Meet Mother

We built a lovely internal app to help make our customers happier.

The primary objective for our team at ToneDen has always been to build the best marketing platform for our users. Internal tools to support and service our users had always been a lower priority and were often Frankenstein-ed together on a strictly-as-needed basis with relatively little concern for the user experience and in some cases needs of our own team members.

In the early days, we assembled a barebones administrative interface for our team that provided basic account management tools and reporting. Over time, as ToneDen acquired thousands of new customers, our internal tools to service these customers were steadily rendered insufficient.

Our customer support, customer success, and accounts teams were finding it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to perform essential tasks to help and support our customers. Similarly, the volume of requests that our tech and operations teams had to fulfill on a daily basis were quickly becoming a significant burden, hampering our ability to focus on priority one: building a better ToneDen for our users.

We realized that it’s not only important to build the best product — it’s just as important for our team to provide the best experience. This means delivering quality customer support, quickly servicing issues on the platform, and actively improving the day-to-day happiness of our customers. This is why we built Mother.

Mother is a product that we built just for ourselves. She helps to streamline and automate everything the ToneDen team needs to provide our customers with the best service possible.

Mother is her own separate standalone app, fast and intelligent. She pulls in data and functionality from a number of disparate sources including our primary database, subscription platforms like Stripe and Braintree, Facebook’s API, our internal task management tool AirTable, and user support-oriented platforms like Intercom and LogRocket. All together, she helps us run ToneDen better for every customer’s needs and demands.

In addition to making it easier for our support and account teams to get the information they need with just a couple of clicks, Mother provides us with better aggregate error and reporting dashboards to enable our team to more proactively identify, diagnose, and address platform-wide issues.

Even though it’s only been a few weeks since Mother launched internally, we have already noticed a significant increase in efficiency and a sharp decrease in the number of requests to our tech and ad operations teams. Across the board, our different business units are able to self-serve the information they need a lot quicker than before, which enables us to assist customers and users faster and more effectively. From a support standpoint, the customized platform monitoring dashboards have been a major asset when it comes to surfacing and debugging latent issues that are affecting a multitude of users.

We’re excited to add even more features to Mother in the coming months, including expanded data reporting and granularity, team communication tools, and further account-specific alerts — all with the aim of empowering our people and providing a better experience for ToneDen users across the world.

P.S. We’re also teaching her to bake us chocolate chip cookies.