Fireco saves 114 hours a month by unifying email, live chat, and WhatsApp with Hiver

Fireco at a glance

For more than 25 years, Fireco has built smart fire safety solutions that help schools, hospitals, offices, and entertainment venues across the UK meet safety standards.The company designs and manufactures fire door closers and retainers, wireless alert systems, and cloud-based tools that make compliance easy, along with installing and certifying fire doors. This lets customers manage every part of fire safety—from equipment to inspection—under one trusted partner.

William Ellick, Fireco’s IT and Support Manager, oversees both technology and customer support. His mandate: to empower Fireco’s teams with the right systems to collaborate effectively and respond quickly to customer requests.

The challenge: Managing queries through multiple channels

Fireco’s support team is small but is an integral part of their business. On a typical day, they handle 10–20 customer conversations, most of which are product- related. At first, the workload seemed steady and manageable, with small spikes during new product launches. But as William Ellick settled into his role, he began noticing gaps and deeper issues. The team wasn’t struggling with volume, it was struggling with visibility, structure, and scattered tools.

Here’s what stood out:

● No strict SLAs, but urgency was critical: The team aimed to respond to a query within a working day. But in the absence of a central platform, they lacked visibility to track progress or ensure consistency.

● Shared Inbox limitations: Fireco’s team used Google Groups to handle customer queries. This caused overlap between agents, with no clear visibility into who owned a conversation.

● Fragmented channels: Customers reached out by email, Live Chat, and WhatsApp, but each channel was in a separate tool. For instance, Live Chat was in a standalone app, and WhatsApp was tied to field engineers’ personal numbers.

Why Fireco chose Hiver?

Fireco explored several customer communication tools but found that many required agents to work outside Gmail or lacked the flexibility they needed. Hiver stood out because it operates natively within Gmail and consolidates every customer channel in one place.

The team implemented Hiver quickly and with minimal disruption. To begin with, Fireco’s team:

● Created Shared Inboxes for Support, Sales, and General Contact.

● Enabled collision alerts to avoid overlapping replies.

● Adopted Hiver Live Chat, which automatically follows business hours and routes chats correctly.

● Centralised WhatsApp communication into a single shared channel, within the same workspace.

Bringing every channel together with Hiver

What started as a simple way to unify customer queries has become the backbone of Fireco’s support — a modern customer service platform that helps the team collaborate easily, resolve issues faster, and stay fully aligned.

With Hiver’s platform, Fireco’s team now enjoys:

1. Clear ownership and seamless collaboration

Previously, Google Groups made it difficult to track who was responsible for each enquiry. With Hiver’s Shared Inboxes (eg: support@, sales@, or contact@) every request is assigned to the right person, and agents can see the entire conversation history in one place, making collaboration straightforward and preventing missed updates.

2. Preventing overlap and duplicate replies

Earlier, Fireco’s team had no easy way to see if someone else was already replying to a customer.

Now, Hiver’s collision alerts feature solves this instantly. When two agents open the same conversation, a small alert appears in real time right beside the customer query.

3. Real-time chat that speeds up customer responses

Fireco had a separate chat tool for website visitors, which required agents to log in manually and switch tabs to reply. This often caused delays or missed chats when the right person wasn’t available.

With Hiver Live Chat, conversations now appear directly in a single tool. It is routed to the right agent who sees the chat instantly and can respond in seconds. Most inquiries are product-related, and agents can resolve them on the spot or move the discussion to email or phone if it needs more detail.

Hiver also syncs chat availability with business hours, so customers only see the chat option when agents are online. This keeps expectations clear and ensures no one waits for a reply after hours.

4. Speeding up troubleshooting in WhatsApp

Previously, WhatsApp conversations were scattered across field engineers’ personal phones. This made it difficult for the wider team to view messages, share context, or step in to help. Important details were often lost, and diagnosing issues took longer than necessary.

Now, Fireco runs WhatsApp entirely through a shared, team-managed channel in Hiver. When customers send messages, everyone in support can see the conversation and collaborate instantly. Customers often share photos or short videos of devices in action. In many cases, the team can even resolve issues remotely.

Here’s an interesting example of how Hiver’s WhatsApp feature helped Will & team:

A nightclub contacted the team about an acoustic alarm device that kept triggering during events. After a quick video shared via WhatsApp, Fireco identified that the wrong model had been installed and recommended the correct version. This immediately avoids unnecessary downtime and directly informs the engineer about the equipment he would be installing.

5. Simple and quick internal collaboration

Context often got lost in long threads or internal messages exchanged in other communication tools. Team members had to manually remind one another about updates or recheck earlier messages to stay aligned.

Now, Fireco uses Hiver’s Tags to categories related conversations and Notes to add quick context or @mention in the right teammate just beside a query. This way, when an issue needs input from another colleague or even a different department, the concerned person can see the discussion and jump in without confusion.

6. Faster and consistent response through templates

Fireco’s library of response templates had grown cluttered over the years. With Hiver, the team now uses a streamlined set of up-to-date templates – making responses quicker to draft and ensuring communication stays consistent across all channels.

7. Performance monitoring with real time data

Before Hiver, supervisors relied on informal checks to understand performance. Now, they can monitor daily volume, response times, and trends directly in Hiver’s dashboard, giving them clarity and confidence without needing additional analytics tools.

Benefits & results: Faster, unified and more collaborative support

Hiver helped Fireco bring every customer interaction into one place, giving the team complete visibility across email, Live Chat, and WhatsApp. The result — faster responses, fewer manual tasks, and more confident collaboration.

● 114 hours saved monthly by managing all customer communication in Hiver, freeing time for higher-value work.

● Near-instant responses through Live Chat, cutting first-response times by up to 80%.

● 8+ hours saved monthly by diagnosing and resolving issues remotely through WhatsApp, avoiding on-site visits.

● 1–2 hours saved each month with collision alerts, preventing duplicate replies.

● 2 hours saved monthly using 68 standardised templates for quick, consistent replies.

● 100% visibility across all shared inboxes, ensuring every inquiry has a clear owner and smooth handoff between teams.

In total, Fireco saves nearly three work weeks every month — time the team reinvests into providing faster, more accurate support for customers. William says,

What’s next for Fireco with Hiver

● Fireco continues to see opportunities to expand how it uses Hiver as the business grows. The team plans to introduce additional WhatsApp channels for different arms of the company, starting with its Fire Door division, so that each business line can serve its customers more directly.

● They are also working through a template cleanup project. Once the library is streamlined, Fireco intends to enable customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, capturing structured feedback to improve service quality further.

● William sees potential in Hiver’s evolving capabilities. The flexibility to add automation, surveys, or AI support later gives Fireco confidence that Hiver will scale with them.