How Noble Schools saves 50+ hours a week and manages 5,000+ HR conversations seamlessly

About Noble Schools

Noble Schools is a nonprofit that operates 17 high schools and one middle school in Chicago, serving over 12,000 students. Founded in 1999, Noble was built on principles of strong leadership, data-driven decision-making, and accountability. With a mission to combat education inequity, the organization consistently achieves a 99% college acceptance rate for its seniors every year.

We spoke to Chase Espinoza-Johnson who has been with Noble Schools for over 15 years and now leads HR operations. 

Challenges: Scaling HR operations during peak season

The HR team at Noble Schools supports 18 campuses, overseeing payroll, onboarding, recruitment, employee relations, and faculty benefits. Before Hiver, all HR requests flowed into Google Groups set up as Collaborative Inboxes, and the team relied on color-coded Gmail labels to track ownership.

This system quickly became unmanageable. With no clear way to route queries or monitor progress, requests slipped through the cracks. They already handled close to 2,000 requests a month, and during peak season — such as onboarding in August, query volumes spiked by 500%. The setup simply couldn’t keep up.

Key challenges included:

• Missed deadlines and legal exposure: Accidental archival of student emails caused requests to go unresolved and created legal risks.
  
• Poor SLA performance: Without a system in place, 48 hour response time SLAs were often missed.
  
• Low employee satisfaction scores: Staff reported frustration with delayed responses and inconsistent service quality.

Chase recalled the limitations vividly:

With so many glaring issues in Google Groups’ Collaborative Inbox setup, Chase began exploring other options to streamline HR communication.

He first tried HappyFox, since Noble’s IT department already used it successfully. The team ended the trial quickly after discovering major issues. HappyFox’s ticket-based design created confidentiality risks: even after HR removed staff from a thread, the system kept sending them ticket summaries. This exposed sensitive employee information to unintended recipients — a risk the HR team couldn’t afford.

Chase summarized the concern:

Other Gmail-integrated tools failed as well. They didn’t restrict replies to the intended recipients, exposing sensitive HR information to the wrong audience.

The shortcomings of these systems slowed responses, left the team disorganized, and eroded employee trust. With thousands of staff relying on timely HR support, Noble needed a secure, reliable, and scalable solution to modernize its operations.

Discovering and implementing Hiver

As one of his first projects after stepping into HR leadership, Chase set out to better support HR operations through better collaboration.

He evaluated multiple tools but found most either exposed confidential information or failed to give HR full control over who saw sensitive messages. Hiver stood out because it was native to Gmail, so the team could adopt it with little training, and it was designed with security and accountability at its core. Even without purchasing Hiver’s HIPAA package, its framework reassured Chase that HR correspondence would stay restricted to the intended recipients.

Once Noble selected Hiver, the rollout was swift. The HR team replaced their old color-coded Gmail labels with six structured Shared Inboxes — payroll, benefits, general HR, credentials, leaves, and other HR communications. Every request now had a clear home, and every specialist gained immediate visibility into what needed attention.

Chase highlighted why this mattered:

Solution: Enabling faster, more reliable HR support

Noble Schools adopted Hiver to replace its unscalable, color-coded Gmail system with structured Shared Inboxes — and in the process, completely reshape how its HR team works. Every feature they use today addresses a real challenge the team faced before — from misplaced requests to missed SLAs to gaps in accountability.

Automating query routing saved hours everyday

Before Hiver, all employee requests – payroll questions, benefits queries, and other onboarding requests – would arrive in the general HR inbox. Staff wasted hours forwarding messages manually. In fact, Chase recalled how an HR generalist once spent half his day introducing employees to the right HR partner.

But with Hiver, this has changed. Chase’s team could now set up automations to route these repetitive tasks. Let’s find out how:

They made use of Hiver’s Custom Objects feature to automatically route queries by mapping the campus domain to the right HR partner. For instance, Custom Objects let you sync customer emails and domains with their account manager from your CRM into Hiver. With this mapping in place, you can create a single automation rule to auto-assign any email from that domain or address directly to the right account manager. This ensures all emails from a given customer always land with their owner, without manual intervention

This way, Noble Schools eliminated manual sorting and the need for multiple, repetitive automations.

• Every type of HR request now lands in a dedicated Shared Inbox instead of landing in a single cluttered inbox. Payroll questions, for example, used to arrive in the general HR inbox, where they often left unattended until someone manually forwarded them to a specialist. Using Hiver’s rerouting rules, these queries now skip the general inbox entirely and go straight to the payroll Shared Inbox, where payroll specialists can address them immediately.
  
• Chase also set up rules so that any query mentioning words like “paycheck” or “benefits” was automatically triaged as a priority and routed to the right person immediately.

These changes relieved the HR team from repetitive tasks and gave them back four hours every day.

Collaborating without messy side threads

Collaboration in the old Gmail setup meant long email chains or side conversations that often got lost. With Hiver, the team is able to work together on requests effortlessly. Let’s see how:

• With Hiver’s Notes and @mention feature, HR managers can add internal comments right beside the employee request thread. If a detail is missing, they can tag the right teammate to fill them in. And when similar cases come up later, the team can revisit those notes as a reference. This eliminates finding context across multiple siloed systems and enhances collaboration
  
• Hiver’s Collision Alerts show in real time if someone else is already drafting a reply. This prevents duplicate or conflicting responses and ensures employees receive clear, consistent communication from HR.

This built-in collaboration helps Chase coach his team in the moment, instead of after the fact, and keeps sensitive cases on track.

• Delivering faster, more consistent responses

With 2,000 and growing staff relying on support from the HR team, consistency matters as much as speed. Hiver helps the team deliver both:

• Chase’s team maintains 38 templates to answer recurring queries, ensuring employees receive clear, uniform responses.
  
• Automations and triaging feature categorize queries by topic, ensuring the team can prioritize effectively.
  

With these features in place, the HR team now consistently meets its two-business-day SLA – a target that was often missed earlier due to poor visibility into employee requests.

• Using Analytics to drive accountability and staffing decisions

Hiver gave Noble’s HR team visibility into their workload and performance. Chase now monitors SLA breaches, first-response times, and ticket resolution in real time — and uses that data for coaching in one-on-one meetings.

When annual onboarding created a 500% surge in query volume, Hiver’s workload distribution dashboard gave Chase the evidence he needed to request a temporary staff member. Hiver makes CSAT scores immediately actionable, tying them directly to accountability and recognition.

• Negative scores trigger instant manager review and coaching. Whenever a low rating comes in, Hiver immediately notifies the staff member’s coach, who reviews the conversation and addresses it in the next one-on-one.
  
• Positive feedback is celebrated in team meetings and used for shoutouts or even bonuses.

Harnessing AI to triage and accelerate support

Beyond automations and templates, AI features in Hiver give the HR team an extra edge in handling high volumes of queries.

• AI Sentiment Analysis flags messages with a negative tone, so Chase can step in quickly to de-escalate issues before they escalate. This ensures urgent queries never sit unnoticed in the queue.
  
• AI Compose and Summarizer, which the team recently enabled, provide smart drafts and quick overviews of long threads. While still early in adoption, these tools promise to cut down the time needed to process and respond to complex queries.
  
• Together, these AI-driven features act as a triage layer, helping the team focus their attention where it matters most.
  

Chase summed it up this way:

Impact: Faster payroll, fewer errors, happier staff

The results of adopting Hiver are clear: more time saved, higher accuracy in processing payroll, higher staff satisfaction, and the ability to handle thousands of conversations without missing a beat.

• 10 hours saved weekly through Automations: Routing, introductions, and reminders run without manual effort, freeing the HR team to focus on higher-priority tasks.
  
• 50+ hours saved overall each week: Features like Notes, AI Triaging, Shared Drafts, and Collision Alerts reduce duplication, side conversations and improve collaboration.
  
• 5,000+ conversations handled seamlessly: Even with a 500% spike in volume of queries during onboarding and payroll season, the team stayed on top of every request.
  
• 80% faster query resolutions: Issues that once took 10 hours to resolve now take just 2 hours, allowing the team to meet strict payroll deadlines without stress.
  
• 17% jump in staff satisfaction: Customer satisfaction scores rose from 2.9 to 3.4 (on a 4-point scale) across all staff surveys, reflecting faster responses and more consistent service.
  
• 100% SLA compliance: Automated reminders and SLA tracking help the team reliably meet their two-business-day response commitment, reducing legal and compliance risks.
  
• Data-backed staffing decisions: Workload Analytics provided the evidence Chase needed to secure a temporary staff member, ensuring the team could stay responsive during peak season.
  

Hiver turned Noble’s HR operation into a more efficient, accountable, and data-driven function, enabling the team to serve staff better during their busiest times.

Looking Forward: Expanding Automation, AI, and team adoption

Noble Schools’ HR team has already seen significant gains from Hiver, but Chase has a clear vision for further expanding its role.

• Building a Knowledge Base: The team has started building its own internal Knowledge Base using Hiver. The goal is to turn it into a self-service resource where employees can find answers on their own, which should gradually reduce query volume.
• Automating routing of unemployment claims with Zapier: HR receives around 10 “unemployment claims” every morning, all currently routed to Chase for manual reassignment. He plans to connect Hiver with Zapier so the system can scan claim details against a historic staff list and automatically route them to the right HR partner.
  
• Integrating personal inboxes: As staff often bypass Shared Inboxes once they know their HR partner, they shift valuable conversations into personal inboxes. Chase noted that Hiver tracks SLAs reliably, but once messages move outside the platform, the team loses the ability to measure response times or preserve a complete history. This gap limits SLA monitoring and makes coaching or audits more difficult.
  
  Chase plans to automate routing of support tickets from personal inboxes to shared inboxes so that the HR team captures every interaction in one place. This change will let them track SLAs consistently and search past conversations whenever needed.
  
• Exploring more AI capabilities: While AI Sentiment Analysis already helps Chase prioritize urgent issues, the team has recently enabled AI Compose and AI Summarizer. Chase sees potential for AI to make drafting and handling large volumes of messages even faster.

To sum up, for Noble Schools, Hiver has become far more than a shared inbox. It has modernized how the HR team manages support by bringing structure, visibility, and accountability. What once felt overwhelming and error-prone is now organized and trackable, allowing Chase and his team to serve staff faster, with greater confidence and consistency.