Fernand
The fast and stress-free helpdesk service for SaaS.
Context is key to providing stellar customer support. Our custom data integration lets you connect any API endpoint to not only display but also send and update information right from your conversation sidebar — making customer interactions more informed, efficient, and actionable than ever.
Simply connect your API endpoint, add one or multiple headers (like an authorization token) and display your data using HTML and Liquid syntax, which also supports conditions and loops. No need to learn anything new or integrate with an obscure format you haven’t heard of.
We know that creating great-looking displays for your custom data can be time-consuming. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive library of pre-built components that you can use right out of the box.
Each component is designed to be both functional and visually appealing, ensuring that your custom data not only provides value but looks great, too, and doesn’t distract you from your main purpose: answering custom requests fast and efficiently.
Today, we’re introducing a powerful matching algorithm to our payment integrations that makes tracking customer relationships smarter than ever. Our system now automatically suggests related customers across Stripe, Paddle, and Lemon Squeezy — even when they contact you from different channels.
Always link customer metadata, no matter from which email they write you
No more manual linking or missing context. Whether your customer writes from their personal email, work account, or any other address, you’ll always have their complete payment history and subscription details at your fingertips. If our automated suggestion algorithm doesn’t catch the right match, you can still manually link them.
We’ve also fixed several minor issues with this release:
- Better handling of edge cases for customers with multiple subscriptions
- Reworked on the tooltip for agent and customer details
- Added a 2FA indicator for admins to see their team status
- Added the ability to mark conversation as resolved
- Updated UI to fix dark mode inconsistencies
- 38 other minor bug fixes and improvements
We’re excited to announce the launch of Split Inboxes, a powerful new feature designed to streamline your customer support operations. With split inboxes, you can now customize your workflow to match your team’s unique needs. Imagine prioritizing your VIP customers with a dedicated fast-lane inbox, effortlessly managing department-specific communications through separate channels, or seamlessly routing multilingual inquiries to the right team members.
Think of split inboxes as smart folders that automatically sort your incoming messages, helping you prioritize and focus on what matters most.
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Increased efficiency
Process similar requests together, reducing mental load and context switching. -
Better prioritization
Create splits for urgent issues, VIP customers, or specific product lines. -
Team coordination
Assign splits to different team members based on expertise, language knowledge, or workload.
We’re continuing to invest heavily in our support widget experience. Based on real-life feedback from SaaS businesses using the widget in their environments, we’ve blasted dozens of bugs, optimized many elements, and generally improved the experience.
Hello, Bonjour, Hallo, Hola, Cześć, Ciao, Olá!
The widget strings now automatically adapt to your user’s locale and address them in their preferred language. We currently support English (default), French, German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, and Portuguese. If your language isn’t yet supported, just send us a quick note.
What’s even cooler is that you can specify language-specific dynamic prompts for every property where we allow this. For example, for your general orgDescription prompt:
Fernand('init', {
appId: 'your-slug',
orgDescription: {
en: 'Hey! Do you need help?',
fr: 'Salut! Besoin d\'aide?',
de: 'Hallo! Brauchst du Hilfe?'
}
})
To learn more, check our help center article on Translations.
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You can now create custom contact forms on your support widget. Just specify which fields you need, and it will create a custom view under your contact tab. The field data will then be passed in the message body.
Auto-tagging widget conversations
You can also attach tags to new conversations from the chat by passing the tags object in the init or set command. You can set separate tags for the chat or the contact form. Note that tags that don’t match your current tags settings will be ignored.
tags: {
chat: ['Chat', 'Support'],
contact: ['Contact Form']
}
This is especially useful in combination with custom contact forms. You could for example create a custom form to handle Enterprise pricing request which you tag with “Enterprise” and use it to manipulate through Fernand Rules (assign to Sales rep, send to Webhook to create Slack notification…)
https://getfernand.com/updates/support-widget-translations-and-contact-form-custom-fields/
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.
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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.
https://getfernand.com/updates/support-widget-with-live-chat/
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 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkIVTjpQyR4
- 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
https://getfernand.com/updates/multiple-workspaces-foreign-languages-support/
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