Rebranded as a customer solutions provider, Hiver forays into helpdesk software market

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Hiver, operated by Bengaluru and San Jose based GrexIT, on Thursday said that it has rebranded itself as a customer service solutions provider.

The firm, which operated in the shared inbox space earlier, has launched an analytics platform, called Analytics 2.0, and entered the helpdesk software market, a statement said. The helpdesk industry is projected to touch $11 billion in the next two years, it said.  

“Though we are a fairly horizontal product, 70-80% of our customers have been leveraging Hiver for managing customer communication. So it made sense for us to bridge the gap between how we communicate about the problem we solve and what problem the customers actually solve through the product,” Niraj Ranjan, CEO and co-founder of Hiver, said. 

The analytics platform will help teams track key metrics to measure customer service and enable them to build custom reports, the statement said. 

Hiver claims to have over 1,500 customers, such as Canva, Kiwi.com, Flexport, Capterra, Lonely Planet and Harvard University. 

“Most businesses using G Suite start out handling customer emails by using labels or Google Groups, but run into collaboration issues as they scale. They are forced to move to helpdesks, which can be fairly overwhelming, for lack of a native Gmail solution. Hiver bridges this gap by offering powerful helpdesk-like capabilities right on top of Gmail,” CEO Ranjan said.

Over five million businesses currently use G Suite, the statement said. 

Founded in 2011 by Ranjan and Nitesh Nandy, Hiver will now operate as a Gmail-centric customer service solution that helps teams across the organisation collaborate on shared inboxes such as services@, orders@ and support@, the statement said.  

In October 2018, the company raised $4 million in a funding round led by venture capital firms Kalaari Capital and Kae Capital. 

It competes with firms such as cloud-based customer engagement platform Freshworks and ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho.