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Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

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Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#21

Post by jasondigitized »

awinter-py wrote: post #18

> B2C support tools don’t work for B2B yes this -- so many build-vs-buy decisions that end up at 'build' because the market doesn't provide multitenant products b2b2b / b2b2c is a bet on a software future of many mini platforms

Can you elaborate on what you mean by mini platforms? I think I am following but interested by what you meas and also curious what you mean by "the market doesn't provide multi-tenant products? Zendesk is a multi-tenant product. I think the problem you may be pointing out is it doesn't treat the tenant / organization as a first class object.

Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#22

Post by abbott4321 »

codegeek wrote: post #6

Funny because we (B2B SAAS company) literally built an in house tool to manage customers at a "Company" level rather than Contacts/Users. However we decided to switch to Helpscout as we didn't wanna self host and it has been a bad experience with helpscout. They have no concept of "Company" and we are honestly considering switching back to our home grown tool. There definitely is need for tool like this. I will be ha…

Front also rolled out support for "accounts" last year which sounds exactly like what you are trying to do. It aggregates a set of contacts under an account and lets you use accounts through the whole application.

You can see all of the communication from a company across all channels (support, sales, success), get automatically notified if someone else in the organization replied recently, do routing/classification based on account data (account size, account owners), and filter analytics by account.

Worth a look if you're considering going off Helpscout.

Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#23

Post by rekoros »

abbott4321 wrote: post #22
codegeek wrote: post #6

Funny because we (B2B SAAS company) literally built an in house tool to manage customers at a "Company" level rather than Contacts/Users. However we decided to switch to Helpscout as we didn't wanna self host and it has been a bad experience with helpscout. They have no concept of "Company" and we are honestly considering switching back to our home grown tool. There definitely is need for tool like this. I will be ha…

Front also rolled out support for "accounts" last year which sounds exactly like what you are trying to do. It aggregates a set of contacts under an account and lets you use accounts through the whole application. You can see all of the communication from a company across all channels (support, sales, success), get automatically notified if someone else in the organization replied recently, do routing/classification…

Just to clarify, you get this account-level view from the perspective of the vendor, correct?

(i.e. if I'm an end user and I use Front to get support from my vendor - will my colleagues be able to get involved in sorting through my issue?)

Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#24

Post by chermanowicz »

This is a huge pain point for so many companies! I haven't seen a solution that does this well until now.

And not limited to customer support - think about partnerships and sales (while perhaps a smaller opportunity).... shared Slack channels can be such a pain.

Anyways. Andrei and team are really smart, great people. Very exciting!

Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#25

Post by satyrnein »

Great concept, but a question about permissions: say that I'm the admin on the client side with a billing question for example, would my non-admin teammates (that don't have access to the billing info) have access to the support conversation about billing?

Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#26

Post by rekoros »

satyrnein wrote: post #25

Great concept, but a question about permissions: say that I'm the admin on the client side with a billing question for example, would my non-admin teammates (that don't have access to the billing info) have access to the support conversation about billing?

By default: yes. However, the vendor could create a private room just for the admins, where sensitive topics could be discussed.

Some other thoughts: the vendor could group all admins into a separate "customer", with their own set of rooms.

Very similarly, the vendor could also group all users a single "customer" that would function as a community (but where all users are authenticated).

Great question!

Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#27

Post by rekoros »

rekoros wrote: post #26
satyrnein wrote: post #25

Great concept, but a question about permissions: say that I'm the admin on the client side with a billing question for example, would my non-admin teammates (that don't have access to the billing info) have access to the support conversation about billing?

By default: yes. However, the vendor could create a private room just for the admins, where sensitive topics could be discussed. Some other thoughts: the vendor could group all admins into a separate "customer", with their own set of rooms. Very similarly, the vendor could also group all users a single "customer" that would function as a community (but where all users are authenticated). Great question!

I could be wrong, but I think that such questions are pretty rare with complex products - most issues are about features, bugs, outages, etc.

My favorite answer to this question is actually "they would just send an email to their customer success rep" :-)

Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#28

Post by awinter-py »

jasondigitized wrote: post #21
awinter-py wrote: post #18

> B2C support tools don’t work for B2B yes this -- so many build-vs-buy decisions that end up at 'build' because the market doesn't provide multitenant products b2b2b / b2b2c is a bet on a software future of many mini platforms

Can you elaborate on what you mean by mini platforms? I think I am following but interested by what you meas and also curious what you mean by "the market doesn't provide multi-tenant products? Zendesk is a multi-tenant product. I think the problem you may be pointing out is it doesn't treat the tenant / organization as a first class object.

by mini-platform, I meant a saas who hosts other businesses who in turn have customers. (This may not be a good name for this). Example is shopify -- if shopify were buying a Q&A tool, for example, they would need it to be administered by the store owner and accessible by the store customers. (Also shopify is no longer mini)

zendesk is a great example. I looked at their 'multibrand' feature.

per this https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408829476378, an enterprise plan lets me have 300 sub-accounts with restricted roles. But: 1) it's not clear if each role gets an admin panel for their page, and 2) it costs $199 per month per agent. This isn't designed to be re-sold.

Freshdesk also has a 'forest' plan which supports unlimited 'products', per this https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/376..., but it seems like the tickets all funnel to the same admin panel.

ah I didn't mean to say 'the market never provides', more like 'in some build vs buy decisions' there are good plugins on the market but none of them offer multitenancy.

Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#29

Post by chrisfrantz »

Andrei and team are building something very cool at Fogbender. They’re trying to tackle the customer support communication pipeline in a way that solves for a number of pain points that services like Intercom don’t help with.

We were early users and look forward to continue testing in the future. Congrats Fogbender team on launching!

Re: Launch HN: Fogbender (YC W22) – B2B support software designed for customer teams

#30

Post by wizwit999 »

Looks nice, and I understand the problem, I'll bookmark this for when we scale up our support.

As a note, I'd be careful with using the word customer when writing, since it can be ambiguous if its your direct customer or your customer's customer. We have the same situation, so I'm aware of it haha.

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