Last Updated on February 15, 2018 by Learn Digital Marketing

Time is money. No matter how technologically advanced we become, we can’t change the number of hours in a day. But, what we can do is cut the wastage and make the most of the time we do have.

Predictably, working in a team or running a small business demands coordination among-st the team members and smooth management of projects; fail to do so and one might find themselves in a disorganized and a messy situation, which in turn will lead to inefficiency and leakage.

Email is a professional’s standard tool when it comes to collaborating with colleagues, customers, partners etc. It is simple, user-friendly and accessible to everyone on all platforms.

We may not realize it, but we use email for collaboration all the time. We assign tasks to colleagues over email, share files, track the status of the assigned tasks etc. This, essentially, is collaboration.

But, collaborating over a long period of time with a large group using email forwarding can turn it into a productivity deterrent. You’d very soon have people complaining about too much email, cluttered inboxes, and information getting lost.

This is where Hiver comes in with the collaborative Gmail inbox.

Hiver makes collaboration on email a cakewalk

The reason behind starting Hiver stems from Niraj’s and his peers’ personal experience with collaboration on email – an activity still largely inefficient considering that email is a popular way for people to collaborate.

Hiver collaborative Gmail inbox is a multi-featured powerful collaboration tool which simplifies internal communication, client management, and optimizes performance.

Here are some Key features of Hiver that will help you streamline your team’s workflow:

Shared Labels: Gmail has an excellent feature called labels. Once you label an email, all the future emails falling under this label will be nested together under the label – like a folder. Now, Hiver allows users to share these labels with other Gmail users.

For example, you can share your Client’s emails with your team and once you share it with someone, all future and past communications under that label will be automatically shared with them – keeping them in the loop without crashing their inboxes and without you having to personally forward each and every email from the client.

For instance, say you are a Manager, and you receive a new task from your client. You decide to assign it to your team member Jack. You create a label - ‘Task:Jack’, and share it with him. Jack now has access to the entire email thread.

But, before Jack can finish the task the client approaches you with a new update. As a manager, it can get tedious for you to forward the email every time there is an update. This is where shared labels work their magic. A shared label ensures that Jack receives all the updates on that email thread, as and when the client emails you.

Once Jack finishes his task, he can create another label – ‘Jack : Done’, and share it with the team lead.

Fewer tos and fros. No confusion. Easy delegation. Easy tracking.

Shared Notes: Shared Notes are available inside an email thread and helps team members coordinate their efforts smoothly when additional information about a task needs to be shared. This almost works like a chat box and your team members can stay updated about any new developments.

Shared Contacts: Hiver allows you to share your contact list with your team. Let’s say you have a new client, and one of your team members add it to the shared contacts list – it gets updated for everyone with whom the contacts have been shared with allowing you to maintain a centralized list of contacts.

Email Templates: If you have the habit of using email templates to get things done faster, you can create them in Hiver. Just install the browser extension and click on the Hiver toolbar button to set up your templates and what’s more, you can even share these templates with others. This allows you to maintain a standardized and consistent email reply as an organization

Email Snooze/Reminder: This feature allows you to deal with important but non-priority emails at a later time. You can schedule the email to come back to your inbox later, this way the email won’t get buried in your inbox and you won’t forget about it.

Email schedule: Sending an email at the right time can be very helpful. For example, maybe you want your email to be the first thing a client in a different time zone sees. You can use the schedule feature to ensure that the email is sent at the right time to the client, without you having to be present to send it.

Collision detection: Remember those awkward mistakes where two team members unknowingly reply to the same email? Although this doesn’t cause any harm, it shows a lack of coordination within the team. The collision detection feature displays a notification ‘X is replying’ when one of your team members is replying to the email, that way you won’t accidentally send out a reply yourself.

Shared Mailbox: Shared Mailbox allows you to turn email into a powerful help desk. You can manage tasks better through shared email accounts like support@mycompany.com. You can assign the tasks in the mailbox to team members and mark them as done. You can also see a list of unassigned tasks so that you don’t forget about them and can get back to them at a later time. It is also easy to track the status of each task.

Conclusion

Hiver collaborative Gmail inbox aims to help you curb information loss, time loss, and energy loss; and exponentially increase your team’s output generation. While most other task management tools only partially integrate with email, leading you to have to and from between the tool and the inbox, Hiver completely integrates with email platform, thereby operating right out of the inbox. Please do comments below.