Updates

Today, we’re releasing one of Fernand’s most anticipated features: our in-app contextual support widget. We’ve dedicated a lot of energy to ensure that we provide the best additional communication channel with your customers.

We’re one of the only CS tools that support mixed message types: an authenticated customer can see the list of messages they previously exchanged with your company via email, then add a new reply in-app on the chat interface, and revert later to email. The list of messages persists on the Conversations view, which is the single portal where a customer sees all their requests and their status.

To set up your support widget, check the detailed setup guide we’ve prepared. It documents all the parameters and options you can use.

Seamless messaging experience

We’ve obsessed with making the messaging experience as pleasant as possible. Everything is fast, seamless, and to the point. We also support authenticating your logged-in users via a secret hash to make sure they don’t have to fill in the same boring info again and again and even persist in their session over time.

Custom links

We understand that your support widget should act as a wayfinder for users. We support adding any custom link to let you choose the actions that you want to push. You can also parameterize this on init depending on your user type. For example, point an unauthenticated user to request a demo on Cal.com while letting an authenticated user book a call with you directly.

We also support a wide variety of icons to enhance the look and scalability of your custom links.

Navigate help articles

Users can now navigate your entire knowledge base content without leaving your product. Everything works 1:1 as your public help site, including our multi-layered navigation and instant search results.

You can even specify deep links in your product that interact with the widget, e.g., ‘Open our DNS configuration guide’ redirecting to article:dns-configuration-guide and opening the widget in-app instead of redirecting users away. In fact, wanna try? Open our widget and Close it

Dark mode support

Our widget also supports dark mode natively through your user’s OS color scheme preference or via your custom prompt setting. It’s easy to pass the theme of the widget as a parameter either when initiating the widget or in flight if a theme setting has been toggled.

We’ve also fixed several minor issues with this release

• Added a crowdsourced way to identify cold emails and spam messages
• Added the ability to add a smart snippet directly from a conversation
• Fixed a bug with multiple active sessions on our Security screening page
• Fixed multiple dark mode inconsistencies on the app
• 18 minor small fixes

Two-factor authentication is an additional security feature that requires a unique code to be entered in addition to your password each time you log in to Fernand. As usual, this comes with no paywall, no “Upgrade to activate 2FA”. Security shouldn’t be an upsell.

To activate two-factor authentication for your account, head over to Settings → Security and follow the steps to get started.

We’ve also fixed several minor issues with this release

• Now possible to create Linear issues without a description
• Attaching and unattaching Linear issues is now instantaneous
• Bonjour → Start with urgent tickets now loops in your queue properly
• Fixed the parsing of emails causing too many line breaks
• Fixed an issue with Calendly invites email parsing
• Added the ability to delete specific messages, or conversations
• 12 other small fixes

After months of refinement, we’re delighted to release our Linear integration to all users today. You can activate it by visiting Settings hit G then S → Integrations → Linear.

This integration enables a tight feedback loop between customer and product teams using Fernand for customer support. Use it to create Linear issues from customer conversations, link conversations to existing Linear issues, surface key information between tools, and make it easier to get back to customers when bugs are fixed or feedback has been implemented.

We meticulously replicated much of the native functionality of Linear when creating an issue, so that you can control the same level of details without ever leaving Fernand. We currently support selecting a team, adding a state, priority, assignees, labels, and project details.

We’ve also worked on a guide to explain how to connect to Linear, and make the best out of the integration.

We’ve just released our native integration for Paddle Billing. If you are using Paddle as a merchant of records or payment provider, you can now view subscriptions and payment history directly in the context of your customer conversation.

You can also use our smart automation rules and smart snippets to act based on the signals of your payment data. For example, you could build a priority support queue for users on a certain plan or auto-respond to free users, telling them it’ll take a bit longer.

We’ve also worked on a guide to explain how to retrieve your API key, connect everything, and make the best out of the integration.

We’ve also fixed several minor issues with this release

• Custom system prompt as a setting for AI replies
• Fixed Stripe plans showing ID instead of their names
• Added OG images for each articles in the knowledge base
• Better rendering for iframes on the knowledge base
• Better handling of spam complaints
• Custom HTML support in the knowledge base
• Better monitoring of the email flow to ensure deliverability
• Fixed minor alignment inconsistencies
• 34 minor bug fixes

Today, we’re proud to introduce Fernand’s knowledge base generator. It’s the fruit of months of hard work, where we obsessed over crafting the best experience to write SaaS help center articles.

• Built with NuxtJS + Vercel. Super fast, so great for SEO
• Notion-like editor you already know and love
• Start with our opinionated template for SaaS
• Compatible with Grammarly
• Beautiful image backgrounds to enhance product visualizations
• Resolution steps
• Mobile friendly
• Instant search in article context
• Unlimited multi-level collections to organize your content to match user journeys
• Light and dark mode support
• Ability to customize branding with custom CSS + JS

This feature is included within our simple pricing scheme of $29/active user/mo. No article or collection limit; all features are included.

Data migration service

While we’re working on productizing our migration importers on a self-service basis, we’ve already worked on migration scripts for all the major providers in the industry. We perform concierge migrations free of charge for all paying users. Interested? Get in touch or book a demo.

Fernand now supports switching between workspaces natively. You can now click on your avatar on the bottom left of your dashboard, then “Switch workspace” to be able to toggle sessions between the multiple products you support. If you have multiple side projects and wish to maintain a clear distinction between them, this feature comes in handy.

Additionally, we now have the ability to detect the language of each incoming message automatically. When a message’s primary language is recognized as non-English, we’ll show a “Translate” button in context. Going even further, this is compatible with our smart automation rules, and you can set routes like “If this message is in German, assign it to this specific German-speaking agent“. No more separate support-de@piedpiper.com.

We’ve also fixed several issues and optimized several flows.

• Corrected an issue with Amazon receipt emails not being rendered
• Fixed 20+ minor visual bugs and edge cases

We’ve just released our native integration for 🍋 Lemon Squeezy. If you are using Lemon Squeezy as a merchant of records or payment provider, you can now view subscriptions and payment history directly in the context of your customer conversation.

You can also use our smart automation rules and smart snippets to act based on the signals from your payment data. For example, you could build a priority support queue for users on a certain plan or auto-respond to free users, telling them that it’ll take longer.

We’ve also worked on a guide with our friends at Lemon Squeezy to explain how to connect and make the best out of the integration.

We’ve also fixed several issues and optimized several flows.

• Corrected an issue with Amazon receipt emails not being rendered
• You can now group mention colleagues using @everyone and @here in notes
• Better contrast in tag labels
• Fixed an edge case where threads would duplicate
• Updated 404 page 🐕
• 3 minor bug fixes

It’s now possible to set granular permissions to specific users for almost every action that can be performed on Fernand. We’ve done this to give our users more flexibility regarding the kind of things they want to allow or not at different levels of collaboration, but also because it allowed us to push for something very exciting.

We believe that customer support should be a company-wide effort, so our new pricing model makes it easier for companies to adopt Fernand across the entire company.

As of now, only active users with permission to reply directly to customers are paying for a seat on Fernand! This means you can invite all your team members, including your entire engineering team, legal, security, marketing, sales, accounting, your office mascot dog or whoever else, so they can access the context of customer support tickets and collaborate internally on issues. They can access conversations, collaborate via notes, assign, tag, snooze, and much more — all of that, for free.

We’ve also fixed several issues and optimized flows.

• Optimized rendering on iPhone for Safari users
• Migrated our Super Replies to ChatGPT API for even better, more accurate generations
• Added a shortcut to compose new emails, as well as a new action in our command palette
• Rules, channels, and smart snippets are now sorted in alphabetical order
• Enhanced the edge case of having an email hard-bounce in a conversation
• 8 other minor bug fixes 🎉

Fernand web application is now responsive and scales for both tablets and smartphone screens. While most users access Fernand on their desktop, it’s common to respond quickly to a conversation on the go. The experience is much better now, but please note that this is an ongoing process, and we’ll improve the experience over time.

We’ve also fixed several issues and optimized flows.

• Added the ability to Compose new emails and start conversations from scratch
• Fixed a problem when an email bounced in a loop in multiple-recipients conversation
• Refreshed our inbox zero imagery for even better “Woah” effects
• Fixed a bug with our Snooze action in smart snippets
• Fixed a bug where invoices wouldn’t load properly in the billing section
• Improved the experience of pasting images in the editor
• Customized the error message when OpenAI’s API is over capacity
• 55 other minor bug fixes 🎉

Today, we’re introducing the most exciting feature so far for Fernand.

We’ve leveraged OpenAI‘s best-in-class API to bring our vision to life. We believe that AI can enhance processes and help automate mundane tasks while still keeping the user in charge of the final output. Hit SHIFT+R or click on the magic sparkles icon of Fernand’s editor. You’ll see an input field with a prompt to give further instructions to the AI, based on the content of your customer’s request. Some example prompts you could use:

• “Decline politely”
• “Interested”
• “Will investigate”
• “Escalated to engineers”

With just a small prompt like the ones above, the AI will be able to provide a fully-fledged, well-written email answer that retains the context of the initial message. This supports also multiple languages, including French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and many others.

We’ve also fixed several issues along with the release:

• Better dark-mode handling of smart snippets
• Dedicated “Open full view” item for the smart snippets in the command center
• An improved visualization of rules
• 6 minor bug fixes

We pushed a major revamp of the Smart Snippets on production today. The most significant improvement is the introduction of the ability to send data using webhooks. You can use it to send a message, update a customer’s attributes in your CRM, or take just about any action on a customer that you’d want to do.

You can choose between different call types, including GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. You can also now specify up to 4 custom headers with a name/value pair.

We’ve also fixed several issues and optimized flows.

• Ability to set a custom FROM name for automated emails and replies, including the use of variables like organization or agent name
• Fixed an infinite loop in our Websocket implementation
• Pasting an image in the editor now adapts automatically for high-density displays like Retina screens
• Clearly labeled the “Open” status in the conversation sidebar for related tickets
• Better UX of the DNS verification to avoid confusion due to propagation issues
• Show / Hide the events in a conversation using CMD+E
• Increased the max size of attachments
• 18 other minor bug fixes

We’ve been hard at work listening and implementing feedback from our first users. This update brings many experience improvements, new impactful features, and general bug fixes. We’ll list some of the highlights below.

• A completely revamped emoji picker on the editor
• Improved Markdown support on the editor
• Better bounce handling of messages that couldn’t be delivered
• Stripe integration is now fully functional, along with a few key changes to pull up Stripe customer data even when no subscription is active
• “All” now lists all conversations, even those that are closed
• Notification email to alert when a rule is executed successfully for the first time
• Notification email to alert you when your channel DNS settings have been properly verified
• Better UI for team member permissions
• A delightful confetti animation when you reach 100% on the progress bar
• Better UI for selecting multiple agents in the rules and smart snippets creator
• Cross-browser optimizations, especially for Safari on Mac OS Ventura
• Improved dark mode handling of some components
• 23 other minor bug fixes

92% of customer support reps experience anxiety daily. This has been the accepted norm for far too long. Today, we’re releasing Fernand, the calmest support experience ever made. Here’s everything we did to design an intentionally calm product.

We’ve done customer support ourselves for the past 10 years and experienced first-hand what a soul-crushing thing it can be. We set ourselves a rule: each flow should only show one thing at a time. No 5-column layouts, and no side panel with infinite scrolling. We do this to counter Hick’s law, which dictates that the more choices you have to make, the more time you’ll need to make a decision.

We’ve designed with psychological levers in mind to try to influence habit-forming, squash procrastination, and increase focus. For example, we communicate your progress throughout your session so that you feel a sense of completion toward a goal. Calm is predictability.

Visually, we made sure to use UI elements as sparingly as possible. We’ve used soft pastel background colors to bring a sense of depth while still feeling soft and invisible. Copy has also been crafted with calmness in mind: simple, honest, humane, and straight to the point.

Our pricing model is dead simple ($29/user/mo). One plan means no decision paralysis: it’s simple and predictable. Most importantly, it lets us include everything unlimited so you don’t have to worry about hitting a quota or how your bill will look at the end of the month.

We also make sure we’re monitoring our infrastructure and app uptime 24/7. No matter how well you’ve designed your product to be calming, everything can be destroyed in a split second. We know that nothing is more stressful than an outage, and we promise to make everything in our power to avoid incidents from occurring. We know that stuff inside out because we’re running an infrastructure-critical company as well.

We practice what we preach: our company itself is calm. We’re async first, remote first, and on a 4-day workweek schedule.

Watch this space for updates, or follow @AntoineMinoux, @cx42net or @getfernand on Twitter