Show HN: I built a customer support tool for SaaS focused on being calm and fast
getfernand.comHey HN!
Today, I'm happy to share with you a project I've been working on with my associate for the past four years.
We know the customer support market is absolutely crowded, but we realized that few were focused on delivering a calm and fast experience.
But why calm and fast? I think these two go together. Our idea is that Customer support can cause a lot of stress when you have an outage or just when one of your customers is unhappy. Only one email like this can cause anxiety that can last and make you sweat the next time you open your inbox.
So we worked on the interface to reduce the stress that arises when you answer your customers, and "fast" comes along here: The faster you are done with the support, the quicker you relieve that stress.
(about the technical side):
For that, and on the purely technical side, we developed an original approach to loading the data. (I was about to write "a novel approach," but even though I came up with that approach, I believe I'm not the first one to do that.) Put simply, we use the REST protocol for updating (POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE) but not for loading. Loading is done by sending a request, and the data is then loaded, one by one, over via websockets.
The idea was that I believe the issue with Rest is that when you want to load a list of items (list of conversations (that's how we call tickets on Fernand), list of contacts, list of tags, etc.), you have to wait for all the items to be loaded before sending back the response. This causes you to lose a few ms for no reason. Instead, we implemented a live connection with the database (the server receives the database results one by one instead of all at once) and thus sends them back one by one.
This is really nice. It allows most of the requests to be executed in less than 400ms (our threshold for fast) and gives results almost instantly.
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We also applied some psychological levers on Fernand to get you through your tickets as quickly as possible. For instance, we made the opinionated decision to do only one thing at a time. You don't see the list of conversations along with one message you are replying to, to avoid you to procrastinate by switching too quickly across many conversations. You focus on one and decide the action to take.
The first page you see is the "Bonjour" screen, which gives you a quick glance about the state of your support (how many tickets, how long to inbox zero) and - cherry on top of the cake - when you reach inbox zero, you are greeted with a beautiful image that changes every day (this makes you want to reach inbox zero every day to see the image ;) ).
Finally, we implemented all the major features a customer support tool would expect: - We have a lovely Knowledge base service (I'm taking the liberty to say lovely because I'm quite happy with the quality we've done here; the pages load very fast, and it's a pleasure to use it). You can see ours at https://help.getfernand.com - We also have a chat widget that can include a contact form and your knowledge base. We handle business hours and show a message when your team is out, and you can customize everything
I hope you'll find it as interesting as much as we love developing it! We're happy to demo Fernand to you (for free, of course)
If you have any questions, we'll be happy to answer them :)