“Hiver offers all the core functionalities of a typical shared mailbox – ability to assign emails, add contextual notes for co-workers, automatic detection of duplicate responses, email templates, and basic automations”
Hiver, a shared inbox solution for teams helps users overcome the need for helpdesk by making collaboration easier on Gmail. In an interview, Niraj Ranjan Rout, co-founder & CEO, Hiver discusses how the platform is useful and helping people overcome communication and collaboration challenges.
Hiver is a shared inbox solution for teams. Hiver transforms Gmail into a collaboration platform by enabling teams to share group emails like support@, invoices@ and info@ with their co-workers. This ensures teammates don’t have to use forwards and CCs to collaborate. Hiver offers all the core functionalities of a typical shared mailbox – ability to assign emails, add contextual notes for co-workers, automatic detection of duplicate responses, email templates, and basic automations.
The shared inbox solution eliminates the need for function-specific customer communication solutions like a helpdesk – by helping teams manage group email communication right within Gmail.
The only tech requirement is that the team in question would be using G Suite for work as Hiver works on top of Gmail.
The lockdown has resulted in communication and collaboration challenges for businesses. Being an email collaboration platform, Hiver takes care of these challenges to a large extent and makes up for the lack of face-to-face communication.
Hiver does this by helping teams manage and collaborate over queries arriving inside shared inboxes like info@, support@ and help@. Irrespective of where everyone is located, teams can sync up on daily tasks and have clarity on what every team member should be working on. Emails can be assigned as tasks and tracked in real-time till the point of resolution.
Having quick discussions with your colleagues is also simple – all you have to do is leave them a note next to an email thread, instead of sending another internal email or pinging them on a messaging app. When teams are working from home, this is useful as it’s not possible to walk up to your colleague’s desk and coordinate on tasks.
And in times like this when some teams would be handling critical requests, Hiver can ensure that everyone has visibility into these queries – who is working on what, how many critical requests are yet to be resolved, and more. With this, teams don’t have to rely on constant back and forth messages to get work done.
Most of the important deals we were working on are moving as expected, as everyone understands that this is a transient phase, and the world will bounce back from this. In some cases, the progress has been a bit slower because of staff unavailability issues at the prospects’ end, but things have been moving forward.
At the same time, we have seen that a lot of our customers that depended on people visiting their premises, like stores, restaurants and spas, are going through a difficult period. We have been trying to do our best to support them with friendly payment terms.
Customers need ways for teams to collaborate better, now more than ever before. While video communication is a big part of collaboration, the problem actually touches every area where people are working together. It spans from planning a feature release, to supporting customers. It’s really important for teams working remotely to be able to collaborate effectively to help their customers, and that is what we help them with.
