Service quality depended on individual effort.
Agents had to reconstruct context across systems, while ownership and next actions remained unclear.
The inbox held the conversation. The operation lived somewhere else.
Tend’s support team was working in Gmail, but an email address alone did not tell an agent what was happening or what to do next.
There was no clean way to manage SMS alongside email. Ownership and status were difficult to see. To answer a question, agents had to search Airtable and the production database for the freelancer, client, event, or onboarding context behind the message.
That made response quality depend heavily on memory and persistence. The team could do the work, but the operating environment forced them to rediscover the situation one ticket at a time.
The Fractional COO concern
When a team has responsibility but the workflow withholds the context and authority needed to act, managers and founders become the default source of answers.
A better inbox would not be enough.
Moving support to a dedicated platform could improve assignment and channel management, but it would not solve the deeper operating problem. Agents still needed to connect each conversation to the real person, event, and status inside the business.
The workflow had to answer three questions immediately: Who is this? What is happening? What can I do about it right now?
What the operation needed
- One place to manage email and SMS conversations
- Clear ownership and status for every request
- Customer and marketplace context available inside the ticket
- Actions that changed based on whether the sender was a freelancer or client and what stage they were in
The right information and actions moved to the person doing the work.
We moved the team to Front, connected shared inboxes, and integrated Twilio so SMS could be handled alongside email. That created a stronger foundation for assignment, visibility, and collaboration.
Then I built a custom Front plugin that identified the sender and surfaced relevant data from Tend’s operating systems inside the ticket. A freelancer’s upcoming events and onboarding status appeared where the agent needed them. Client conversations surfaced the relevant event context and actions.
Instead of asking agents to learn the architecture behind the business, the system translated that architecture into the next useful decision.
Why this required operating ownership
The solution crossed support, marketplace operations, internal data, communications infrastructure, and software. Someone had to own the complete outcome—not just configure one tool.
The result
Support became a system the team could run, not an inbox they had to survive.
Email and SMS were unified, the team had clearer ownership, and the context required to resolve an issue appeared with the conversation. Agents spent less time hunting and more time helping.
2 → 1communication channels managed in one support workflow
Lesshunting across systems for the context needed to act
Fastersupport decisions with the right actions at the right moment
“Jackson has the incredible ability to understand business problems, build functional products quickly, and adjust on the fly. I just wish we had found him 6 months earlier.”
Davis WaddellCo-Founder & CEO, Tend
