Crafting a better work experience

Sometimes a to-do list is not enough to accomplish your objectives.

More often than not, you need a more structured approach. This is where tools like Trello are of great help. Trello is a web-based app that lets you create cards with lists in a Kanban-style to manage projects.

Kanban is a method of organizing work. It's a visualization format in which cards (digital or not) are spread over a board. Each card contains a task or action. Cards are distributed in different lists in categories of progress: To-do, doing, and done. Boards can be customized to hold different degrees of progress granularization.

Trello uses the kanban lean methodology to help people plan and execute projects of all sorts via their application. Trello boards are very popular. Some companies, organizations and communities leave them public for everyone to watch, like the super popular videogame Project JoJo Trello or this company's roadmap.

Nice! You said something about managing Trello from my email?

Short story long, yes, you can with 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 Trello integration that helps you bridge the gap between emails and projects!

The integration gives you access to all your boards, lists, labels, cards, and teammates. You will be able to add cards, apply labels, move cards to lists, add teammates, and define due dates. Say good buy to switching between apps to add tasks to your project.

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

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

How do you set up Trello in Missive?

Step 1

Create a free Trello account.

They offer multiple sign up options, like Gmail sign in for example, or you can do it with an email and password. Once that's done, you will need to create your first project or board, then add a few cards and you're done!

Step 2

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

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

Share the integration with your team if needed.

Step 3

You're ready to start creating and managing cards from Missive! Click on the "New Card" button in the integrations panel.

Enter the card's information and click on Create:

Will changes reflect in Trello?

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

Update: Now blocking read receipts from other servicesMissive now auto blocks read trackers and 1x1 images to prevent senders from spying on what you do with their email.

This week we sunsetted read receipts from Missive. This will cost us a lot, so here is why we did it.

Read tracking is magical. You know instantly when your recipients open your sent emails. This brings incredible power and can be beneficial in many legitimate business scenarios. It’s really popular.

Behind the scenes however, there is an uglier untold story. For us, the technologists who built and offered support around it, it kept getting more controversial over time. In the most extreme cases, we saw first hand how it was misused and weaponized to abuse people. And on the more innocuous and potentially useful scenarios, how unreliable it could be, which could in the end give a false sense of control to our users. A technology that works 70% of the time is a bad one.

The origin

Missive is a team communication app. From day one, we believed that in order to succeed we had to offer an unparalleled email experience. Email is the most important channel in most business communication stacks.

For instance, sales people live and die in their email clients. One really useful feature for them is read tracking. You send an email to a prospect, that person quickly follows up saying they are not interested, but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification, you instantly take your phone and follow up. You win.

After we launched Missive in 2015, requests for a read tracking feature quickly started to pile up.

We built it.

Reliability

When you advertise read tracking ability, the majority of users don't think about the intrinsic aspect of it, how it works and how unreliable it can be. They expect it to work all the time.

Behind the scenes, read tracking works by checking if an image in the sent email has been requested on a server. Each recipient receives a different version of the email with a unique transparent image. Each time one of those images is requested, the server matches it to a recipient and notifies the sender.

But… false positives and false negatives are very common:

• The recipient may read an email without triggering a read receipt if the images were blocked/not downloaded. Many email clients have built counter-measures to block them by default, rendering them less and less accurate.
• The recipient may not read the email and still trigger a read receipt if the email server downloaded and cached the image in advance. A lot of web-based email clients will do this.

When a user expects read tracking to be a source of truth, those false positives/negatives can cause weird situations.

There is no way to make this more reliable. All apps offering read tracking ability without explicitly mentioning to their users that it sucks, are doing false advertisement.

Now, a lot of educated users know the pitfalls of the technology, and use it with a grain of salt. From our support experience however, those are the minority.

The abuses

With a minimal amount of creativity, it’s easy to come up with scenarios where people can misuse read tracking.

Let’s say you received a love letter (email) from a colleague, you are quite moved and touched by it, but feel it’s inappropriate and decide to not reply. But the words haunt you and you go back and read them again and again.

Now, if the love letter author inserted a pixel tracker, they can know every single time you did go back to that email, and read it again and again. Not cool.

This scenario is fantasy, I just came up with it. But for us, no need to be to creative, people would write us messages like:

Argh… no! Please, don’t do that with our product, please.

The legal landscape

We are no legal experts, but for us, it seems clear offering read tracking ability made us ride on the grey side of privacy laws like GDPR.

[... referring to email tracking … ] The data processing is secretly performed, i.e. no information about the data processing is provided to the email recipients from whom the data is retrieved. Furthermore, email recipients are not given the possibility to accept or refuse the retrieval of the information described above. In sum, differently from classical acknowledgement email systems, with these new products, the recipient of emails has no possibility to accept or refuse the acknowledgment information processing towards the software user.

The Working Party 29 expresses the strongest opposition to this processing because personal data about addressees’ behaviour are recorded and transmitted without an unambiguous consent of a relevant addressee. This processing, performed secretly, is contradictory to the data protection principles requiring loyalty and transparency in the collection of personal data, provided by Article 10 of the Data Protection Directive.

-European data protection authorities opinion on email tracking.

You can do mental gymnastics, but read tracking is a predatory feature, privacy wise. Is it legal for a provider like Missive to offer email tracking capacity? Is the burden of using it all on our customers’ shoulders?

This is all debatable, and a lot of our users, when preemptively announced we would retire read tracking, argued that many other apps (CRM, email clients, etc) still offered it.

For instance, Superhuman when faced with controversy for offering read tracking made it opt-in instead of opt-out, probably for that exact reason.

The major difference between us and them is size. Being legally challenged in court or fined would most certainly be a death blow for a small bootstrapped company. Not a risk we are willing to take.

Our competitor funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley can certainly foot the legal bills, not us.

Conclusion

To summarize, read tracking doesn’t really work, can be weaponized, is most certainly illegal in many places and is potentially deadly to our business. Pulling the plug seemed obvious to the four of us.

This will affect our bottom line, some of our users will leave for competitors*. But today, we took a stance and it feels good.

And to end this post on a high note. We want to officially announce that we're actively working on a full-fledged calendar in Missive! You will be able to accept invites, add events and alerts, share calendars, and more! We estimate that it will be ready in under two months.

* If you are one of those users who cancel their Missive account, we offer to refund your last payment. Just contact us by email by October 15th, 2020.

People like texting, that's a fact.

Being able to offer customer service via SMS (short message service) or texts opens up a fresh and dynamic way to reach customers but also for them to reach you better.

According to Gigaom, SMS are opened around 98% of the time! This number is astonishing, especially when we know emails are at best opened 22% of the time.

Why should I use SMS as a communication channel?

Let me give you three reasons why you should add SMS to your omnichannel customer support arsenal:

1. They are affordable

Unlike phone calls, where one agent can only take one call at a time, with SMS a single agent can be working multiple cases at any given time. The actual cost of SMS is also lower than a traditional phone call.

2. They're not frowned upon

People are tired of intrusive marketing calls or having to wait for ages before they are transferred to the "right" area of the company.

With SMS, customers respond when and if they want. Also, if they contact your company, their expectations will be lower in terms of replying speed. This gives companies a little room to breathe and handle cases with more care and diligence.

Additionally, people seem to see SMS as a more relaxed and approachable way to contact and get contacted by companies.

3. They're very popular

Literally, billions of people use SMS every day. There's no special tool, software to download or process to master. You just need a mobile phone and some credit in it. I don't believe there's another communication channel with entry-barriers as low as SMS.

Ok, but how do multiple agents reply from a single number?

This is where we come in to help. We offer a great integration with Twilio SMS that lets you send and receive text messages from your future collaborative email client, Missive. You read that right. Your team can collaborate and respond to SMS and emails from a single app, without stepping into each other's toes. Not only that, but you can also add WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and more!

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.

One of the best features is the ability to collaborate inside SMS. For example, if a customer sends a message, and you don't know how to respond, you can @mention another team 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 Twilio SMS?

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 of 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

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 collaborating around SMS with Missive! See how your customer satisfaction ratings go through the charts!

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.

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

Choosing a live chat service to add to WordPress

There are many options out there. Choosing the right one depends on your individual use case.

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.

There appears to be no reliable live chat options for WordPress that are free. So using Missive Live Chat is a high-quality, affordable investment.

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 chat is almost ready to be plugged into WordPress.

Setting up Missive Live Chat in WordPress

It's quite easy to install Missive Live Chat in WordPress. We have developed a simple plugin for this purpose.Go to your WordPress Admin, click Plugins, search for Missive Live Chat, install it and activate it.

Upon installation, click on Missive in your WordPress dashboard sidebar, and follow these steps:

1. Enable Missive live chat by selecting the Yes option
2. Copy the account id from the code snippet in Missive. It looks like this number:
   2846475-c2324-232344-235-dsfds34ffdf233

1. Paste the id in the Chat Account id field back in WordPress.

1. Save changes

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

NoteYou can also add the code snippet directly to the WordPress theme's header.php file, although it will get deleted each time you update or change the theme. That's why we recommend using the Missive Live Chat for WordPress plugin.

Customizing the live chat window

Inside the Missive Live Chat for WordPress plugin settings you can:

• Change the main color
• Customize various messages such as welcome, help, error, title, etc.

For other settings, open your Missive app and go to the Setup tab in the Chat account and click Configure. Among other things, you can:

• 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 meta data
• Emojis

Go here to learn more about each feature.

We hope this article helped you add a live chat to your WordPress site!

The customer's journey starts when they visit your website or brick-and-mortar store for the first time, and it doesn't end when they make a purchase or hire your services. It goes well beyond that point.

You've worked hard to acquire that customer. You've invested time and money. So it makes sense to retain them as long as possible. As it's the case for many industries, the cost of keeping a customer is lower than acquiring a new one. This Harvard Business Review article says that the acquiring cost can be 5 to 25 times more expensive than the retaining one.

So, how can you measure customer satisfaction to maintain low churn rates and long-lasting customers? Easy, just ask your customer for feedback. Ask for feedback on the product, the support experience, etc.

In this blog post, we're going to center around customer satisfaction in the support experience. Because unless you're Google, customer support is an integral part of your daily operations.

There are many buzzwords these days, companies boasting they are "customer-obsessed" or "customer-centric." For the most part, it's true. Companies focus more than ever in providing excellent customer support. It is mainly due to the level of competition. You can quickly lose customers to your marginally-inferior competitor if they offer superior customer support.

How to implement a customer satisfaction survey?

Probably the most known and effective way to do this is by embedding a link with the survey in the support employee's signature.

We've all seen these surveys—some people like them, others don't. Either way, they are great tools to provide feedback to the company about the employee's performance and helpfulness. Since support agents are the company's face, you only want to work with the best talent you can find.

It's also important to note that they are indispensable assets to businesses, and their work is not easy. These types of surveys can also help agents themselves. Some companies reward employees with the best ratings by giving out bonuses.

Tools to measure customer satisfaction

It's a crowded space where solutions abound. So we took the task of researching the top 3 options for customer satisfaction surveys. They all support shareable links, and some offer embeddable code.

Nicereply

With powerful analytics and an easy setup, Nicereply lets you create surveys for each employee rapidly and see a leaderboard.

Simplesat

Simplesat's customizable rating scale and quirky icons are an engaging new take on user experience.

Delighted

Their 5-star survey product lets you collect customer feedback easily with a link. Delighted's dashboard lets you see your customers' feedback in real-time.

Bonus: Typeform

Typeform offers a design-centric solution for surveys. They also offer a wide arrange of visually stunning templates.

How to add a survey to my email signature?

With Missive's managed signatures feature, 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.

You can also add custom fields.

Also, in some survey tools (namely Nicereply) other variables can be fed to enrich reporting. For instance, you could pass the {{ conversation.id }} and {{ message.id }} variables to know in which email exchange the customer completed the survey.

Depending on the customer satisfaction tool you select, there are three ways to add the survey to managed signatures in Missive.

1. Single link with employee selector

In this case, you have a single link pointing to a general survey. When the customer clicks on the link, they're sent to a page where they can select the employee's name that helped them and then they can proceed to rate them. This system usually works for small teams.

In Missive's managed signature rich text editor, simply add the survey's link.

To make this more appealing, you could create an image link with HTML. Like this:

You can achieve that with this code:

<div>
  <strong>
    <span style="font-size: 15px;">{{ user.name }}</span>
  </strong>
</div>
<div>
  <em>
    <span style="color: #005CD4;">Company Inc</span>
  </em>
</div>
<div>
  <span style="color: #737373;">
    <span style="font-size: 11px;">@company.inc</span>
  </span>
</div>
<br>
<div>
  <span style="font-size: 12px;">Was my response helpful?</span>
</div>
<div>
  <a href="http://www.mysurvey.com/companyinc">
    <img style="width: 100px; margin-top: 5px;" src="https://i.imgur.com/s2q0a6T.png" alt="Survey">
  </a>
</div>

2. Dynamic survey link

If the satisfaction survey system gives you a unique link per employee, you can add the unique part or the URL as a custom field in the member's profile. For example, if the complete link is:

http://www.mysurvey.com/companyinc/employee/sales/671gjbsw2

Then in each employee's custom field, enter the variable part of the URL:

In the editor, type in the static part of the URL and add the newly created variable custom field, like this:

3. Embeddable code

Some survey collection companies let you generate embeddable HTML code. In this case, copy the code and paste it in the managed signature editor.

You can also add custom field variables like in the example above.

We're confident these customer satisfaction surveys will help your company offer the best experience and ultimately retain more customers.

Research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company shows that in certain industries, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

Start gathering feedback!

People prefer businesses they can communicate with through messaging.

Facebook Messenger is one of the biggest online messaging platforms in the world. It has over 2 billion monthly active users globally and is one of the most downloaded apps as well, with over 2 million monthly downloads.

For most companies, being able to connect with leads, customers or followers on social media is crucial, especially in omnipresent platforms like Facebook Messenger.

In this post we're going to explore how your business can harness the power of Facebook Messenger to connect to customers throughout the sales funnel.

The golden rule

Facebook says "We know people expect businesses to respond quickly, and businesses who respond to users' messages faster see better business outcomes." And they enforce this in a few ways.

The most important thing to remember when using this channel of communication is to respond fast.

There's actually a 24-hour response window, once passed you can no longer reply to the customer. You have to wait for them to contact you again or pay to send a Sponsored Message. This applies to third-party apps that connect Messenger.

Facebook also displays how fast you reply to messages. There's a coveted "very responsive to messages" badge, which people like because it is perceived as sign of attentiveness and superior customer support. We'll talk about how to get this badge a bit later in this post.

Setting up Facebook Messenger for Business

It's a simple process. You need to have a Facebook Page. To create a Page you need a personal Facebook account. Both are free, and most people already have a personal account.

Enabling Facebook Messenger in your Page

The option to receive messages privately is on by default. If for some reason it isn't, you need to visit your Page's General Settings and find Messages. Click on Edit and make sure the "Allow people to contact my page privately by showing the Message button" checkbox is selected.

Encourage customers to reach out to you

You can achieve this by letting people know you're open to receiving messages. You can:

• Share your Messenger link: You can create a unique Messenger link for your page by adding m.me/ in front of your Page's username. Share your link anywhere, for instance: your website, app, flyer, SMS, etc.
• You can find your Page's username below your Page's name. For example, our link is m.me/missiveapp.

• Add Send Message button: This is an excellent way to drive people who visit your Page to get in touch with your company.
• To add a Send Message button, click + Add a Button below your Page's cover photo.

• Add Send Message Button to posts: Whenever you post something on Facebook, you can choose to add the message button.

• Add Customer Chat plugin to your website: Facebook offers a webchat that can easily be installed in your site.
• To enable it, go to Page Settings > Messaging > Add Messenger to your website. You can read more about it here.

Managing messages from Facebook Messenger

There are a couple of ways to do this. You can use the basic Page Inbox system Facebook offers or opt for a collaborative inbox tool like Missive, designed to manage customer inquiries by a team.

Messenger's Page Inbox

It's a good solution for low message volumes and businesses that use Messenger as their only communication channel.

It offers basic assigning features, labels and notes. But once your company starts growing, adding new team members and having people contacting you through email, SMS, etc, it's better to look for another solution to centralize comms and distribute the work among employees.

Missive: Collaborative team 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 reply to customer inquiries coming from emails, SMS, Messenger, WhatsApp in a centralized app.

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

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

Teams can't go back to Facebook's Page Inbox system once they use Missive!

Adding Facebook Messenger to Missive

It will take you 5 minutes or less. Just follow these quick steps:

1. Go to Accounts > Add Account
2. Select Messenger Business
3. Login to Facebook as a user who manages the Page
4. Back on Missive, click the Facebook account you just added
5. Click Import on the Business Page(s) you want to manage in Missive
6. Share the account with the relevant team or people

That's it; you're ready to start replying to Messenger inquiries from Missive!

The importance of responsiveness

Timing matters, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post. People are always looking for quick results, they expect the businesses they message to respond fast and accurately.

Very Responsive to Messages badge

You can get the "Very responsive to messages" badge in your Facebook Page. This will let people know that you consistently respond quickly to messages.

People contact more Pages that have this badge.

The badge will show automatically when you have:

• A response rate of 90% or more
• A response time of less than 15 minutes.

Get your badge faster with Missive!

With Missive you can create alerts that trigger when a message has been sitting in your inbox for a determined period of time.

You can notify a team when a Facebook message is getting close to that 15 minutes window.

Here's how to do that:

Go to Rules > Create a rule > Incoming messages > Messenger

Automated responses

Using the rules feature, you can create a whole array of impressive automated flows to win the Messenger game. Here are a few ideas:

• Greet your customers instantly after they contact you
• Auto-send support responses based on keywords
• Auto-assign refund inquiries to your accountant
• Send an out-of-office message during off-hours
• Auto-label urgent messages

You can explore more ideas here.

If you think Missive could be a good fit to your business, don't hesitate to contact us with questions and be sure to check out all our amazing features!

When dealing with customers, doing it fast is almost always better. People expect to receive a diligent and competent service at all times. Without the proper tools, meeting customer expectations can be hard.

Whether you have an SLA (Service Level Agreement) in place or you simply want to offer the best customer service possible, Missive can help you cut and sustain a proper response time through Rules.

Your customers will stay happy, your team will have an automated helping hand, and you will wish you would have implemented this sooner.

What is an SLA?

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a commitment that defines the level of service that is expected to be given to a customer by a supplier. Possible penalties can be agreed upon when failing to meet the expected standards of service.

An SLA can be a written formal contract between companies, but it can also be an internal arrangement between teams or departments. Likewise, an SLA can exist simply as a company policy intended to improve and excel in the service given to prospects or current customers.

Why do you need an SLA?

Apart from the fact that some companies will ask for an SLA instituted before signing a contract with you, freely implementing one is a great way to improve your team's service level, whether in customer support or sales.

By having guidelines and cues in the escalation path, the level of service will get better naturally. You can also use it as a selling point for your company.

What is an escalation path?

An escalation path is a process for quickly bringing unresolved issues to the appropriate level of responsibility for resolution when they cannot be resolved within a specified time frame.

A breach happens when the escalation path has been exhausted, and any of the preventive measures did not manage to contain the problem.

You can create three types of escalation paths:

• Time-based: the message climbs the path every x amount of time.
• Customer-based: the message is escalated based on the value of the customer.
• Complexity-based: the message is triaged based on the difficulty or specialization-level of the issue.

How to set up an SLA?

Unlike rigid and complex help desk software, Missive allows you to integrate an SLA in the form of automated rules. The level of granularity it offers is outstanding. You can apply distinct SLAs to different teams, groups, or even individual employees.

Time-based escalation path setup

We will be creating three rules. The first one triggers a warning after 30 minutes of the message being left unreplied.

The second one will trigger after another 30 minutes later but in this case the message will be labeled with Respond ASAP

After another 10 minutes and on this next step of the escalation path, the message will be assigned to a supervisor. It will be labeled with ⚠️ SLA BREACH

Customer-based escalation path setup

In this case, let's imagine we have a valuable customer named Elisa Clark (eclark@company.com)

We will set up three rules. The first one will mark all incoming emails from Elisa with a 👑 VIP label.

A second rule that triggers a note after 15 minutes if the message is still unreplied. A manager will also be notified of the imminent breach.

A third rule will apply the label ⚠️ SLA BREACH after 30 minutes of the message staying unreplied.

Complexity-based escalation path setup

This last scenario works well when your team is segmented in different levels of expertise.

In this case, all incoming emails could arrive at a centralized team inbox. When manually labeling depending on the difficulty (Level 1, Level 2, Level 3), the message is assigned to a particular team member. This is achieved with a user action rule.

If after 30 minutes the message sits unreplied, the message can be automatically assigned to another member with the same level of expertise.

If, after 1 hour, the message is still unreplied, then the message is labeled with ⚠️ SLA BREACH and assigned to a Level 3 member.

Are you tired of customers complaining about unreplied emails? Or long response times? Are you ready to enhance your customer's experience? Then it's time to try Missive and adopt an SLA to achieve your response time goals.

How to run analytics without a consent banner? It is simple; don't use cookies nor collect personal information.

Frankly, the amount of information our devices give away is scary. Amongst other places, it ends up in the dashboard of a company's analytics app. For product people like us, many of these data points turn out to be irrelevant when making important product or marketing decisions anyway.

Even Google's Head of Insights & Analytics, Janneke van Geuns, said that "The biggest misconception is the perceived need to capture and measure everything and anything." "A common belief is that if you capture every type of metric, it will tell you magically what works and what doesn't. Unfortunately, that is not how we get to insights, and would be comparable to having to find a needle in a haystack."

So, not only does harvesting data without intent can invade your users' privacy, but it can make your work more challenging. Keep it simple they say!

NOTEAnalytics/tracking were never included in our apps (mail.missiveapp.com, iOS, Mac, etc). This post is exclusively about our homepage and marketing site hosted at https://missiveapp.com.

The switch

We asked ourselves if it was time to switch to a less invasive analytics app than Google Analytics; one where lengthy privacy policies weren't needed to figure out their compliance with privacy laws of various countries (GDPR, CCPA, or PECR).

We realized that the answer was yes, a change was needed. Here are a few reasons why:

1. As an email collaboration tool, transparency and our users' privacy are paramount to us. Even if we were only including Google Analytics on our marketing site, we had to reference it in our privacy policy, which made it longer and scarier without a clear upside.
2. Many users are blocking invasive metrics scripts, skewing the quality of the data.
3. We hate those annoying cookie banners required to use Google Analytics legally in Europe. To scroll is not to give consent. So a veritable "consent-wall" is needed for it to be compliant.We are not fans of using free products; there is always a long-term hidden cost.

We looked at three potential replacements: Fathom Analytics, Plausible.io, and Simple Analytics.

After some due diligence, we decided to go with Simple Analytics, a product run by a small independent team from the Netherlands.

They were the only one not using fingerprinting to track users between page views. The upside is better privacy protection, the downside is the unique visitor metric can’t really be trusted.

But as seen here in this exchange between Rafael (our CTO) and the Fathom Analytics team, even with fingerprinting, the unique metric is not so reliable:

After a few days of using Simple Analytics, I'm happy to say it’s a far less overwhelming experience than the Google Analytics dashboard. You get a straightforward single-page dashboard with all the metrics they offer.

Privacy-first service

Let's explore what makes Simple Analytics a privacy-first analytics service:

• They don't save or collect IP addresses.
• They have an interesting way to detect unique visits, again, without cookies or IP addresses. They do it based on the hostname of the referrer of the page. They explain it like this: "When a user comes from one domain to another, their browser shares the previous domain with the next. If the current page's domain is the same as the one in the referrer, we know it's a non-unique visit." Not perfect, but good enough.
• They do collect and store timestamps, but those are entirely harmless and crucial for the graphs they generate.
• User Agents. They use them only for counting operating systems, device sizes, and browsers. They don't use User Agents for fingerprinting.
• Simple Analytics never tracks users, and by default, they ignore visits with Do Not Track (DNT) enabled.

The caveats

Simple Analytics currently offers these metrics: page view count, visitor count, referrals, top pages, screen widths, browsers, and countries. Seven metrics versus dozens in regular analytics apps. Is that a disadvantage? Not for us at the moment.

Since we don't plan to run ads anytime soon, we don't need to profile our audience, get their demographics, likes, interests, behavior patterns, etc.

Also, they don't crunch any data for you, so you will need to calculate ratios and percentages for traffic metrics manually. But again, not a problem for us.

They just rolled out cookie-less event tracking, which we will use to manually track some events like downloads.

On the other hand, they seem pretty engaged and are continually developing new features. You can see the whole roadmap.

And they were great at answering all our questions before the transition.

Conclusion

We traded a ‘free’, privacy-less, and complex analytic dashboard to a paid, privacy-first & simple one. We couldn’t be happier.

Also, thanks to this change our DuckDuckGo privacy rating was upgraded from C+ to B+

We have submited our Privacy Policy to the organization ToS;DR. DuckDuckGo works with them to provide these privacy grades. We will hopefully get the A grade soon.

UpdateWe now support Message Templates to send messages outside of the allowed 24 hours window. Learn how to use them in this guide.

Go where your customers are. By adapting to your customers' preferred channels of communication you reduce the first point of friction they might encounter while trying to reach you.

With over 2 billion active users, WhatsApp is the biggest messaging app in the world. With a userbase of this magnitude, it’s likely that some of your customers use WhatsApp on a daily basis. This channel of support is particularly effective when targeting a mobile-first audience.

People have been using WhatsApp to communicate with customers for years. The problem was scalability. You could only link one phone number to one device. For companies receiving dozens or hundreds of customer requests per day, implementing WhatsApp was impossible.

If your small business customer service only receive a few requests per day, and you have no dedicated team to handle support, then using WhatsApp Web will most likely be good enough.

Otherwise, a WhatsApp shared inbox is probably the way to go. Missive lets you connect a phone number to a team inbox where multiple people can answer queries from numerous customers at the same time, from any device and from a single phone number.

Not only that, but you can also:

Assign messages to specialized teams or coworkers

Nowadays, around 40% of all purchases online are made on mobile devices. Let's suppose you have an eCommerce store, and a customer has a problem with their order, so they contact you using their phone.

In Missive, the message can arrive at a Team Inbox. From there, you or any coworker can assign themselves to the case and follow up promptly.

Maybe something goes wrong, and the customer asks for a refund, but you don't have the clearance to handle reimbursements, then you simply assign the case to a colleague in the finance department.

All is done quietly, behind the scenes. The customer never knows she's been transferred, and she gets the refund done quickly and smoothly.

Chat with colleagues inside a customer's conversation

Let's suppose you're onboarding a new coworker, and they are starting to take cases on their own gradually. They will inevitably have questions for some situations that come out of the norm.

Instead of them having to tap you on the shoulder, copy/paste the customer's inquiry on Slack, or any other way, they can @mention you inside the WhatsApp message and ask for help.

Once again, the customer gets a seamless support experience, and you don't lose time switching apps or moving around the office.

Use canned responses to reply to common questions faster

It is inevitable. In any business, there are always some questions that come through every day, multiple times per day. Even if all the information is on the website, and you have multiple FAQs about it.

Going back to the eCommerce scenario, people often ask about turnaround times or delivery dates. In cases like this, you may want to create a canned response with all details regarding shipping and turnaround times.

Whenever someone asks about their delivery date, just insert the response and continue working on something else within seconds.

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

Create automated rules to relieve employees from repetitive tasks

Missive rules are potent sets of conditions that can be applied to incoming and outgoing messages, and also to specific actions.

For example, all incoming WhatsApp messages that contain the word "urgent" can be automatically labeled with a red label and assigned to a specific team member.

An additional rule can also be made so that if a message remains unanswered for an hour, an alert is sent to a manager.

This is a great way to keep the right level of service in the company.

Go where your customers are

Centralize all your communication channels into a single app.

Missive not only lets you collaborate around WhatsApp messages, but you can also tap into other channels, including email, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, SMS, and website live chat. All in a single interface.

Follow this step-by-step guide to set up WhatsApp with Missive.

Batching emails is a concept that's been around for many years now. Everyone, from small bloggers to productivity gurus, has talked about the benefits of this practice. And there's a simple reason behind this. It just works. It does make you more productive.

How can I achieve this using Superhuman + Gmail:

I want to receive batches of email a few times a day vs email just flowing in constantly.

I just want new email 2-3 timed a day. Like an old school postman.

Any ideas?

— Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) February 17, 2020

Let me ask you this: Do you turn on the washing machine for a pair of socks 🧦? I think you get my point. The same applies to emails; it's more efficient to write/reply to many of them in a single batch maybe 2 or 3 times a day, max.

One thing is sure, being notification free most of your day will help you focus on important stuff.

Here are 3 ways to receive emails in batches:

Set an alarm

This is the most straightforward way. There's no science or long explanation needed for this. Set two or three alarms at the times you wish to check your email.

A few of problems could arise from this no-frills solution.

• You might forget to close the app and continue to get distracted by incoming emails.
• You might not hear the alarm.
• You might miss important or urgent emails.
• It is not scalable.

Try Boomerang

Boomerang is an app that works on top of Gmail and Outlook. Among their features, they offer a way to receive emails in batches. It lets you receive emails at certain times, send autoresponders, and it can handle exceptions, so that you can still receive emails from particular senders, for example.

If you're happy with working and consuming your email from a web browser, and you don’t work with a team this might be a good option for you.

Get Missive

Missive is the team inbox and chat app that helps teams collaborate around many channels. It also offers a robust way to receive emails, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and other types of messages in batches.

It’s crazy that no one has mentioned @missiveapp but I do this every day with this email client. This feature and so much more has dramatically improved my productivity. No affiliation, just a happy paying customer.

— Zee (@Zee) February 17, 2020

With Missive, you can create rules to define which emails arrive in your inbox at precisely what times.

Let's start with a simple reception time rule.

When enabled, all emails arriving between 12 am, and 7:59 am won't show up in your inbox until 8 am.

The same rule can be created for other types of messages (WhatsApp, Messenger etc) and for different times of the day. You can also create one to stop all emails during weekends or holidays.

The above rule is rather general and not practical for everyone. It’s naive to think that all messages have the same level of priority. So let's add a couple more conditions to filter out all emails except the ones coming from your business partner and husband.

The setup is very similar, but we added an exception for all email coming from partner@company.com and john@mail.com.

We can add another condition to the rule, where it lets through any email that contains the word "urgent" in the subject.

Now all important emails will make their way to you instantly, and the rest will wait.

Missive rules offer endless combinations to make email batching work as efficiently as possible. You can filter incoming emails based on:

• Reception time
• To and From
• People in CC
• Subject
• Content
• Attachment name
• Email accounts
• Labels
• Conversation state (unassigned, assigned, closed)
• Unreplied and open for X time

As a collaborative tool, Missive even lets you snooze emails for coworkers.

Another way to stop checking emails all the time is to turn off all push notifications in the desktop and mobile apps. Missive lets you choose what types of messages should trigger notifications and which shouldn't. This works great if you are delegating email to an assistant, they can triage messages and @mention you only for the really important stuff.

If you ever want to check emails before the scheduled time, you can easily access them in the Snoozed unified mailbox.

Bonus

You might want to let people know about your new email policy. So we recommend you add a small text in your signature for a few weeks.

Or even better: add another action to the rule we previously configured to send an automated response when people contact you during the email-free periods. This way, they will gradually stop expecting speedy replies, and you won't feel guilty.

Here's how you can do that:

It's time we take back control of our time!

To learn more about the productivity benefits of this practice, you might want to read this article.