We’re throwing the final polish into Tender and getting ready to release it into the wild. I thought I’d take a moment to highlight some of the features that makes Tender so special to us.
Automatic Logins
Probably the primary goal for Tender was to reduce the barrier to entry for creating support requests. We all have enough logins everywhere, so why should we create another one just to file a support request? Tender allows you to post issues anonymously – but that wasn’t enough for us. We took it one step further: Tender will share authentication with your application.
What does this mean? It means that if you setup some special cookies in your application, users can post issues from their accounts on your application. From the user’s perspective, it’ll seem as if help.yourapp.com is just a part of yourapp.com They won’t login, the app will just know who they are.
Response Time
Another high priority goal for Tender was to make companies responsible for support. We want you to want to help your customers. That’s why when you log in, you’re immediately shown how many outstanding issues, and your average response time.
Your average response time is a measure of how long it takes you to respond to your customers. It’s a good, concrete number you can assign to how well you’re helping customers out.
Want to give Tender a try?
We’re rounding the final bases for getting Tender out the door right now and as such we’d like to get some more people using it so they can give us feedback. If you’d like to try out Tender, file a support request with the subdomain you’d like to use, and we’ll see if we can’t get you an account setup.
We’re hoping to open up Tender fully to the public by the end of the week, so stay tuned!
Loading tweets…
Our Products
Our Open Source Projects
- astrotrain – simply the best email processing solution out there.
- Seinfeld – automatic tracking of your open source contributions to github projects.
- warehouse – still using subversion? Get the best source browser out there.
- xtt – time tracking built for the add & twitter inclined.
- GitNub – OS X GUI for tracking git logs.
10 Comments
Nice work! The “special” cookies idea is pretty brilliant; I’m excited to check out Tender when it’s released.
Mmm… special cookies.
Disclaimer: I can be a bit of a support/help system nerd.
“Probably the primary goal for Tender was to reduce the barrier to entry for creating support requests.“
I’d have a different goal: Reduce the need for support requests in the first place. Based on my admittedly sparse knowledge of Tender so far it seems to be shifting Lighthouse noise (which irks devs) to the user community when there are a fair number of public issues (which irks users).
Just who is the target user for Tender?
“Tender will share authentication with your application.“
This, I like. What else can my app send along to help provide some context for the request?
“[The dashboard response time average is] a good, concrete number you can assign to how well you’re helping customers out.“
Not if it’s just measuring the delta between the time when the support ticket creation and time of response. What you’re talking about is a qualitative measurement – how well you’ve helped.
Having performance against goals might better help with motivation. I defer to those who know better.
No matter what, though, I look forward to giving Tender a shot!
@puppyscent We’re doing our part to reduce support requests with some upcoming features, but honestly—not much your support system can do for this. If a user has an issue, the best thing you can do is make it easy for them to get in touch.
As per your idea that Tender irks users, we’re actually finding it’s making both developers and users much happier. They don’t get ignored by developers anymore, and the developers don’t get annoyed by users.
As per the response time, no it’s not meant to be the be-all-end-all—it’s just a step in the right direction. Some information is much better than no information. (Oh, and I think you might want to look up the difference between qualitative & quantitative ;))
@kyle
“If a user has an issue, the best thing you can do is make it easy for them to get in touch.“
Nope. If your app has failed to be intuitive – or work in the first place – then your help/support system should make it easy for the user to get help without having to file a support request. In other words, make it easy to discover a solution without much in the way of searching, much less posting a ticket.
It’s a philosophical difference.
“As per your idea that Tender irks users, we’re actually finding it’s making both developers and users much happier.“
Huh? I didn’t say that Tender irks users. All I’ve seen thus far is it being used for GitHub and the example of it helping to reducing Lighthouse noise. What I tried to say was that based on the GitHub example the posting traffic – for those requests that were public – was shifting over to the users’ view.
Since I don’t agree with the ‘make it easy to post support requests vs. finding solutions’ approach naturally I don’t much like wading through what could very well be a lot of dupe public support requests.
“Some information is much better than no information.“
Uh, no.
“Oh, and I think you might want to look up the difference between qualitative & quantitative“
Ha.
I said “What you’re talking about is a qualitative measurement – how well you’ve helped” in reference to your suggestion that a quantitative measure like response time indicated how well you’re helping your customers.
@puppyscent I think you’re misreading a lot of what’s going on, so I’m not really going to combat your points.
Needless to say: stay tuned, and check out the app. I think you’ll change your mind on your points.
@puppyscent
I agree that building an intuitive app is critical, and providing good inline help, screencasts and FAQs is important too, both for the happiness of your users and to make support volume bearable.
But you will NEVER make everything intuitive and the education useful enough for everyone. And I’d MUCH rather frustrated/confused/disheartened users contact support (it should be very easy) than leave the app.
The notion of leaning away from easy support requests fails to really take the users perspective into account. One of the key WOW experience opportunities is when a customer is dissatisfied. As a user, I care far more how things are handled when I am dissatisfied than the fact that I am dissatisfied in the first place. If I can get get help, quick and see that I am important to the company I’m dealing with, I don’t so much care if there are some bumps in the road, because I can be confident they will be resolved when they come up.
So in short, intuitive apps and good inline help are great, but they are no replacement for extremely accessible support. Free consumer apps without good support may survive, but I think experience will show that paid business apps without accessible, excellent support will have a hard time excelling.
My inexperienced 2c.
Tender looks really sweet, but a little too much like virb.com (when you’re logged in). Are you guys using the same designer?
Is it possible to get a BETA login? I’ve been holding off making a help desk decision checking this each day – but i have to pull the trigger pretty soon.
Andrew, we’ve been giving out beta accounts to users that request them on help.tenderapp.com, but we’ll be launching very soon…
Make your voice heard
Sorry, but comments are closed for this item.