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About the company
Craftgate is a unified payment orchestration platform that helps businesses manage virtual POS systems, e-money providers, and other payment methods from a single dashboard. It simplifies payment operations, reduces costs, and gives merchants access to faster settlements, better commission rates, and loyalty programs.
Built on more than a decade of payment expertise, Craftgate powers some of Turkey’s fastest-growing fintechs with reliable, scalable infrastructure.
Lemi Orhan Ergin, Co-founder and Technical Lead, oversees both engineering and customer support at Craftgate. He focuses on improving operational efficiency and enabling seamless collaboration between technical and support teams to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
The growing pains of scaling support
Before Hiver, Craftgate handled all customer queries from a shared Gmail account. As their customer base grew, this setup quickly became unscalable.
- Lack of visibility: Managing customer inquiries from a single inbox meant tracking everything manually. As volume climbed to nearly 100 inquiries a day, around 50 went unanswered during peak periods. There was no clear visibility and conversations slipped through the cracks
- Uneven workloads: The six-member support team, supported by two rotating engineers, handled all incoming requests. But without proper routing rules, the workload wasn’t evenly distributed. Senior agents took on most of the queries while others had lighter queues.
- Gaps in rotation and visibility: Two engineers handled support queries in weekly shifts. But since support operations ran from a single Gmail account, there was no clear way to track who was on duty or when a shift ended. This often left customer queries unattended or delayed until someone noticed them.
- Scattered collaboration: Agents often moved conversations to Slack for internal discussions, but switching between different tools slowed the resolution time.
“Support and engineering were trying to help customers, but context kept getting lost without a shared system. We were spending more time coordinating than actually resolving issues.” — Lemi Orhan Ergin, Craftgate
- Manual documentation: The team manually copied 1–5 customer responses into Confluence each day, but valuable insights were often missed during busy weeks.
- Limited analytics and AI fit: Gmail provided no way to categorize or analyze the support conversations. As most English-only AI tools could not process the Turkish language queries, the team found it hard to use off-the-shelf AI tools for sentiment analysis or reporting.
Craftgate needed a solution that could automate routing, bring visibility across conversations, and unify team collaboration; all within the familiar interface of Google Workspace.
“The team was clear they didn’t want to change how they worked inside Gmail — they just needed a more structured way to manage customer conversations.” — Lemi Orhan Ergin, Craftgate
Finding the right fit
When Craftgate decided to streamline its support operations, the team first explored tools that could manage high query volumes without changing how they worked. They tried Atlassian Jira Service Management and similar systems but soon realized that switching between Gmail and external apps only added friction.
After several trials, they came across Hiver. It gave the team everything they needed: automation, visibility, and collaboration, all in a familiar workspace.
To test it, Craftgate ran a short proof of concept. The results were clear:Hiver could handle their growing workload seamlessly.
During implementation, Lemi gradually introduced the following:
- Added a primary Shared Inbox (support@craftgate.io) for all customer communication.
- Enabled Round-Robin assignment so every incoming customer query was automatically routed to a team member.
- Created rules for simple Automation to handle repetitive tasks like auto-acknowledging messages or filtering unimportant updates like bank acknowledgment alerts.
- Introduced the notes and @mention feature to the team so support agents and rotating engineers could collaborate on tickets without switching to Slack.
- Configured user roles and weekly shifts to match their on-call engineering support schedule.
This setup became the foundation of Craftgate’s new workflow—centralizing all requests, clarifying ownership, and giving the team the structure they needed.
“We wanted a solution that could handle the complexity of fintech support but still felt easy to use. Hiver gave us automation, visibility, and collaboration—all in the inbox our team already uses daily.” — Lemi Orhan Ergin, Craftgate
Solution: Driving clarity, consistency, and control across customer support
With Hiver, Craftgate finally brought structure and clarity to its daily support workflow. The team now manages every customer interaction and internal discussion directly inside Gmail, while keeping their engineering shifts and coordination seamlessly aligned. This removed the friction of scattered tools and manual follow-ups.
1.Smart routing keeps every request on track
No one has to pick tickets manually or worry about missed conversations. Hiver’s Round-Robin feature automatically routes every new request landing in the Shared Inbox (support@craftgate.io) to an available agent.
The team now plans to move to a skill-based routing system, where senior agents handle complex cases and new joiners receive fewer conversations as they ramp up. This will help in balancing workload and maintaining quality.
2. Automations clear the noise and save time
As of now, Craftgate uses eight Automation rules to keep its Shared Inbox organized and reduce repetitive work:
- Before Hiver, automated messages used to fill their inbox. Hiver now detects these messages and automatically closes them.
- An autoresponder instantly acknowledges every incoming customer request, so customers know their message has been received.
- When a customer replies to a conversation that was already marked as closed, Hiver automatically reopens it and moves it back into the active queue. This ensures follow-ups never get lost, and agents can continue helping the customer without starting a new thread or missing context.
“With Hiver, we finally have a system that scales with us. Automations and assignments run quietly in the background, so the team can focus on resolving issues—not managing inboxes.” — Lemi Orhan Ergin, Craftgate
3. Integrations to keep the team aligned
As part of their workflow, the team integrated Hiver with Slack to speed up technical escalations. When a support agent flags a conversation that needs engineering help, the on-call engineer automatically gets a Slack notification. This alert links back to the conversation in Hiver. The engineer sees the full customer history right away and can jump in to resolve the issue without asking for context or switching tools.
4. Collaboration happens without switching tools
Instead of using Slack to discuss issues, the team now relies on Hiver’s notes and @mention feature. Support agents and engineers leave updates and tag teammates right beside the query without switching tools.
As Lemi points it out, “If it’s about a specific customer conversation, we use Hiver all the time now,”
5. Templates bring speed and consistency to replies
Even though 80–90% of customer conversations are unique, Craftgate still faces recurring requests like onboarding queries or payment flow clarifications. To save time, the team uses response Templates in Hiver for these similar types of responses The Templates keep the tone consistent and let agents respond faster without rewriting the same messages each time.
6. Smarter handling of agent availability
Previously, the team had no way to track who was free to take new requests. Now, agents can mark themselves Unavailable when stepping away for longer periods, so new requests don’t route to them. For short breaks, other team members can now monitor their Shared Inbox (support@craftgate.io) and respond as needed. The result is smooth handoffs and steady response times even during busy hours.
Results: Faster responses, clearer ownership, and measurable savings
After switching to Hiver, Craftgate built a faster, more predictable support process. The team now saves time, avoids manual effort, and handles every customer interaction with clarity. What was once a single unorganized inbox, now runs as a structured system powered by automation.
1. Clear visibility and no missed emails
Hiver’s Round-Robin feature automatically routes each new request to an available agent. Before Hiver, the team used to miss up to 50 inquiries some days. Now, with over 700 conversations routed each month, every request gets a timely response.
2. Automations save 15+ hours a month
The team set up more than 400 Automation rules to close automated bank messages, reopen customer follow-ups, and alert engineers for technical issues. These Automations save over 15 hours a month, allowing agents to focus on complex queries.
3. Templates ensure speed and consistency
The team uses 49 templates for common questions, like onboarding steps or payment clarifications. They help agents reply faster and keep the tone consistent. On average, this saves about two hours a month and cuts response times by almost 20%.
4. Organized conversations through triaging
Craftgate uses over 4,000 labels to categorize similar issues, flag priorities, and track recurring problems. This structure helps the team manage requests about 35% faster than before, saving around 72 hours every month.
5. Collaboration that keeps everyone aligned
Agents and engineers now use notes and @mention feature to discuss updates or doubts right beside the customer query. With over 300 notes added so far, the team saves about 12 hours a month and keeps all updates linked to the right conversation.
6. Efficient Integrations to avoid manual follow-up
Two on-call engineers help the support team with technical queries. So when a technical issue comes in, Hiver automatically triggers a Slack alert through its integration. With this feature, Craftgate has roughly 24 hours monthly in manual coordination and follow-ups.
7. 130+ hours saved monthly overall
With features like Automations, Templates, triaging, and collaboration, Craftgate now saves more than 130 hours each month.
“Hiver has turned customer support into an exact, measurable process. We know who owns what, how long it takes to respond, and where to improve next. That visibility changed how our entire team works.”
Lemi Orhan Ergin
Co-founder & Technical Lead
Looking ahead: Exploring Hiver AI and Automations
Craftgate plans to build on its progress by making support even smarter and more data-driven. The team plans to use skill-based routing so complex issues go to senior agents while new members handle simpler ones. They also plan to get more control over agent availability and expand analytics to track workload patterns and team performance more deeply.
Next, they want to bring in Hiver’s AI features to automatically triage conversations, surface insights, and predict recurring issues. They also plan to integrate Hiver with Confluence so the team can share solutions and learnings more easily.
“ In the next phase, we will focus more on AI intelligence—seeing trends, predicting issues, and improving the process before customers even ask.” — Lemi Orhan Ergin, Craftgate
For Craftgate, Hiver has become the backbone of customer communication. By bringing communication, automation, and accountability together in one unified platform, they’ve built a system that scales naturally as they grow.
As Lemi puts it:
“Our goal isn’t just faster replies—it’s smarter support. Hiver gave us the structure to get there.”
