Crafting a better work experience

No matter what system you have for managing your Gmail inbox, we've all received an email from a customer, executive, or direct report that we just can't respond to immediately.

We don't always have all the answers and need to check with colleagues to get their input.

Until we do that, it just sits and lingers in our inbox.

Wouldn't it be great if you could add notes, annotations, memos, and tasks to your emails to give yourself context for when you eventually get back around to responding?

What about being able to have a private conversation with another team member in Google Workspace or add Gmail notes on an email a customer sends you without having to forward or blind-copy things?

Something like Google Doc comments, but for your Gmail account.

Yeah. We'd like that too.

Gmail doesn't offer this sort of functionality, though.

There are some workarounds native to Gmail that can help with scenarios when you need to add notes to Gmail or collaborate with others without creating a mess of FW: chains.

We'll cover 5 (and a half) options native to Gmail and one third-party option that makes it easy to add notes, comments for your team, attachments, tasks, and more without forwarding or jumping through hoops.

What Are Gmail Notes?

Gmail notes are a feature that allows you to save notes and attach them to specific emails. This can be useful if you need to remember something important about an email thread, or if you want to keep track of something related to the email.

5 (and a half) Native Gmail Notes Options

1. Using Google Tasks

You can add an email to Google Tasks to leave notes for yourself in the task description area.

Right-click on the email you want to add notes to and select "Add to tasks." You can also click on the email and use the keyboard shortcut ⇧ + T (Shift + T).

You'll see a task appear in the sidebar to the right of your email message. Click on it and add notes to yourself in the details area.

Click the mail icon below the task to open up the email you've associated with the note.

The Downside: You can't share your Google Tasks with others. If you want to collaborate on an email with a team member within Gmail natively, you'll need to forward the email to them or use Google Chat.

2. Using Google Keep

Google Keep can be used to add notes to email in Gmail.

Open the email in which you want to add a note.

Open the sidebar if it's not already by clicking on the arrow on the left side of the screen.

From the sidebar, select the Google Keep icon. Google Keep panel will appear.

In it, you can add as many notes as you need.

The Downside: No text formatting and poor note organization.

3. Using Google Chat

You can use Google Chat to collaborate with team members—sort of.

To do this, click Google Chat in the left sidebar of Gmail to trigger a chat pop-up.

Add the team member or members you want to collaborate with. Then copy, paste, and send the contents of the email you want to discuss with your team.

It's helpful to add a link to the specific Gmail message thread so you can easily open it back up later.

The Downside: Other team members can't click the link you've added to reference the original email because it lives in your email inbox—not theirs.

If you don't provide enough details, it may not make much sense to the people you share it with.

This causes a lot of wasted time going back and forth. It usually saves more time to forward the email to team members instead.

4. Using Drafts to Add Comments

You can also use a draft to add notes for yourself. Reply to the email without sending it, and your message gets stored in your Drafts.

5. Replying Inline Using Quotes

Step 1. Sign in to your Gmail account, find the email you want to work with, and copy the text from the body of the email you want to reply inline to.

Step 2. Click reply.

Step 3. Click the Quote button to add a quote block in your email reply.

Step 4. Paste the text you copied from the original message next to the gray quote block line where your cursor is.

Step 5. Press Enter and reply with your response below the quote block.

5.5 Using Gmail labels

Now you can't use labels to add a note, but you can use Gmail labels to indicate that a note is needed before a reply can be sent. 

Think of it as very, very lightweight process tracking within your inbox.

How to Easily Comment & Collaborate on Email with Missive

Missive is an email and chat tool that syncs with email platforms like Google and Outlook to make collaboration easy.

You can use it as a native desktop app on macOS and Microsoft Windows or as a web app in browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

Here are some valuable ways we use Missive at our company to add private annotations and collaborate with other team members.

‍

Add Private Comments for Yourself to Emails

You can add private comments for yourself to refer back to them later.

Tag Your Team in Comments on an Email

You can tag other team members in a comment by typing @ + their name. Tagging others will automatically share the email with them (without having to forward anything), so they can see your comment and reply to it.

They can reply with an inline comment or within a thread if they have multiple conversations within the email and want to keep topics organized.

Assign Tasks with Comments

You can turn a comment into a task if you have something you want to delegate to a team member or yourself without having to tab over to a project management tool and bog it down with more tasks.

If you're anything like us, you like keyboard shortcuts. Missive makes it easy to create tasks; just start typing your task description, then switch to task mode by pressing ⌘  + ⇧ + X on Mac or Control + Shift + X on other platforms.

Alternatively, type [ ] or - [ ] at the beginning of your comment. Assign the task to a team member using the @ + their name anywhere in your comment.

Suppose you want to send tasks to a more formal project management tool. In that case, Missive has several add-on integrations with Asana, Trello, ClickUp, Todoist, and a Zapier connector for any others you rely on.

Comment in Style

Missive comments support styling options beyond plain text too. You can add styles for bold, italic, strikethrough, quote blocks, inline code, and code blocks!

Share Attachments in a Comment

Make it easy for people to send attachments to customers without spending 10 minutes searching for them in Google Drive by sending them as a comment. We frequently use this to send zip files, PDFs, links, and screenshots without using apps like Slack, where we lose the context of the email itself.

Use Rules to Automate Comments

If you want to save time and maximize your productivity, you can use Missive's powerful rule feature to automate comments based on various conditions.

Delegating Customer Support to When You're Busy

Let's say you receive a new email from a customer that you can't get to immediately and your organization likes to keep customers happy by responding to them within 24 hours.

You can set up a rule in Missive to automatically move the email to a Team Inbox after a certain amount of time and add a comment that goes out to all members, letting them know you need someone to step in to help.

Respect Service-Level Agreements

You can set rules to apply to an entire team as well.

For example, you can help your team maintain SLAs established with customers by creating a rule that sends a notification to everyone on the team whenever receiving an email during business hours that goes 30+ minutes without a reply.

Automatically Add Reminders about Critical Customer Details

It's not uncommon for individual customers to have important details that your team needs to be aware of whenever they're interfacing with them.

For example, imagine you're a major OTR carrier or 3PL provider and have a particular shipper/receiver who restricts certain types of drivers from their facility.

You can use rules to automatically add reminders as comments to email exchanges involving that customer's domain address (e.g., *@acme.com).

Adding Comments to Gmail from a Mobile Device

You can also add comments, tasks, and attachments using the mobile app for iOS or Android.

This is something I often do when I'm taking a break mid-day to get some fresh air and get drug around the block by my Husky.

Don't Let Gmail Get in the Way of Work

Gmail is great for personal email but comes up short for collaboration. While you can use tasks for meta-level Gmail notes on your private emails, things get medieval again when you need to get someone else's input.

Hopping on Zoom for a quick chat is mentally exhausting and makes it harder to be productive remotely.

Teams should start embracing asynchronous communication and the tools that enable it—like Missive.

FAQ

What Is the Difference Between Gmail Notes and Google Keep?

Gmail Notes and Google Keep are both note-taking apps by Google. While Google Keep was developed to be a personal, simple way to jot down thoughts, Gmail Notes was designed to help users take notes through email seamlessly.

Can I Export Notes from Gmail?

There is no official way to export all your Gmail notes without copy/pasting them individually. Though it’s not a Google-supported feature, it is possible to export notes from Gmail via add-ons.

A list of things tech startups usually go through that we did not.

Warning: This is not a list of things you should not do; it's simply a collection of things we did not.

• We did not do a business plan.
• We did not create a pitch deck.
• We did not spend money on Google Adwords.
• We did not move out of Heroku.
• We did not create a US bank account to save on Stripe fees.
• We did not grow our headcount past four.
• We did not raise venture capital.
• We did not go through an incubator.
• We did not code a native iOS app.
• We did not code a native Android app.
• We did not code a native Windows app.
• We did not code a native Mac app.
• We did not spend money on ads.
• We did not type-check our codebase.
• We did not switch to a new programming language after launch.
• We did not hire a PR firm.
• We were not featured in any noteworthy tech publications.
• We did not win any prize nor apply to win one.
• We did not attend networking events.
• We did not join the local chamber of commerce.
• We did not devote a % of our days to marketing.
• We did not pay for a competitor product to try features.
• We did not focus 100% of our work hours on only one business.
• We did not buy or use an email list to reach potential leads.
• We did not use a CRM.
• We did not track/monitor user behavior in the apps.
• We did not A/B test anything.
• We did not sell the company to a competitor.
• We did not split our codebase into microservices.
• We did not use AWS Lambda.
• We did not apply for the government salary subsidies.
• We did not translate our app or website.
• We did not have coaches.
• We did not ask questions at user signup (What is the size of your company?)
• We did not give discounts.
• We did not offer yearly plans.
• We did not order mugs/socks/T-shirts/hoodies with our logo.
• We did not pay for a LinkedIn premium plan.
• We did not host a page that asks for email addresses to download a PDF.
• We did not have mentors.
• We did not do an MBA.
• We did not present talks at our alma maters.
• We did not pivot.
• We did not setup automated email follow-ups.
• We did not waste money.
• We did not hire a human to do our hero video narration. (Suggested here)

Were we successful because or despite of all of these did-nots?

There are presumably many things there that would have made us more successful. And obviously many things we might do soon.

The takeaway? Don't stress over all the things you are not doing but focus on the few you are doing right.

Missive will soon reach $2M in ARR, roughly one year after the $1M mark.

In the article celebrating this significant milestone, I wrote that we could grow another 100% with the same team size.

We believe we can grow by another ~100% with only the four of us.

I was right. We grew to this point without sacrificing quality to our customers. It is baffling to most people, especially ones from the startup world, to see us thrive with such a low headcount.

Our users love the app and love the customer support experience we offer. They are shocked when we tell them we are just three. Also shocked when they see my basement Office in Zoom calls. 😆

Do I have the most unglamorous working setup?

- Basement ✅
- No window ✅
- Wooden crate + books standing desk ✅
- Kid toys all around ✅
- Apple Studio Display ❌

Who beats that? 🤣#remotework #bootstrap #desksetup pic.twitter.com/M5osCQ5diO

— Phil Lehoux (@plehoux) March 30, 2022

It's not just that we did not raise any money, but we willingly kept the team small. Some critical aspects of our business are just more manageable because of our size, like:

Product Development ❤️ Customer Support

The three of us do all of the support. There is a direct line between the problems and the solutions. Our customers, when they complain, when they voice frustration about the product, we hear them and act swiftly.

We act swiftly to please them, of course, but also to keep our sanity; responding to the same complaints again and again is soul-crushing.

Technology Stack ❤️ Consistency

In seven years, our tech stack has stayed pretty much the same. We don't reinvent the wheel; we don't migrate to new frameworks or languages to please a new generation of developers. We don't have to since we are not recruiting X new developers every month.

Yes, but...

Yes, our revenues have grown at a healthy ~5% month-over-month rate. But this growth came in significant part from the expansion of our existing customers. We have been able to stay small because the rate at which we onboard new customers has remained approximately the same for the last 2-3 years.

In the last year’s post about our $1M ARR milestone, I wrote:

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.

This is not true anymore; the business generates a lot of cash flow, and many customer acquisition channels are starting to make more and more sense.

Customer Onboarding ❤️‍🩹 A Tiny Team

So this brings me to the one thing we can not scale indefinitely: good customer onboarding. Each business is unique; each has its requirements, workflows, etc. When people first set up in Missive, that is when there are the most questions, this is when we can tell them where the value is. The more new users we onboard simultaneously, the bigger the team will need to be if we want to keep offering a stellar experience.

Can I predict what our headcount will be in a year? No, but I'm confident it won't be just the three of us.

Most people use a simple and static email signature telling basic information about themself and their company (job title, phone numbers, address, etc.).

Others have more complex usage; for instance, they will gather feedback on how well they answered their customer questions.

What if you could be more creative? For instance, what if you could change your signature copy based on the day of the week? Like adding the sentence "Have a great weekend!" in emails sent on Friday!

Let me show you how, with Missive, the best business email client.

Copy-paste the following code snippet in the signature editor where you want the sentence to appear:

{% assign today = "now" | date: "%A" %}
{% if today == "Friday" %}Have a great weekend!{% endif %}

The first line parses the current date and assigns the day value to the today variable. The second line checks if the today variable is equal to Friday and, if so, outputs the Have a great weekend sentence.

By adding an else statement, you could display an alternative sentence. The below code will display Have a great weekend! on Fridays and Cheers, every other day.

{% assign today = "now" | date: "%A" %}
{% if today == "Friday" %}Have a great weekend!{% else %}Cheers,{% endif %}
Philippe Lehoux

How is this possible? Missive takes advantage of the powerful templating engine liquid.js that allows you to do crazy stuff! Learn more.

p.s. Thanks to Laura Soar, one of our customers, who suggested this cool idea.

Most people reading this article probably have had poor interactions with automated customer support services. Many are badly designed or try to delegate a lot of the work to bots and other forms of automated support. True artificial intelligence is still non-existent and inferior levels of it are very costly to develop. So, how do you fully automate customer support?

Well, you probably shouldn't. At least not entirely. You should aim to automate repetitive and predictable tasks, and leave the tricky stuff to humans.

By doing so, customers will be happier and employees too, since we all know repetitive work is the worst part of most jobs and it's also what machines excel at.

Customer support automation done right

Here are five ways that will help you scale customer support without compromising the customer experience.

1. Use canned responses

Canned responses or templates help you write and reply to emails faster with pre-written snippets. This alleviates the stress of having to type the same text multiple times per day. Employees can start replying to a customer with a customized message and insert blocks of canned responses.

This is probably the most efficient semi-automation method. As far as the customer knows, they got a personalized answer to their question.

It is important to properly name canned responses and be familiarized with the contents. Otherwise this method easily backfires on you if you send unrelated information.

With Missive you can share canned responses with everyone in the company or specific teams! This reduces the danger of sending sales related info to a technical support enquiry.

‍

We also support variables. With them you can easily customize response with dynamic content like your recipient's name.

For example:

Hi {{ recipient.first_name | default: 'there' }},

… if it matches a recipient.first_name would render something like this

Hi Philippe,

… and if it didn't match anything something like this:

Hi there,

2. Triage support queries automatically

Routing messages to the most appropriate responder or team can be time consuming. This is why you should automate this. The sooner the customer's question is received by a competent team member, the sooner it will be replied to.

It requires some initial work, but after you've finely tuned the parameters, your team won't be wasting time sorting out queries.

In Missive this can be achieved with the creation of Rules. Here are a few of examples of automated routing:

Job inquiries should be directed to HR.

Refunds should be directed to John at the Finance team. He should process all refund requests within 24 hours of reception.

Shipping issues should be directed to Customer Support and show shipper's phone number.

3. Create a robust knowledge base

This is your first line of defense. You should build an extensive repository of frequently asked questions and tutorials on your website. Ideally you can solve 80% or more of the customer's questions by simply directing them to the knowledge base.

At first you will need to think of these questions, but soon it will become user-generated. People will be fast to let you know they can't find this or that in the knowledge base. You simply need to label these conversations and upload new content to the FAQ sections once or twice per month.

In Missive you can label things in a matter of seconds, thanks to user actions. For example, whenever you spot a potential FAQ, simply type "#faq" in the comment bar and the conversation will be labeled "FAQ".

4. Get customer feedback

The best way to improve customer support is by gauging your support experience. This can be easily done by adding a simple satisfaction survey in your email 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.

5. Auto-reply customers with relevant information

Let's face it, customers aren't patient, most want immediate responses. While big companies can offer 24/7 support, most businesses can't. This doesn't mean you have to leave your customer flying in the dark. Auto-replies can reduce customer anxiety and sometimes solve issues without human interaction.

Outside business hours + link to knowledge base

Let people know they've sent an email outside of business hours. It's the best way to manage expectations and let the customer know they won't receive an immediate or same-day response.

You should also include a link to your knowledge base. People might find an answer by themselves.

Outside business hours + suggested articles

If you want to up your level a little, you could create multiple auto-reply responses that trigger with different keywords.

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!

‍

‍

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!