Crafting a better work experience

Texting has been around for almost 30 years. It is the most popular form of communication in the entire world. It's hard to estimate, but some sources say between 4.2 and 5 billion people around the world have access to SMS messages. Compared to 3.9 billion email users and 2 billion WhatsApp users.

Not only that, but it's also one of the most effective tools of communication. According to TechJury, SMS messages have:

• 90% open rate.
• 90% of SMS are read within 3 minutes.
• 98% of US smartphone users text regularly.
• 80% of people use text messaging for business.
• SMS open rates are nearly 5 times that of email.
• 6 in every 10 consumers tend to have a positive impression of companies that contact them via text messages.

I think it is safe to say that texting is a big deal.

Ok, but what's an SMS shared inbox?

An SMS inbox is like an email inbox. It's a place where texts from one or multiple phone numbers are received, stored, and managed. An SMS shared inbox adds a layer of collaboration to the inbox concept. This means SMS from a single number can be seen and assigned to multiple people who access them from their own devices with their own accounts.

But do I need this for my business?

Most likely yes. Just reread the bullet points above. Texting is widely adopted and liked by people. Whether you're an ecommerce, work in sales, or rent camera equipment, customers will inevitably contact you and you will also need to contact them.

SMS can be used in a passive way, by letting customers send questions, ask to fix issues, give feedback -- in order words, for customer support. But you can also proactively engage with them by using SMS as a new channel to distribute marketing content. According to the previously mentioned source, SMS marketing campaigns perform 7 times better than email marketing campaigns.

But imagine receiving dozens or even hundreds of texts per day from customers. You need something more robust than a flimsy shared inbox. In order to successfully leverage this new channel of communication, you need to be able to categorize messages, distribute workload, share information, etc.

I suggest you have a look at our shared mailbox best practices article to learn more about the best ways to efficiently manage a shared inbox.

Missive: The SMS shared inbox tool

Missive is a team inbox and chat app that helps businesses stay on top of all their communication channels in a single app. All while enabling collaboration between coworkers. In Missive you can receive emails, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp messages, SMS, and more! SMS can be received and sent via Twilio, Dialpad, or SignalWire SMS.

One of the best features is the ability to collaborate inside SMS. For example, if a customer sends a text message, and you don't know how to respond, you can @mention another team member and instantly give them access and ask for help.

You can also create team inboxes and assign certain SMS to specialized teams. Maybe a customer has a sales question. Then you can assign it to the Sales team manually or through automated rules.

And you know how there's are always some questions that come through every day, multiple times per day...? With Missive's canned responses, you can quickly respond to popular SMS questions in seconds!

Pro tipUse the shortcut: Shift + Command + O to quickly open the responses popup

Nice! How do I set up SMS?

Twilio

Step 1

Create a free Twilio account and buy a Twilio phone number.

Twilio's Console site allows users to quickly search for and provision phone numbers for your company. You can filter phone numbers based on location, phone number type, capabilities, and more from their Console.

Here's an in-depth guide to the phone number purchasing process. Or, if you prefer, you can also do a third-party phone number porting to Twilio.

You will be able to consult your number(s) in the Phone Numbers option under the Super Network category, which can be accessed by clicking on the sidebar's 3-dotted button.

Step 2

In the Twilio console, go to your dashboard and copy these two critical numbers: the Account SID and the Auth Token.

Step 3

Open Missive and go to Accounts > Add Account > SMS powered by Twilio

Select whether this SMS account will be shared with a team, like the Support team or if it will be a personal one.

Enter the Account SID, the Auth Token, and your Twilio Phone Number.

Step 4

Start engaging with customers via texts!

Dialpad

Step 1

In Missive, open your settings, click Integrations > Add integration > Dialpad then follow the instructions.

Step 2

Configure the Dialpad SMS inbox and Dialpad call logs by openning your settings, Accounts > Add account > Dialpad then follow the instructions.

SignalWire SMS

Step 1

Create a SignalWire account and get a SignalWire phone number.

Step 2

In your SignalWire dashboard copy these fields Project ID, Space Url and API Token, plus your phone number.

Step 3

Open Missive and go to Accounts > Add Account > SMS powered by SignalWire

Select whether this SMS account will be shared with a team, like the Support team or if it will be a personal one.

Enter the Space URL, the Project ID, the API token, and your SignalWire Phone Number.

Five years ago, we launched Missive, an innovative but somewhat hard-to-define email client to the world. Fast-forward to last week when we reached US$1M in annual recurring revenue (ARR)!

I believe our journey to get there is fascinating for a couple of reasons:

• We’re self-funded.
• We’re a small team of three co-founders and one employee.
• We built a cloud-based collaborative email client (a.k.a. it’s not easy).
• We never spent a dime on marketing.
• We’re incredibly resilient.

On being self-funded

Missive is bootstrapped, meaning we never took a dime from investors. We funded it with the cash flow of our other business.

One doesn’t start a new email client without some solid finance and runway. The graveyards are full of email-related startups. We knew that.

The long story is I met my co-founders at the coworking space I had opened in Quebec City to meet other like-minded people. They were starting a web development studio and I was learning to code by doing fun/creative little projects and experimenting on different business ideas.

I got one of those ideas after organizing a game jam festival. As an organizer I was designing and printing name badges for all the attendees, judges, sponsors, etc. The process was really painful. I envisioned a Vistaprint-like service for name badges. I started building it alone, then quickly asked my now co-founders to work with me on the project. ConferenceBadge.com launched in 2013 and promptly got to profitability.

A year and a half in, it generated enough revenue for us to go full-time on the product. Having said that, we were not excited by the idea of working exclusively on an online name badge service. We brainstormed on problems we encountered while building Conference Badge and Etienne got the idea of building a collaborative email draft editor to ease support. This idea quickly morphed into a full-fledged collaborative email client; Missive was born.

It took one year to build the prototype, one more year to start charging for it, one more year to have a few real customers, one more year to get to profitability, and finally one more year to get to $1M ARR.

We could never have afforded to work on Missive for so long without CB paying the bills. Life is like a role-playing game; you build up.

 PODCAST 🎙 Listen to my interview with Courtland Allen of IndieHackers (2017) where we discuss the early days of Conference Badge and Missive.

On being a small team

In the past five years, the team never grew past four full-time members.

Here are the roles we play:

Etienne and I are fluent in 90% of the codebase and mainly focus on feature development.

Rafael, on the other hand, is the master of all code. He reviews every line that gets committed to the different projects. He makes sure the servers are healthy and that the databases survive the billions of queries they run per day.

Etienne uses his infinite web technology knowledge to offer a fast and secure HTML/JS experience on all platforms (Electron, Cordova, Web).

Luis designed the public website, maintains its content, writes blog posts and does demo sessions with customers.

I personally manage salaries, expenses, office, accounting, and long-term financial planning. These tasks usually take a small percentage of my time.

On most days, customer support represents ~33% of our working hours. This has not changed despite our growth. We spend a lot of time making the app easier to use and improve the documentation to decrease requests per customer.

We are quite proud of the level of support we offer; our customers are often amazed at the speed at which we can help and solve their problems, especially customers coming from competitor products.

We believe we can grow by another ~100% with only the four of us. Being small allows us to be flexible on product decisions. We are first and foremost product builders, not managers, and we want to stay that way for as long as possible.

On building a cloud-based collaborative email application

One reason it took so long for us to get to profitability, at least in our experience, compared to our other product, is the complexity of the space we chose to play in.

Building a collaborative email client is challenging and rewarding, but the list of things you need to tackle before you have a minimally usable product is infinite.

You need to balance the time invested in getting on par with existing products and innovative work. It is no surprise most of our competitors have raised tens to hundreds of millions of dollars; the space is hard.

Up to this point, most of our architectural decisions have weathered the test of time and growth.

One of the craziest decisions we took early on was building and deploying a single JavaScript/HTML codebase on all platforms. We knew it was impossible to bootstrap an email client on all major platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and web) with multiple codebases at our team size. A mobile email client in JavaScript was the only way we could compete. Not only did we succeed at creating a blazing fast experience on phones, to our astonishment, Apple featured us multiple times on the App Store.

To this day, I believe this decision is the main reason we can compete with massively funded startups. We refused three acquisition offers from unicorn startups; they were all interested in our skills and experience shipping one codebase on all platforms

 PODCAST 🎙 Listen to Etienne’s interview with Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski from Syntax (2019) where they discuss the pros and cons of building desktop and mobile apps with a single codebase.

On finding customers

Our initial users were mostly early tech-adopters looking for a new innovative cross-platform email client. We found those by posting on different tech discovery communities like ProductHunt. Those early and mostly solo users wanted a different set of features than what would ultimately become our real paid customers: small and midsize businesses.

This tricked us for a while in a race to build more and more features not so consistent with our vision. For instance, we started offering read tracking as it was one of the most requested features of early adopters. Many users upgraded to a paid plan for this alone; they weren’t interested in any of the collaborative features of the app. Those soloish users were churning at a far greater rate than real teams and they were requiring far more customer support/server resources per dollar earned. At some point, this reality sank in and we decided to focus entirely on teams. We ditched read tracking as it was a magnet for such misaligned customers. Our churn rate plummeted. The hard-learned lesson: have the courage to say no.

We never spent a dime on marketing; the cost of customer acquisition in our space is crazy high. We can’t compete with subsidized VC-backed companies.

We charge less than our competitors. They have higher prices, usually negotiable for a one-year agreement. After their deal expires, the price increases significantly; this is when their customers look for an alternative and find us. We let VC-backed startups build the market with big advertising spending, and we wait patiently with a better and more affordable product.

On being resilient

We are conservative in most of our decisions. To keep innovating as a small team for the long term, we are frugal with our time and money.

We’ve always made decisions to ensure we’d still be able to allocate 66% of our time to work on the product.

Our workdays are not much different from what they were five years ago.

We don’t set goals or long-term road maps. Daily, we look at what seems to be a good use of our time, and we do it, period. Long-term planning is tiresome and always looks pretty useless for a team like us.

What’s the takeaway from our last five years at Missive? Resilience, our capacity to rebound from whatever hardship we face, to look at our work with fresh eyes, and stay motivated.

Our story is not one of risk taking, it’s one of consistent work. It’s my belief that the compounding effect of our work will rival the one from VC-backed startups shooting in all directions. Be resilient.

Customer feedback is an integral part of a customer-centric business strategy. Along with excellent customer service, getting feedback from the people who use your product/service is key to achieve customer success.

In this blog post, we share with you four ways you can use Missive to easily acquire, manage and store customer feedback.

We will be relying mostly on User Action Rules. These are triggered by an action defined by the user. For example, you could create a rule that sends a conversation to the trash whenever you type trash in the comment bar.

Let's get started!

Get social reviews

Send links to multiple review platforms in under 3 seconds. How?

1. Create a Response

Here's the copy if you want to use it. Make sure to add the logos of the platforms you use and add the respective links.

Hey {{ recipient.first_name | default: "there" | confirm }}!

Thank you for trying out our product. If you want to share your experience with others, you might want to review us on:

G2 - Facebook - TrustPilot - Yelp - Google

Cheers!

2. Create a Comment User Action rule for #reviews

Now, when you type "#reviews" in the comment bar, the Platform reviews canned response will be sent automatically to the customer.

Manage Email Customer Feedback

With Missive you can easily manage customer feedback received in emails. You can even have it sent to a spreadsheet in order to categorize it and put words into action. This can be done with Zapier webhooks and Google Sheets.

Although it might sound like a daunting project, it's not. Let me show you.

Create a Zapier account and click on Create Zap.

Select "Webhook" as the trigger > "Catch hook" as the Trigger Event > Continue

To test the trigger, open your Missive settings > Create a "New comment" rule > Set the condition Text is "#feedback" > Add the webhook URL provided by Zapier

Add the comment "#feedback" to any email thread in Missive.

Go back to Zapier and click on Test. You should get something like this:

In the action menu, select "Google Sheets" > "Create Spreadsheet Row" as the Action event > Add your Google account > Continue

Note Before you continue creating the Zap, go to your Google Drive > Create a spreadsheet and add column names. It could be as simple as having two columns: Email and Feedback

Select your Drive > Select a spreadsheet > Select a Worksheet. In our spreadsheet, we have two columns: Email and Feedback. We are going to match them to the pertinent data from the webhook.

In this case, we want:

Email -> Latest Message From Field Address

Feedback -> Latest Message Preview

Test it and click on Turn on Zap.

From this point on, whenever you get customer feedback in an email, you can simply type "#feedback" in the comment bar and information will be sent seamlessly to the feedback spreadsheet.

Show satisfaction surveys in signature

Missive offers a powerful signature management system. With it, you can easily add customer satisfaction surveys to each of your teammates' signatures in just minutes.

The dynamic data comes from your team's editable member profiles. Some survey collection companies let you generate embeddable HTML code. In this case, you can copy the code and paste it into the managed signature editor.

You can also add custom field variables like in the example above. Learn more about managed signatures.

Implement proactive follow-ups

One of the most straightforward ways to stay in contact with a customer and to ensure a successful relationship is to follow up after a determined period of time. If you work in a sales environment, it's crucial to follow up on leads. Missive makes it easy for you.

You can create a Rule that snoozes all outgoing emails sent from your account that contains the label "Warm Lead".

You'll never miss the opportunity to close a deal!

Customers needing support prefer live chat over other methods of communication. It's got the personalized feel of a phone call and the accuracy of an email. Also, consumers are more likely to buy from a company that offers live chat support. That's a fact.

Small businesses could be hesitant about the idea of adding live chat to their websites. Will it generate a lot of extra work? More demanding customers? Will I lose focus on the other aspects of the company?

These are all real concerns, but with a proper deployment strategy, live chat can be a very powerful weapon and it's highly scalable. So how can small businesses implement this new channel of communication successfully?

Here are some of the best tips for a fruitful customer service in a small company:

1. Roll it out to a few select pages first

Instead of adding the live chat bubble to all pages at once and risk getting swamped with requests, do a selection of the pages where customers struggle the most. You might also want to consider this:

• If possible, offer live chat to paying customers only.
• For a sales-oriented live chat, display it only on your pricing page.
• For a technical-oriented live chat, display it in your documentation guides.

2. Set expectations and fulfill them

Don't start by offering 24/7 support. Your team will suffer and customers will be disappointed. It's better to start offering live chat during your business hours.

A good tip is to only show the bubble when someone from the team is online and open to respond to live requests. If you stick to this strategy customers will be happy because they know that if they can access the chat they will get help promptly.

I don't know about you, but when I use a company's live chat that says "We respond within 2 or 3 hours" I immediately feel disappointed. I'm not saying there's something wrong with not being able to offer immediate support, but if that's the case ask people to email you instead. A live chat should be… live.

3. Share the workload

In the case of small companies, I'm a firm believer in sharing the support workload amongst all coworkers. It's a great way to have contact with customers, take in observations, and make the product/service better.

Even if it's just a few hours per week you can get more valuable feedback from exchanging words with a customer than spending hours going through analytics or metrics.

It's also a good idea to pass a customer's case between coworkers as seamlessly as possible. This might be due to a shift ending or someone requiring other areas of expertise.

4. Prepare as much as possible

Chances are you already know which questions are asked the most. Maybe you already have an FAQ section on your website. Either way you should set up templates of these questions, so you can send them quickly.

This way you avoid losing time and focus your attention to more complex queries or other sales efforts.

Also, try to send links to help articles as much as possible. If you don't have a knowledgebase, build one as early as possible. It's one of the best investments you can make, support-wise.

5. Be cordial and transparent

This might sound obvious, but doing customer support is not always easy. Always greet people, be agreeable and show that you want to help.

If you don't have the answer to a question, simply say that you will follow-up by email. The same applies if you need time to fix a problem. It's best not to keep the customer waiting.

To learn more about delivering stellar customer support, read this post.

6. Use the right tool

Live chat tools abound. If you're depolying an omnichannel strategy, then look for a tool that allows centralizing all your communications into a single place, may that be email, live chat, SMS, etc. Missive is one of those tools.

We offer a live chat solution that is greatly suited for small companies looking to dip their toes into live support. You can add schedules, create automatic responses, send proloaded responses, share the workload automatically, and more. Oh, and if you have less than 200 active chats per month, it is free!

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Missive Chat can be added to any webpage. If you're using a CMS or ecommerce builder, be sure to check out our guides to set up live chats on them:

• How to add live chat to WordPress
• How to add live chat Shopify
• How to add live chat to Squarespace

Missive was built with privacy in mind. It's a fundamental part of our business, as it should be for every company dealing with people's communications. Honesty and transparency are also at the core of our values.

The above sounds nice and all, but actions speak louder than words. That's why we have created this blog post to answer some of the most frequently asked questions regarding Missive's reliability, privacy and security practices.

To kick things off, a few key points:

• Missive does not sell any kind of data to any third parties.
• All data stored in our database and cloud storage is encrypted at rest.
• Missive is fully GDPR compliant.
• We've successfully passed security audits by security firm Bishop Fox, as required for apps handling Google user data.

You can consult our full privacy and security policies.

Good, now let's answer some questions!

Can you access my emails?

Technically speaking, it would be false to claim we cannot read your emails. Missive imports your emails via IMAP like any email app does, and stores them in a database. This includes text content and attachments.

Storing this data in our own database is the technical foundation of a collaborative product like Missive. Thus, we naturally have access to the database that contains your emails in order to manage and maintain it in good shape for Missive to operate properly.

This is the same situation as with your main email provider (Gmail, Office 365, etc).

That said, only a few of our engineers have access to the database in question. Even for these people, getting to your actual email content is not trivial. We built internal tools that allow our engineers to do their daily job (eg. see what is going on in the system, number of emails processed, etc.) but none of these tools display email contents.

Needless to say, we are not in the business of scanning, sharing, or selling any of our users’ data. We never access a user’s data unless this user has specifically granted us permission and asked us to investigate a bug with their account, for instance.

Can people know if I've opened their emails?

No. Missive automatically blocks read trackers and 1x1 images to prevent senders from spying on what you do with their email. We currently block read trackers from these services.

Where are Missive's servers located?

Missive's servers are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). All our servers currently originate from the US East 1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS is used by companies and organizations such as Nasdaq, Netflix, the CDC, etc.

If you need a list of IP address ranges to whitelist on your server, you can use the following file provided by AWS:

https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

If I were to migrate Missive, I won't see you close shop in a year or two, right?

Definitely not. We are completely bootstrapped, meaning we don't depend on investors' whims or decisions. We control 100% of our company and we've been in the market for over 5 years. We've been cash positive and profitable for some years now. We enjoy a healthy and growing monthly revenue rate.

There are over 1000 organizations using Missive, including big names like Pipedrive and Buffer.

As a pioneer and key player in the collaborative email space, it's safe to say we're in for the long run.

Do you sell or share my data?

No. Never have, never will.

We don't even collect cookies or identifiable data points on our public website! Unlike most companies out there, who use this for website analytics and metrics. Not us.

Can I get a copy of my data?

Absolutely. As a GDPR-compliant company, you have the right to access, correct, export, and delete all personal data associated with your account.

To request any of the aforementioned actions, please contact us at privacy@missiveapp.com

How do I delete all data from Missive?

Please know this action cannot be undone.

1. Login to Missive
2. Go to your Organizations settings
3. Remove all members from your organization
4. Click the Billing tab, downgrade to the Free plan
5. Delete all your email accounts, if any
6. Delete all your integrations, if any
7. Delete your organization
8. Go to the Login & Security setting tab, enter the password if requested, scroll down, delete your Missive account

You will immediately be logged out of Missive with no means of logging back in.

Within 30 days, all traces of your Missive data and activity will be permanently deleted from our database, cloud storage, backups, and logs.

If you have any other questions regarding privacy, feel free to send us an email!

Sometimes you need to take particular actions for different groups of customers. Handling these exceptions can be difficult as your company grows. Without an automized system working on your behalf, it's easy to make mistakes.

With Missive, companies can create groups within their contact books. These are very useful tools for segmentation. But even more helpful is the ability to create workflows using these groups or individual contacts as conditions to trigger automatic actions.

It might sound a little cryptic. So let me break it down a little. Imagine you have a group of highly-select customers that require special attention and faster service. Instead of always having to be alert for when they contact you, with Missive, you can designate a group for them and then let it alert you when someone from this select cluster makes contact.

The previous is an example of our powerful contact-based rules. We're going to explore three scenarios (instructions included) on how you too can leverage this feature.

But first, let's learn how to create contact groups.

1. Click on your name
2. Go to Contacts

1. If you don't have one already, create a Contact Book.

1. Create a contact
2. Create and add a group

1. Repeat for other contacts

PROTIPYou can add contacts to a group directly from the email viewer. Click on the email address > Add to Contacts > Add Group

Scenario 1

Your top 20% of customers bring 80% of the revenue. You signed a strict Service Level Agreement and they expect the best treatment.

Group name: VIP customers

Actions: Notify Sales Team when they email + label as VIP + display 15 minute SLA post

Scenario 2

You're dipping your toes into the German market and you've hired Hans to help. He's bilingual, so he can answer emails in English and German. You need to have them translated automatically since you don't speak the language.

Group name: German customers

Actions: Assign messages to Hans + translate them to English using a webhook

Scenario 3

Your business (Company Inc) is consulting to the sales and legal teams at Acme Inc. Both teams email you to john@company.com. You need the lawyers' emails to be directed to your own legal team and forward a copy to another outsourced firm.

Group name: Acme Inc (Legal team) customers

Actions: Move messages to the Legal Team Inbox + forward them to the outsourced firm.

Bonus

Trash spam or undesired emails in the future by adding them to the contact groups Spammers.

Group name: Spammers

Actions: Trash emails

Managing leads and deals from an Excel sheet might work for a short period of time, but it's mostly a hack. What your company needs, no matter the size, is a CRM.

A CRM is a Customer Relationship Management tool, usually in the form of an app that allows companies to properly manage interactions with potential and current customers. Companies of all sizes, including small ones, benefit from integrating a CRM into their tool stack.

Options abound online. But we believe Pipedrive is one of the best out there. It's not just a CRM, it helps you, among other things:

• Manage leads and deals
• Track communications
• Automate tasks
• Generate insights and reports

How to manage leads and deals from my inbox?

In one word: Missive.

Missive is a team inbox and chat app that helps businesses stay on top of all their communication channels and projects in a single app. All while enabling collaboration between coworkers. Missive offers a Pipedrive integration that helps you bridge the gap between emails and your sales funnel!

Missive offers a great integration with Pipedrive that lets you see your contacts, deals, activities and notes right in the context of your Inbox! You can also create and edit them directly from Missive.

The integration will also let you quickly send received emails to your Pipedrive account with the Forward to Pipedrive action available on each email.

Do you need to discuss a deal in real-time? No problem, you can do that too using the chat feature in Missive!

How do you set up Pipedrive in Missive?

Step 1

Create a free Pipedrive account.

They offer multiple sign up options, like Gmail or LinkedIn sign in for example, or you can do it with an email and password.

Step 2

Open Missive and go to Settings > Integrations > Add integration > Pipedrive

A pop-up will open that will ask for your Pipedrive account and permission to access it.

Share the integration with your team if needed.

Step 3

You're ready to start adding contacts, deals, activities and notes from Missive!

Will changes reflect in Pipedrive?

Absolutely! Everything you create or edit in Missive will be visible and available in pipedrive.com in real-time.

Millions of entrepreneurs around the globe have leveraged the internet to increase sales. Now more than ever, current world events have driven many businesses to jump into the ecommerce world in a matter of months.

Shopify is one of the leaders in the ecommerce building space. They claim businesses using their service have generated over 200 billion USD in sales. It's amazing.

But let's not forget that having a medium where you can sell stuff is only half the battle. Providing quality customer support is just as important as offering a quality product.

In today's fast-paced world, customers expect fast, reliable service. With so much competition out there, failing to do so can result in decreased brand loyalty and fleeing customers.

In the online world, live chat is often the most effective channel of communication. According to eConsultancy:

Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone.

In other words, live chat makes for happier customers.

In this article, we will explain how you can add live chat to a Shopify ecommerce site.

Choosing a live chat service to add to Shopify

There are many options out there. But if you are part of a small/medium ecommerce team that is looking to collaborate around live chat, email, and other communication channels, then Missive is the way to go.

Missive Live Chat is powered by Twilio. Right off the bat, it is free, and you can have up to 200 active chats per month. After that, you will pay a low fee, starting at $0.03 for each additional one.

Setting up Missive Live Chat

Once you have created your Missive account, go to your Settings and click Accounts then Add account.

Select the Missive Live Chat option.

As we stated before, Missive Live Chat uses Twilio's Conversations API, so you must first sign up to Twilio. Monthly fees (after the 200 active chats per month) will be charged to your Twilio account.

Once you've signed up, you will have access to the dashboard, where you will be able to see two important pieces of information: your Account SID and Auth Token.

Back in Missive you can continue the process.

Missive is, above all, a tool to collaborate around different channels. You will be asked to choose whether you want the chats shared with teammates or not.

We suggest you choose the first option and share it in a Team Inbox. This will lead all incoming chats into a shared inbox where many teammates can assign cases to each other and work more efficiently.

After that, you will need to enter the Account SID and Auth Token from your Twilio account as well as a Chat service name.

Your live chat is almost ready to be plugged into Shopify.

Setting up Missive Live Chat in Shopify

It's very simple to install Missive Live Chat in Shopify.

STEP 1

Go to your Online Store Dashboard > Settings > Actions > Edit code

STEP 2

Click on the file theme.liquid that's inside the Layout folder.

STEP 3

Go back to Missive and copy the code snippet. You can find it in Settings > Accounts > Missive Chat > Setup > Code Snippet.

STEP 3

Go back to Shopify, and paste the code right before the </head> tag.

Congratulations! You now have a live chat on your website. But it's not in sync with the site's branding. Yet.

Customizing the live chat window

Inside the Missive Live Chat settings, you can:

• Change the main color
• Customize various messages such as welcome, help, error, title, etc.
• Change the position of the bubble
• Show online status
• Show avatars
• Show names
• Ask for name and/or email
• Require name and/or email
• Change the bubble messages
• Change the User Interface messages
• Identify and verify users
• And more

The widget is highly customizable. For all options, see the documentation.

Here's the final version of our chat bubble. It looks great, right?

Managing the live chat

Missive Live Chat is the perfect way to interact with visitors and users from your website without creating additional silos of communication.

Whenever someone sends a message through the live chat on your website, it will instantly appear in your Missive app, and like all other channels (email, SMS, social media messages), you decide where these messages land. You may choose for them to arrive in a Team Inbox or everyone's Inbox.

Missive Live Chat offers you fantastic features:

• Identify visitors & authenticate users
• One-to-many interactions
• Customizable widget
• Schedules
• File exchange
• Automation
• Read status
• Attach and display metadata
• Emojis

Go here to learn more about each feature.

We hope this article helped you add a live chat to your Shopify site.

Everyone has a website these days. How can you make yours stand out from the crowd? I think there are three principal elements; First, offer a great product. Second, create a beautiful website, and third, deliver outstanding customer support.

Squarespace is a website builder that allows people to easily create alluring websites in a short time and without any coding skills. They've distinguished themselves by their aesthetic pre-built templates that cater mostly to the creative industry. By building a website with them, you're on the right path to standing out from the crowd!

Now let's talk about customer service. In today's fast-paced world, customers expect fast, reliable service. With so much competition out there, failing to do so can result in decreased brand loyalty and fleeing customers.

In the online world, live chat is often the most effective channel of communication. According to eConsultancy:

Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone.

In other words, live chat = happier customers.

In this article, we will explain how you can add live chat to a Squarespace site.

Choosing a live chat service to add to Squarespace

There are many options out there. But if you are part of a small/medium team that is looking to collaborate around live chat, email, and other communication channels, then Missive is the way to go.

Missive Live Chat is powered by Twilio.  Right off the bat, it is free, and you can have up to 200 active chats per month. After that, you will pay a low fee, starting at $0.03 for each additional one.

Setting up Missive Live Chat

Once you have created your Missive account. Go to your Settings and click Accounts then Add account.

Select the Missive Live Chat option.

As we stated before, Missive Live Chat uses Twilio's Conversations API, so you must first sign up to Twilio. Monthly fees (after the 200 active chats per month) will be charged to your Twilio account.

Once you've signed up, you will have access to the dashboard, where you will be able to see two important pieces of information: your Account SID and Auth Token.

Back in Missive you can continue the process.

Missive is, above all, a tool to collaborate around different channels. You will be asked to choose whether you want the chats shared with teammates or not.

We suggest you choose the first option and share it in a Team Inbox. This will lead all incoming chats into a shared inbox where many teammates can assign cases to each other and work more efficiently.

After that, you will need to enter the Account SID and Auth Token from your Twilio account as well as a Chat service name.

Your live chat is almost ready to be plugged into Squarespace.

Setting up Missive Live Chat in Squarespace

It's quite easy to install Missive Live Chat in Squarespace.

STEP 1

Go to your Squarespace Dashboard > Settings > Advanced > Code Injection

STEP 2

Go back to Missive and copy the account id from the code snippet. You can find it in Settings > Accounts > Missive Chat > Setup > Code Snippet.

It looks like this number:

2846475-c2324-232344-235-dsfds34ffdf233

STEP 3

Go back to Squarespace and paste the code in the HEADER tag.

Congratulations! You now have a live chat on your website. But it's not in sync with the site's branding. Yet.

Customizing the live chat window

Inside the Missive Live Chat  settings, you can:

• Change the main color
• Customize various messages such as welcome, help, error, title, etc.
• Change the position of the bubble
• Show online status
• Show avatars
• Show names
• Ask for name and/or email
• Require name and/or email
• Change the bubble messages
• Change the User Interface messages
• Identify and verify users
• And more

The widget is highly customizable. For all options, see the documentation.

Here's the final version of our chat bubble. It looks great, right?

Managing the live chat

Missive Live Chat is the perfect way to interact with visitors and users from your website without creating additional silos of communication.

Whenever someone sends a message through the live chat on your website, it will instantly appear in your Missive app, and like all other channels (email, SMS, social media messages), you decide where these messages land. You may choose for them to arrive in a Team Inbox or everyone's Inbox.

Missive Live Chat offers you fantastic features:

• Identify visitors & authenticate users
• One-to-many interactions
• Customizable widget
• Schedules
• File exchange
• Automation
• Read status
• Attach and display metadata
• Emojis

Go here to learn more about each feature.

We hope this article helped you add a live chat to your Squarespace site.

You now have the tools to create a great website and offer fantastic customer support. Now focus all your energy on developing an excellent product or service!

Project management from your email client? It's possible.

Asana is a project management tool that has exploded in popularity in the last few years. It can help people of all industries better manage projects using different visualizations, including Kanban-style boards, calendar view, Gant charts, etc.

Asana can also help your team reduce the number of meetings because it lets you clearly define task owners and allows a high-degree scoping. And although Asana can also reduce the number of emails you get, you simply can't get rid of them all. Email is by far the most used communications medium in the professional world. Customers, clients, prospects, employees, etc., they all use email.

Email is actually the simplest way to communicate externally with clients. There's no learning curve to beat or onboarding to account for. You simply send email.

So there should be a way to easily add tasks to projects in Asana directly from your email, right? Without the hassle of shifting between apps and trying to match tasks with specific conversations.

Thanks to Missive's integration with Asana, you can add tasks to workspaces and projects from your email client with just a couple of clicks.

Sounds good, but what is Missive?

Missive is a team inbox and chat tool that helps businesses stay on top of all their communication channels and projects in a single app. All while enabling collaboration between coworkers. Missive offers an integration with Asana that helps you bridge the gap between emails and project management!

The integration gives you access to all your projects, tags, custom fields, and teammates. You will be able to assign tasks to teammates and define due dates. Say goodbye to switching between apps to add tasks to your workspaces.

A customer sent an email with a change request to the project? Easy, click on New Task in Missive, and the whole team will see the new task and can begin to work immediately.

Do you need to discuss a task in real-time? No problem, you can do that too!

How do you set up Asana in Missive?

Step 1

Create a free Asana account.

Step 2

Open Missive and go to Settings > Integrations > Add integration > Asana

A pop-up will open that will ask for your Asana account and permission to access it.

Share the integration with your team if needed.

Step 3

You're ready to start creating and managing Asana tasks directly from Missive! Click on the New task button in the integrations panel.

Enter the task's information and click on Create:

Will changes reflect in Asana?

Yes! Everything you create or edit in Missive will be visible and available in app.asana.com in real-time.