From Gmail Chaos to Faster Support

The Problem

Gmail was not a support system.

Tend is a premier marketplace for hospitality staffing. The company connects hospitality establishments to its network of Tenders and takes service seriously, which means the team is selective about who gets onboarded to the platform and needs support operations that can keep up with that standard.

At the start, all customer support was handled through Gmail. That was a nightmare.

The team could only support customers over email. There was no clean way to respond to text messages. And because the workflow lived inside a normal inbox, it was never fully clear whether something had already been handled, who owned a conversation, or what needed to happen next.

The result was predictable: slower support, more ambiguity, and too much time spent figuring out the status of a conversation before anyone could even begin solving the actual problem.

Step 1

Move support into a real ticketing system.

The first fix was straightforward but important: Tend needed a proper support workspace.

I moved the team into Front and wired up the relevant inboxes, including Twilio SMS. That immediately improved the operation because support could finally be managed in one place instead of across disconnected communication channels.

Even before the custom work, this created a cleaner support environment:

• support conversations were easier to track
• ownership became clearer
• email and SMS could be handled inside the same workflow
• agents had a much better sense of what had and had not been handled

Step 2

Reduce the time spent clicking away to find context.

Once support lived in Front, the next bottleneck became obvious. The information agents needed to answer a ticket was available, but it lived elsewhere.

Sometimes the right data was in Airtable. Sometimes it was in the production database. Either way, agents had to leave Front, search around for context, and piece together what they needed before they could respond.

That was extremely time-consuming, especially for repetitive support work.

Step 3

Bring the right information and actions directly into the ticket.

To solve that, I built a custom Front plugin. The plugin read the message, determined who it was from, and automatically surfaced the right information and action buttons for that specific person.

Instead of treating every ticket as the same, the system adapted to the user context.

• If it was a freelancer with an event coming up, the plugin exposed Confirm and Call Out actions
• If it was a freelancer still onboarding, the plugin surfaced onboarding details
• If it was a client, the plugin showed event status and the relevant support context

Agents no longer had to leave the inbox just to gather the basics. The information and actions they needed were already there.

The Result

Support got faster because the work got easier.

The biggest win was not just the move from Gmail to Front. It was the fact that support agents could finally respond with context already in front of them.

• support operations became easier to manage
• email and SMS support could live in the same system
• agents spent less time searching for background information
• the right actions became available at the right time for the right user

Instead of treating every support message like a mini investigation, Tend had a system that made the right next move more obvious.