For the last month Endevver has been piloting a new custom support system to help users of its many plugins as well as our numerous customers get answers to their questions as quickly as we can. We looked at two more modern customer support systems, GetSatisfaction and TenderApp. We have a soft spot in hearts for both.

GetSatisfaction has a stellar user interface and user experience, plus, and this is the biggest compliment we could pay any piece of software: it is fun to use. We also love how community oriented it is, which fits in nicely with our company ethos. As a result it is a product we use with a lot of our pet projects.

Tenderapp offers a decidedly very different user experience. It far more minimalistic and offers what we feel is more "professional" user experience:

In making the choice between these two services, Tenderapp has one very critical feature that GetSatisfaction does not: private tickets. You see, one of the things we at Endevver are experimenting with is how to best serve the ongoing support needs of our clients. As such, our clients are sometimes in need of sharing proprietary or private information with us, and if they can't do that safely and securely, and if we can't keep that information closely associated with their help ticket, then we are not confident we can provide the best service we can. And that's no good for anyone.

Tenderapp also integrates closely with Lighthouse - another product by entp, the folks behind Tenderapp, and another tool that Endevver practically lives in. It is the system we use to manage all bug reports to our plugins and to Melody. We honestly can't imagine our lives without this tool, and the fact that Tenderapp interfaces with it so well helps create a much more cohesive development environment for us internally. This in turn translates to a better experience for our customers because our work flow encompasses these three aspects of support seamlessly: asking for help (Tenderapp) → bug/issue/defect tracking (Lighthouse) → change control (github) [1].

So we are happy to announce help.endevver.com, a place in which we welcome all Movable Type and Melody users to ask us their questions. We will do our best to provide support to everyone when we can. Then in the coming months, based upon demand and our collective experiences using Tenderapp, we may begin exploring paid support plans to offer Movable Type users and customers.

We are very excited to help our customers and the Movable Type community in this new way and hope you will be too!

[1] I would have drawn the relationship between tenderapp, lighthouse and github as a cycle, but Illustrator keeps crashing, and Keynote and gliffy don't support circular arrows.