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Hiver bills itself as the world’s first Gmail-based help desk software. In other words, you can use Google Workspace completely without installing any unnecessary additional software. In theory this means minimal fuss in setup and virtually zero learning curve, provided you can trust the Google gods with your data. Read on to know whether Hivar lives up to its claims.
Hiver: Plans & Pricing
Hiver has three main pricing plans for ‘customer service’ as they call it. The ‘Lite’ tier costs $15 per user per month if you pay month-to-month, $19 per user if you pay annually. This plan supports up to 10 agents on 2 shared e-mail inboxes.
Users have unlimited access to e-mail templates and tags. You can also set up live chat, your own knowledge base, WhatsApp channel, and shared contacts. Other benefits include collaboration on tickets, with ‘collision’ support to ensure two agents are not inadvertently working the same case. Hiver also offers dedicated mobile apps for both Android and iOS.
The ‘Pro’ plan is believed to be Hiver’s most popular, costing $39 per user per month if paid annually or $49 per user if paid monthly. It includes all of the above, along with unlimited users, with a greater emphasis on SLAs and analytics. For example, you can view SLA reports and even alerts if an SLA is violated. Also supports ‘Pro’ plan quickbooks Integration and scheduled data export. Members in this level can also receive help from Harvey, Hiver’s AI bot.
The ‘Elite’ plan costs $59 per user per month for an annual payment or $69 per user for a month-to-month payment. Hiver describes this tier as having “custom access control, round robin assignments, and uptime SLAs to deliver customer delight.”
Even though the pricing isn’t particularly enjoyable, you can enjoy skill-based auto assignment of tasks, along with an alert system for potential SLA violations. Subscribers to this plan also get help in making your data HIPAA Loyal.
If you have more than 50 ‘Seats’ Hiver encourages you to contact us for a custom quotation. You can even sign up for a 7-day free trial of any of the plans without providing credit card details.
Hiver: features
The main selling point of Hiver is that it acts as a help desk directly from your e-mail. This means that if your team has a shared inbox, it can turn e-mail into ‘actionable tasks’, as the feature page says. Messages can be tagged and/or prioritized by users. They can also tag other users in Notes to help collaborate on issues.
Hiver also supports e-mail sharing with teammates and other departments via permalinks. Just like with Google Docs sharing, you can easily add and remove editing rights for individual users.
Another great advantage of switching to Hiver is that the company offers dedicated mobile apps, so your agents can stay connected even when they are away from the office. These are available for both Android and iOS.
hiver: interface
Given that it sits right inside Gmail, it might be most useful to think of Hiver as an upgrade to your Google workspace. Certainly in their video tour showcasing the UI, a lot hinges on how well the features fit into Gmail, such as being able to provide support to customers through various channels like WhatsApp. You can also use the existing ‘Activity’ pane in E-mail to specify and track support questions.
The good thing is that if you and your team are already familiar with Gmail and are happy to use the interface, this will mean almost zero time spent figuring it out.
Hiver also dedicates a page to its workflow management, which makes it easy to visualize the tasks assigned to your team by displaying all active conversations in your shared inbox. You can also filter conversations with just one mouse click, for example by team member.
Hiver: Security
Hiver maintains a devoted’security Center‘ on their website. Given that it sits on top of Gmail, we were pleased to see that it quickly answered one of our first questions: The company doesn’t store your e-mail on its own servers, instead leaving it up to Google. However, they do store some metadata such as e-mail subjects.
When it comes to processing e-mail data, they claim that the ‘raw’ data is temporarily stored and encrypted until synced across Gmail accounts, after which it is permanently deleted.
Hiver also claims to undergo regular external security audits. All their data is hosted by AWS (Amazon Web Services) in the United States. This means that their data centers benefit from all the security that Amazon provides, such as 24/7 security and fire suppression systems.
All of Hiver’s servers use network firewalls and all data transmission to or from Hiver occurs over 128-bit SSL encrypted connections. their application endpoints are TLS/SSL Receive an “A+” rating on only and SSL Labs tests.
It’s no surprise that Hiver uses Google SSO (single sign on) to access the app and users can revoke Hiver’s access to their G Suite at any time.
the company has been Working hard to comply with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) but there’s a screw up: 2019 Google was fined for breach of GDPR.
The tech giant recently made some Changes to make to your Chrome browser More a data-security complaint but the fact remains that Google’s business model revolves around serving targeted ads. This begs the question of whether moving your help desk to Google will allow your organization to comply with local data protection laws.
Hiver: Support
Hiver has a dedicated Help Center with helpful guides on topics such as setting up your e-mail account and integrating WhatsApp channels into Gmail.
The Resource Center also includes some benchmark reports and a few e-books on topics such as using Gmail as a help desk. As useful as these are, the available resources seem quite restrained compared to other help desk providers we’ve reviewed.
It doesn’t matter which pricing plan you choose, all users receive onboarding support and 24/7 assistance via e-mail and chat. However, only customers on the most expensive ‘Elite’ plan receive priority support, which includes callbacks and your own ‘Success Manager’.
Hivar: Final Verdict
‘Hiver’ is actually the French word for ‘winter’. We wonder if the owners know this, because if you’re already using Google Workspaces within your organization and want to quickly and easily set up a help desk, the platform could be ‘the winter of your discontent’.
Leveraging existing platforms to manage tickets makes perfect sense, especially if you can incorporate additional features like live chat and delegating tasks to other users. Pricing plans also start at a very reasonable $15 per agent per month.
The biggest problem you will face as a business owner is whether you want to rely heavily on Google for your organization’s customer information, as they don’t have the best record for data security.
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