Tender Support Launches

Today we cut the reins on our newest products Tender Support (hosted by our wonderful friends over at Engine Yard). So what exactly is Tender? Tender is the next evolution in customer support. We built Tender to solve a real need we had: dealing with customer support for Lighthouse.

There’s no shortage of help desk / support applications out there, so why would we possibly build our own? Well, we think that we’ve got a few core ideas that differ from others.

Support applications shouldn’t be harder than email

It’s easy to get lost in the rabbit hole of buidling applications for the sake of building more software. That’s why email is at the core of Tender. Issues can be created and managed entirely through email. You can also create public and private issues without creating an account. We think this is a very important focus: who wants to create more accounts when reporting a problem?

Support staff should be held responsible

It’s all too easy to see an email come through your inbox, mark it as read and move along. In Tender, we try very hard to hold support staff responsible for communicating with customers. We give you statistics on how long it takes you to respond to issues and highlight the issues which you haven’t responded to yet.

Support applications should integrate with your application

Tender is highly customizable. You can implement your own CSS, your own email addresses, serve it from your own domain, and change the text in many parts of the site. Make your support site look and feel like your own site. Furthermore, we’ve added an automatic-login feature to Tender — with a little bit of configuration on your application, users will automatically be logged into your Tender install.

Work with your bug tracker

Tender integrates seamlessly with Lighthouse. It allows for developers to keep their bug tracker clean and uncluttered, while allowing customers some visibility into the development process.

Just the beginning

Tender is still a relatively young product. We made the first commits to the repository at the end of August and opened up to beta testers in December. In that time, we’ve crushed hundreds of bugs and refined the product over and over. But this is just the begining. We’ve already got some major feature enhancments under development that should be hitting in the next month or two. Your best bet for keeping up with features is to keep your eyes on Hoth and @tenderapp.

We’re stoked with the level of enthusiasm people have been showing after trying Tender out. We can’t wait to keep working on Tender and making it the best support application out there!

What are you waiting for? Sign up for a new installation. There’s no restriction or credit card required for the first 30-days — what’s there to lose?