Every great company has a great website reflecting its' personality, values, and brand. Create Designs is a website design and online marketing agency specializing in WordPress design and development. Established in 2011, they work with both new and established small to medium-sized businesses looking for award-winning design.

We spoke with James Thurlow-Craig, Create Designs Managing Director, about how he and his 8-member team use Missive to increase their profitability by saving time and effort.

What challenges led you to look for a shared inbox solution like Missive?

Increased growth and the structure of our team has meant that we’ve outgrown Outlook as a viable solution to manage both projects and support inquiries. We were looking for a solution that would allow us to triage customer inquiries and easily communicate internally about specific emails without having to trawl through instant message conversations cross-platform.

We also needed an easier way of managing elements such as canned responses and email signatures from a single dashboard. In addition to this, as MacOS users, we’ve been endlessly plagued by Outlook’s inability to correctly format HTML emails properly without the text reverting back to Times New Roman when sending from MacOS to Windows. This was making our sales emails and correspondence to clients look ugly.

What was most important to you when evaluating your options?

One key area which many other solutions fall short is to have multiple Team Inboxes that work across different email domains.

We run a number of different brands under our parent company which target different niches. As such we needed a seamless platform which would integrate with our different team mailboxes and blend them in to a single Inbox to handle. All while ensuring that the signatures work perfectly without accidentally applying the wrong email signature to an email.

Further to this, the ability to set up a native application on MacOS was critical. Several other solutions, including Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite) itself, are designed to be web-based. While they do allow you to connect with other mail clients, their functionality is often reduced or limited.

Missive’s desktop and mobile applications work perfectly, and to find any kind of bug is really an achievement, even when there are new features, and updates rolled out weekly!

How do you use Missive?

We use Missive internally for sales management, customer support, and project management. The ability for Missive to connect to both Pipedrive and Asana is a game-changer. As a business where our only asset is time, being able to save time through efficient processes is huge for us. A simple right-click on an email to create an Asana task can easily save 2+ minutes every time. With a team of 8 using Asana constantly throughout the day, the time saved really does add up.

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For customer support, it allows us to easily assign support tickets to our development team without having to forward or cc specific members of the team. It’s not practical for us to allow our clients to directly communicate on an ad-hoc basis with our developers as their time is tasked in, so it’s very distracting to be taken off a task to respond to emails throughout the day. As such, Missive allows them to drop a private comment in the email for our project manager to respond.

There are various features for our salesperson which help convert leads more effectively and save time. Being able to schedule an email in advance in a couple of clicks allows him to set the best time for the prospect to receive a response - such as early in the morning before we begin or later in the evening.

As a Director, it can be difficult to ever “switch off” from the daily running of the business. Being able to set custom rules to easily snooze my mailbox outside of working hours is working wonders for my stress levels - it’s understandable that clients will often need to send emails outside of the normal 9 to 5, but I don’t need to have it pop up on my phone at 10pm on a Sunday evening!

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You told us that Missive increases your bottom line profit by saving time and effort. How did Missive help you accomplish this?

Missive’s UI is very familiar, well-thought-out, and has an Apple approach to its design. This means everything is where you expect it to be and it just works. Missive has taken many of the key pain points which business users struggle with on a daily basis and found intuitive solutions for each of them.

It’s not one single feature which helps us save time and effort, but a combination of bringing together many tools. From being able to setup integrations to other software we use, through to even the smallest of details - there’s no need to even click save when you’re updating your automated responses or signatures… it auto-saves. There is a great attention to detail across the board.

Last question, please name 3 key Missive features that you rely on the most?

There are definitely more than 3 features that I’d consider mission-critical, but if I had to choose, it would be the internal chat, mobile/desktop native apps and team inboxes.

Being able to message support if there’s a problem and receive a proper response and not a generic "we’ll get back to you" style reply is so reassuring.

Having a community-based approach to feedback for new features and improvements is really setting the benchmark for competitors who often grow too big to care. Weekly rollouts of new features do a great job of ensuring we never need to look elsewhere to stay ahead of the competition.

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