Reimagining Gmail Workspace: Hiver’s 2023 Achievements and 2024 Vision

As we step into 2024, I’m thrilled to share with you the remarkable journey Hiver has been on over the past year. I’ll also take this opportunity to give you a glimpse into the exciting roadmap that we have planned for 2024.

2023: A Landmark Year at Hiver

Last year, we focused on enhancing our product suite, driven by our commitment to building products that help businesses provide exceptional experiences to their customers.

Chapter 1: Revolutionize Communication within Gmail: Support for WhatsApp, Voice, and Live Chat Channels

Exceptional customer support isn’t just a service; it’s the lifeline that keeps businesses thriving and customers smiling.

1. Answer all your WhatsApp queries directly within Gmail

A major leap in 2023 was integrating WhatsApp as a channel to manage within Gmail. This allowed businesses to efficiently handle customer queries, boost team productivity and ensure a seamless experience for their users. Haven’t explored it yet? You can set it up by following the guidebook here. Some functionalities particularly most used by our customers include: 

• Easily add unlimited users, track conversations, and maintain accountability for WhatsApp queries.
• Stay compliant with WhatsApp’s messaging regulations using Hiver’s visibility of pre-approved templates. Send timely messages to your customers, and engage with them in set periods – such as 24 hours of inactivity, last seen, etc.
• Enhance customer interactions by including rich media in chats such as images, videos, and files directly in your chats through Hiver.

2. Upgrade to Live Chat to boost engagement and efficiency

We also enhanced our live chat widget to improve customer and website visitor engagement. Here’s what new you can do:

• Enable 24/7 query submission via ‘Contact Form’ for your customers to submit queries around the clock to ensure continuous engagement and satisfaction, especially when your team is offline. You can also collect your choice of information from visitors for easier follow-ups.
• Automatically switch your chat widget between online and offline modes, aligning with your business hours.
• Boost conversions and customer interaction through timely nudges, keeping your support proactive and visible.
• Enhance response times and support quality with our round-robin auto-assignment in chat, streamlining your team’s workflow.
• Collect crucial contact information for tailored follow-ups, elevating your customer interaction strategy.

3. Enable end-to-end voice support

Try Hiver’s Aircall Integration (paid subscription required) to make and receive calls effortlessly within your email inbox. Our customers love the convenience of managing calls where they manage emails as it boosts efficiency and streamlines their workflow.

Chapter 2: Make Better Business Decisions with All New Custom Dashboards, SLA, and CSAT Reports

In a data-driven world of business, enhancing analytics isn’t a luxury; it’s the rocket fuel that propels companies to new heights of success.

1. Hiver analytics’ custom consolidated dashboards

Hiver’s analytics’ custom dashboards now offer a centralized, real-time overview of KPIs across shared inboxes. They allow quick performance assessments and detailed report customization by metrics, inboxes, and visual styles. For more details, read here.

2. SLA and CSAT reports

We introduced comprehensive SLA and CSAT reporting within Hiver Analytics. This feature empowers businesses to monitor key metrics and make data-driven decisions, elevating the quality of customer support. Some features most liked by our customers include:

• Functionality to download and export reports.
• Detailed view of SLA metrics for shared inboxes – tracks first response, resolution violations, and resolution compliance percentages. Reports can be created with graphs, time period selection, grouped by SLA Policy, Tags, and more. 
• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Insights with an all-new text-based CSAT snippet for clear feedback. Customizable color-coded text blocks, aligned with your company’s language and culture. Improved live-chat CSAT with color-coded emojis. 

Chapter 3: New In-Team Synergy Tools to Improve Collaboration and Streamline Workflows

Improving collaboration isn’t just a goal; it’s the secret sauce that turns ordinary companies into extraordinary ones.

There were two key updates that we added to Hiver – Shared Labels and Approval Workflows to enable teams to work more cohesively and make decisions faster, right within their email conversations:

1. Shared labels enable focused collaboration on specific conversations. By creating shared labels and sub-levels for clients, projects, or teams, you can organize emails to manage tasks quickly and confidently. This feature is ideal for teams handling sensitive information (such as Legal firms) and for internal knowledge sharing. Refer to this detailed guide to know more. 

2. Approval workflows(in-email) streamline collaboration by allowing team members to seek and grant approvals directly within email conversations, eliminating the need to switch between applications.

Chapter 4: Advanced Automations to Efficiently Manage Team Workload and Improve Productivity

Choosing to automate is your strategic leap to catapult your workflows from manual to miraculous.

There are four new advanced automation we have introduced for Hiver users to improve workload and team productivity.

1. CSAT Rating Triggers: Automate in-app notifications and actions based on new CSAT ratings received. These triggers help to timely respond to customer feedback and even do damage control immediately – if needed.
2. Enhanced Task Management: New triggers and filters for status, assignee, and tags, plus actions for note-adding and tag removal for better task clarity and management.
3. Skill-Based Email Assignment to team members: ‘Assign among’ action for auto-assigning emails to team members based on their skills, optimizing workload distribution.
4. Advanced Email Triggers: Features for time-based follow-up management, shift handling, and automated email replies, enhancing email conversation efficiency.

Note: These features are part of Hiver’s Advanced Automations, available on the Elite plan. Reach out to [email protected] if you’d like to know more about these features.

Chapter 5: Hiver Ecosystem: More Integrations Supported!

In business, fostering integration and improving the ecosystem is the compass that guides success.

Over 2023, we have added three new integrations for Hiver customers to effectively manage recurring tasks right from the comfort of Gmail: 

1. Enable QuickBooks integration for seamless management of bills, tax obligations, and finances within your email conversations.
2. Enable Okta integration for automatic user management within Hiver, enhancing security and access control across applications and devices.
3. Try out Zapier integration to get SLA-related triggers, and notifications in other business tools like Slack for breach warnings or breaches, including First Response and Resolution status updates. Access your Zapier dashboard to try these features now!

Looking Ahead: Our 2024 Roadmap

As we progress into 2024, new enhancements and a few major updates at Hiver are going to strengthen team collaboration and business communication right from your very own email-based helpdesk! Here’s how:

Get ready to help your customers help themselves – offer proactive support

• Enable customers to better self-serve themselves through the Customer Portal and enhancements to the knowledge base. 
• A unified 360-degree view of communication for a customer across all channels (email, chat, WhatsApp and voice). 
• Manage agent shifts so that queries get assigned to the right agent for faster responses.
• Deeper customer and conversation insights with custom-configurable fields.
• Plans to launch Voice channel integrations with more CTI platforms (RingCentral, Dialpad and more).
• Initiate outbound messages to deliver proactive support with the WhatsApp channel.

Enhance your team’s productivity

As businesses are constantly adapting to changes, achieving team productivity has never been more critical. Here’s how Hiver is planning to help you improve your team’s performance.

• Build Chatbots to help you deflect and automate responses to commonly asked queries. Freeing up time for your team to provide instant support to pressing and urgent queries.
• Generative AI features like AI Summarizer and Smart Compose assist agents in responding with high-quality information – to reduce query resolution time.
• We plan to add 10+ new integrations to the Hiver marketplace (CRMs, project mgmt tool, order mgmt and more) – which have been a recurring feature request we’ve received.
• REST API access so that you can build custom integrations 
• Enhance team collaboration with:
  • Permalinks for Chat and
  • Uploading attachments to Email templates and Notes on Email

Conclusion: A Year of Innovation and Growth

2023 was pretty eventful for Hiver. Here’s a quick journey down memory lane – check out Hiver’s 2023 Round Up!

We at Hiver are committed to innovation and customer-centricity. Our valued customers and partners – Thank you so much for your unwavering support in 2023! We are excited to continue supporting your goals and priorities in 2024 and beyond – where we hope to keep making your job easier by building products and features that help you deliver stellar customer support.