Turn Gmail into a simple, powerful helpdesk with Hiver
Emails are an indispensable part of almost everyone’s work routine and with the rise in the number of emails that we deal each day it becomes essential to have tools for email optimization. Email is the de-facto standard tool for collaboration and communication in the workplace. But at the same time, email clutter is the No 1 productivity killer at most workplaces.
Hiver’s mission is to fix this by turning Gmail into a helpdesk. Hiver helps you manage critical business functions like support, sales and hiring right from Gmail. Access your customer support emails from your gmail. Assign emails as tasks, see their status and full conversation history. Apart from that it also lets its users create and share email templates, write notes on emails and share them, etc. With Hiver, teams can use their email to get all this done efficiently, without having to learn and adapt to another set of tools.
Kevin William David sat down with Niraj Ranjan Rout, CEO of Hiver to learn more.
What is Hiver?
Niraj: Hiver turns your Gmail into a simple, powerful customer support and sales management tool. With Hiver, you and your team can effortlessly manage shared email accounts like sales@company.com, info@company.com — right from your Gmail.
With Hiver, you can handle emails as tasks, assigning them to your team, and seeing who is working on what with just a few clicks. You can communicate around email conversations with notes, and make sure you don’t drown in email clutter.
Hiver also lets you share your Gmail labels. Just share a Gmail label like “sales lead” to share email conversations with your team and delegate those as tasks. Hiver is super easy to set up, and you’ll be able to have your team up and running in under 10 minutes.
Why are you building this?
Niraj: It definitely started being a solution to a personal problem, but is now being completely driven by our understanding of our customers and the problems that they face.
Email is used by just about every knowledge worker in the world, and is actually a great communication tool. But using email to handle a process like customer support or sales in even small sized teams is usually a recipe for disasters. Before you know, you’d be drowning in email clutter and hunting across inboxes for the information you need to get back to a customer or a sales lead.
Hiver solves all of that, without you having to learn and adapt to a new tool. Hiver enhances your Gmail to allow your team to manage these business processes from your inbox.
How are you different from what’s existing in the market right now? What’s unique about what you are making? Why should your end customers use Hiver?
Niraj: While the space(s) that we’re in is highly cluttered, we have a USP — we’re email centric. While every helpdesk tool in the market sells the story of email being the root of all problems, we embrace the email inbox, and make it better equipped to handle important business functions.
Our end customers use our product as it’s extremely natural to be able to handle emails from customers and sales leads right from your email inbox, without having to deal with and adapt to another interface.
Who are your customers? Who are you selling to in a company?
Niraj: Our customers comes from a very wide variety of business verticals like law firms, architecture and planning firms, online retailers, gyms and spas — you name it. Also, the size of our customers ranges all the way from 2 people teams to large multi-national companies which use Hiver to manage business critical functions.
In small firms, our product is usually directly purchased by the founder. In larger companies, the decision maker is usually a head of a department, like customer support, partner or sales channel manager etc.
When you started doing sales, was there a segment or industry that you went after? If so, what was the reason?
Niraj: We’ve always done SaaS, ever since we put a pricing page up. We didn’t really go after a specific industry. We think about growth in terms of distribution channels — marketplaces, integrations etc., rather than industry segment. I think that’s a great approach to take for a SaaS company — there’s so much opportunity to build synergies with other products, and in the process, increase your own footprint.
How do customers use your product?
Niraj: Our customers use Hiver to manage shared email accounts like support@company.com, sales@company.com or jobs@company.com etc.
Once an email comes into such an email account, Hiver customers can use their own Gmail account to access it, delegate it to someone in your team, and communicate around the email using notes.
They can also tag email conversations with shared Gmail labels like “refund required”, or “large customer”, and the labels then sync across the Gmail account for the team, keeping everyone in the loop on what’s going on.
It’s a seamless way of managing external communication that your company has with customers, sales leads, partners, vendors and job applicants.
What are some unique cases that your customers have done?
Niraj: While we’ve always built Hiver keeping in mind the scenarios that arise when companies communicate over email with people outside it, we’ve been surprised by how large organizations use Hiver to manage their internal helpdesks like IT, partner support and legal teams.
This has given us many new ideas about marketing Hiver, and building some new toolsets to make it more lucrative for these use-cases.
Early on, what were some of the biggest challenges like while building the product and how did you solve them?
Niraj: The biggest challenge early on was getting the product in front of serious users and customers who would use it extensively, and give us feedback to improve.
We solved it by optimizing our site for some long tail keywords which had a bit of traffic but no competition, but were extremely relevant for our product. It also helped to get on the Google Apps marketplace and Chrome Store early on.
What are top 5–10 products that you depend on the most to run the company & how do you use it?
Niraj: Our customer support runs on Hiver. We have the whole team doing customer support.
Our user analytics is all on top of Kissmetrics. We use Kissmetrics to look at monthly reports, activations, churn etc. Also to understand how new features are being used, what kind of repeat users they have, what are the top 3–4 things that a new customer or new trial user does. So Kissmetrics has this amazing cohorts report which we use it to understand users.
We use Waffle to visualize our github tasks and turn that into an Kanban kind of board where we can move tasks from ideation to release through a very structured pipeline. We have a 10–15 stage pipeline built on waffle that takes care of our release right from the point where we think of the idea to actually deploying it.
Trello is used for very high level thinking where we have not actually factored things down into actionable items. As soon as we factor things down into actionable items it goes into Waffle or GitHub. But when we are thinking of high level ideas which are 3–4 months away from starting development that is usually inside Trello.
We use Epicbeat to listen to the web and figure out the right people to reach out to for our marketing campaigns. We use GitHub to host our code.
We use MailChimp for email newsletters. Our newsletter has close to 20k subscribers now. It’s a mix of customers and people who come to our blog and subscribe.
We use Yesware. In our case we don’t use it for sales because we don’t do any outbound sales. We use it primarily for our content marketing reach out.
Are you using Hiver and recommend them? You can do it here https://siftery.com/hiver-grexit?recommend
