What does 2020 hold?
Table of Contents
It’s fair to say that 2019 was an awesome year at Groove. We shipped a ton of new features and products and iterated on what we already had—doing our best to make sure you have everything you need to support your customers as easily as possible.
To mention just a few highlights, in 2019 we:
- Launched Groove 2.0
- Built in a rich KB integration with the Inbox
- Released seven new integrations, including Shopify, Jira, HubSpot, and Salesforce, along with a bunch more
- Re-introduced the 3-column email view with live previews
- Launched our public KB API
- Made Inbox conversations and KB articles printer-friendly
- Added related articles to your KB, further guiding visitors through your content
- Gave you complete control over KB localization
- Enhanced security for your KB with password protection and IP whitelisting
- Released the ability to follow a conversation to ensure you’re always in the loop
- Built a new setting in Reporting that allows you to change how resolutions are calculated.
What we learned from 2019
During 2019, our vision of what companies (big and small) need to support their customers started changing. There are more channels and ways that people interact with your business than ever before, and we need to be sure we build a suite of products that empowers you to manage those conversations and experiences using the channels best suited for you and your customers.
I’ll be the first to admit that we are sorely lacking some of these core products and channels that businesses need—Live Chat is the first thing that comes to mind—along with improving our social channels (e.g. Facebook Messenger and Twitter) and introducing new mobile channels (e.g. WhatsApp and SMS).
Finding the biggest pain points
Alex (our head honcho here at Groove) also spent a bunch of time really digging in with our customers to try and understand their biggest pain points when dealing with their customers, whether that be missing features within Groove or areas where we’re currently lacking.
Just to make sure we have all our bases covered, we sent a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey to see where we ranked to establish a baseline for ourselves, and we gained a ton of insight into what folks like (and dislike) about Groove at the moment.
With all this in mind, toward the end of 2019, we started piecing together all the core features and improvements we believe a successful, modern company needs to truly support their customers in 2020 and beyond, which helped us define our roadmap for the upcoming months.
Here’s what we have coming for you for the rest of 2020:
Q1: Inbox performance & reliability, Live Chat, a New Widget, and CRM
All around Inbox improvements, based off recent NPS feedback
Based on all the feedback we’ve received from a net promoter score (NPS) survey we sent out recently, we’ve decided to create a team specifically focused on improving our existing Inbox product based on your feedback. It’s a fairly long list, but here some of the bigger items we will be tackling:
- Performance improvements while working in your inbox
- Reliability improvements to the Groove platform
- Feature enhancements including custom snooze, merge improvements, canned reply improvements and improvements to the reply editor and attachments.
Live Chat
Our team is currently testing an internal working beta of Live Chat. It’s looking great already, but we need to wrap up some of the inner workings and refine the user experience for agents before launching to private beta.
We’re on track for our public beta and launch during the start of Q2.
Our New Widget
Lowering customer queries through 24/7 self service is critical in scaling your support operations, along with providing a better experience for your customers.
Our current widget has been around for ages—and it shows. So we’ve rebuilt our support widget from the ground up to be more modern, more functional, and, best of all, to be the entry point for Live Chat for your customers with just a few clicks.
Our new widget will be live and available to all customers early in Q2.
CRM
As you will soon be able to support your customers through a number of channels within Groove, it becomes more and more important to have a holistic overview of who that customer is and how they have interacted with you.
We will start out with a lean version of our CRM with basic functionality during early Q2, with a team focused on new, powerful features over the course of the year. Trust us: this is gonna be great and supercharge your customers experience with your company and teams!
Q2: New mobile apps, dark mode, Inbox Improvements, a new API, and more
Native iOS and Android apps
We’re the first to admit that our current mobile app—for lack of better words—sucks.
We went back to the drawing board, and we have a team that has started work on new applications for both iOS and Android. We plan to launch both early to mid Q2.
New API
Since we’ve recently started on a host of improvements and new products, we decided that it was best to improve and extend our Inbox API (having recently launched our new Knowledge Base API, too).
This will include great documentation and a new interface so API users can quickly and easily see examples and expected responses for all our API methods.
Arriving early Q2.
New Search
Over the last couple of months, we have been gathering and taking all customer feedback regarding search to bring together an improved, more intuitive search experience that should help you find exactly what you’re looking for.
Live in your Inbox during early Q2.
New and improved Groove interface (including dark mode)
With agents spending hours in Groove, we want to make sure that everything in Groove is intuitive and highly efficient to use.
Also, spending hours in front of a bright screen can be draining, which is why we will be introducing the long-awaited dark mode.
Coming in Q2.
New Settings
We kicked off our new settings in late 2019, but we put the project on a temporary pause so we could focus on Live Chat and Widget projects, which we felt would bring more immediate value for all our customers.
We will be picking this up again during Q2 with a late Q2 launch.
WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter
The introduction of Live Chat will also introduce a new Groove Inbox experience highly tailored for real-time conversations. This experience is critical for us to have locked down for the next iteration of our social channels, along with introducing WhatsApp.
Development to start in early Q2 with a late Q2 launch.
Q3 and beyond: Targeted messaging, bots, rules, automations, and much more
On top of all that juicy-goodness planned already, our product and design teams are already finalizing the specs and designs for upcoming quarters.
We consider this list to be slightly organic (ever changing), but we do have some big items that I thought I’d share with you:
Live Chat:
- Targeted messaging (Q3)
- Bots and chat automation (Q3)
- Calendar integration (Q3/Q4)
Inbox improvements:
- More performance improvements, specifically for larger accounts (ongoing)
- SLA’s (Q3)
- Custom Snooze times (Q2)
- New and improved rules and automations (Q3)
New integrations:
- Update to our Zapier integration with additional functions
- Improvements to our Slack integration, giving you more information and functions right within Slack (TBD)
- A bunch of new integrations (WooCommerce, Asana, Amazon, Calendly, and more…)
We know that this is a huge and ambitious list.
As always with software projects, unexpected problems can pop up at any moment that may throw off our schedule. But internally, our team is on track so far, and we’re 110% committed to bringing everything on this list to you in the coming months.
As always, a special thanks to everyone that has participated in our customer surveys and reached out to us with their thoughts and feedback; it has helped us immensely in defining our roadmap to help better support you. After all, we’re all growing businesses we are in this together!
Cheers to an awesome upcoming 2020 🥂