Missive

The team inbox feature is simply incredible. It allows our team to chat between responses to our customers or suppliers to make sure we say the correct things and that we have all the information needed before sending those emails. It’s much better than Zendesk for the workflow and the fact that Missive doesn’t break all the time (like it happened to us on Zendesk back then, before we switched).

As a small business, Missive allows us to centralize all our “external communication” (Customer service, BizDev, Media/Press contacts) into one software, instead of scattering our team between a help desk, a CRM, and some other tools and software to make it all work. We have different e-commerce websites, so we can actually have all our projects and different emails on the same software for a single price.

Since this isn’t a help desk, there are no “ticket numbers”, where everything has a clear number attached to it (Customer request ticket #1001, #1002, etc.). But that’s understandable because Missive isn’t built only for being a help desk.

What I also like the least about Missive is the lack of hierarchical structure implemented in the pre-built responses our team created. It’s already great (the search tool for searching through your quick responses is already great, but the lack of visual structure can be hard for beginner employees when you have 50+ quick responses for every possible situation when dealing with customer service. This is something that I miss from Zendesk, when we could separate our quick responses (aka macros) into different folders/categories

We reviewed this alongside Front. It was attractive to me as it is a small team that is bootstrapped, and I like to support that.

But most critically when doing the technical review of Missive v Front (and others) we found that they had the deepest integration with Gmail and an excellent API that allowed us to build a custom integration with our internal tooling.

We were driven to find a common collaborative inbox tool for the team as Intercom wasn't working as well as we needed (we still use it for outbound messages), plus we get lots of messages from other channels and for other reasons beyond support - like sales.

It also works well with PipeDrive - seeing that PD was using it themselves was reassuring, although it would be *excellent* if they shared some of the internal integration learnings with the PD integration off the shelf (it does the job, but only just)

There is still some confusion about how to best handle closing and archiving with team emails - so it is closed from an individuals box but not the shared box and similar when trying to hand over an email and removing the email from your inbox - we still have a fear we will archive it for everyone. This is the most confusing part of the platform.

We tend not to use Tasks as we have Pipedrive, Trello, TidyHQ all generating tasks which makes it confusing - I do wish we could push all tasks centrally to one of the above tools.