and starve on those late nights playing Xbox, we had to bring him on board.

So here it is Chris. You can stop making me feel guilty now. Just remember, we're the only hip-hop addicts in the office and we gotta stick together.

One of the most favored features in Tender Support is the FAQ auto-suggest. When a user submits a discussion to your Tender Site, the FAQ will automatically suggest articles to help answer their questions based on what you have saved in your Tender FAQs. It saves time for both the user and your support staff.

We just deployed an update to the auto-suggest workflow. Previously, when a user submitted a discussion, they were then taken an auto-suggest page with results from the FAQ and given an option to continue submitting the discussion. The downside was that if a user ignored the following page or closed their browser, their issue was not submitted.

The latest update polishes off the auto-suggest workflow. Now when a user submits an issue it's placed in a delayed queue. If no action is taken from the auto-suggested article results the discussion is then submitted a few moments later. If a user finds a solution to their problem on the auto-suggest page and selects the option that the article helped them, the discussion is then resolved. Lastly, if a user says that it didn't help them, then the discussion is submitted right away so your support staff can reply.