Yetto is now available in beta!

TL;DR

After years of obsession, we're finally ready to announce that Yetto is available in beta! It's early days, but if you and your team want to try a different way of doing technical support, designed from the ground up for your work as it actually happens, apply for a spot.

We've got problems

"Technical" is a funny distinction, often a double edged sword. Software companies tend to use "are they 'technical'?" euphemistically, a way of deciding whose opinion matters or whose work is important. Having said that, I think we'd all agree that there's something different about "Technical Support" or "Support Engineering." The work you do supporting a networking platform or debugging an API with engineers is different from, say, supporting an e-commerce business -- not that that work is any less valuable or strenuous.

You're context switching constantly, trying to get deep in the weeds on a problem quickly and then jumping to the next with no time to reset in between. Being that deep in the weeds usually means working through reproduction steps with a customer while trying to understand and untangle the inner workings of your own application (and often other companies' applications as well). It involves not just keeping a lot of information in your head at once, but finding connections between disparate pieces of data from an ever-growing number of sources and discerning the difference between how the organization says something works versus how it actually works in practice.

Once you make some headway — whether that's finding a root cause or fixing a bug or just finding the team responsible for the service that isn't working — you then need to communicate... to everyone. You need to update your customer, clarify things with your colleagues on other teams, and write notes for the rest of your team so that they can follow up on the work or even recognize when a similar issue comes in later.

This already chaotic work is made infuriating once you come to the inevitable conclusion that your primary tool for accomplishing this work is fighting you every step of the way.

The help desks we use have generally been designed to enable a different kind of support work, work that assumes most of your effort is spent issuing refunds or providing answers for relatively known questions with reasonably known answers to customers who have failed to search your documentation and F.A.Q's effectively.

You know that it's not uncommon to spend as much time in Slack, Notion, Confluence, GitHub, Jira, or Linear as you do in the help desk; finding relevant pieces of data, digging through outdated org charts and internal documentation, and advocating for action with other teams and leaders. None of this work, most of the job, is measured by the tool generating the metrics that determine your job performance. It's frustrating, to say nothing of inefficient. We know; we've been there.

We think we can do better. You shouldn't have to jump through hoops to find detailed, up to date information or to talk to the colleague who can answer your question about that new feature. Your help desk should help you do that.

Yetto is our love letter to Support teams who want to solve interesting problems. It's the tool we wish we had for the years we've already spent solving these problems.

Why now

The way teams work — and how they work together — has changed dramatically over the past decade. Task-specific software has given teams deeper, richer, and faster ways to do their jobs, and teams are working closer together than they used to. The rise and proliferation of LLMs and generative AI over the past year and a half is only speeding up those changes. Support can't continue to work in a silo with tools designed for simple text exchanges with customers. That's not what the job looks like anymore and (barring some Terminator style apocalypse) it's not going to go back.

We believe in the power and value of customer support and Support Professionals, and we have for a long time. We've been doing the job for at least a decade each ourselves — fixing customer problems, building Support teams, and building support tools. Watching the shifting landscape of business operations and technology recently has only cemented the fact that quality, technical support work can only be done by Support Professionals with modern tools built to connect them directly to the systems and teams they work with across the company.

In other words, once you've automated away all the easy support tickets — the refunds, password resets, and documentation questions our current help desks are built to make easy — what you're left with is all the novel, challenging support work the help desk hasn't been built for.

What now

You're exhausted. You're frustrated. We all are. Our tools have been designed for a job that never reflected our work to begin with and increasingly doesn't exist at all. No matter how much we try, no amount of patching, Python, or ad-hoc tools are going to make them work for us. It's time to try something new.

We're inviting support teams and Support Professionals to apply for beta access to Yetto now. This is the help desk we've always wanted to use. Now we're making it available to you.