‘Remote Work Will Change How We Work’: Explains Niraj Ranjan Rout, Co-founder and CEO, Hiver

The relevance of a SaaS-based email collaboration tool becomes more prominent during a pandemic. Hiver provides an email collaboration tool that allows teams to share email conversations and work together on sales, support, hiring, project management and operations right from their gmail. 

Hiver currently caters to over 1,500 customers across 30 countries, including Lonely Planet, Hubspot, Canva, Wikimedia, Harvard University, Vacasa and Flexport.

Based out of Bengaluru and San Jose, Hiver is co-founded by Niraj Ranjan and Nitesh Nandy. Express Computer gets in conversation with Niraj Ranjan Rout, Co-founder and CEO at Hiver, where he shares the use of this tool, employees’ experience using the tool, the new age of remote working, and what can be expected in the future

• Please elaborate on Hiver.

Hiver is an email-centric customer service solution that helps teams across the organization collaborate on shared inboxes like services@, orders@, support@. It’s the most frictionless, natural way for teams to handle customer email communication as it works right inside Gmail. It helps customer facing teams collaborate better and make sure that all queries are answered on time, by the right people. 

• How is it a useful tool for remote working?

Collaboration is one of the core tenets of Hiver. Hiver makes up for the lack of face-to-face communication while working remotely as the platform ensures team members always know who is working on what.

With Hiver, teams can collaborate over queries arriving on shared inboxes like info@, support@ and help@. Irrespective of where everyone is located, teams can easily sync up on daily tasks and have complete clarity on what every team member should be working on. Emails can be assigned as tasks and tracked in real-time until the point of resolution. 

Having quick discussions with your colleagues is also extremely simple – all you have to do is leave them a note next to an email thread, instead of sending another internal email or pinging them on a messaging app. When teams are working from home, this is extremely useful as it’s not possible to walk up to your colleague’s desk and coordinate on tasks.

And in times like this when some teams would be handling critical requests, Hiver can ensure that everyone has visibility into these queries – who is working on what, how many critical requests are yet to be resolved, and more. This way, no request slips through the cracks and every query is attended to on time. Also, teams don’t have to rely on the constant back and forth messages to get work done.

• How does this tool take into account privacy and security concerns?

At Hiver, we take privacy very seriously. Hiver is the only customer service solution that doesn’t store or read emails. Since it works on top of Gmail, all the customer data continues to be stored on Google servers. In addition to that, Hiver is also SOC 2 Type II attested, ISO 27001 certified and GDPR Compliant. 

• How have Hiver’s employees adapted to this?

With social isolation becoming the need of the hour, we transitioned into a remote team in a short period of time. We have been successfully ensuring everyone works productively while working remotely. We have always been using our own solution for managing emails coming to our Support and Finance inboxes. And product adoption has only increased for other functions after going remote. 

For smooth client support, our support team handles emails arriving at our support@ shared inbox. Taking help from teammates and other functions to resolve issues is the norm. While team discussions are super easy when everyone’s co-located, working remotely could slow down teamwork. But with Hiver, they can just use the Notes function to have quick internal discussions around customer emails. 

To stay on the same page while working remotely, we’ve been relying on Hiver’s team view that allows team members and managers alike to see who is working on what. This increases transparency within the team and allows the support manager to distribute workload evenly. 

Apart from that, we do a standup meeting every morning where team members share what they have been working on and have access to the team’s metrics through Hiver’s Analytics wherein we make sure we reach out to help if a team member is slowing down.

• Do you think remote working is the new normal?

Two months after going remote, I think many organizations are realizing that remote work is sustainable and something that can be implemented for a long period of time. Already, many tech giants in the US have announced that they are permanently going remote. I won’t be surprised if the same happens in India. While meeting in person has its obvious merits, we all got to experience the potential upsides of remote work. While I don’t think it will become the new normal, I can say that we will all be more receptive to remote work and it will become a big part of how we work when we go back to the office.