State Of The App, February 2015

If you’re reading this post, chances are good that you already use Groove.

As odd as it might be, I’d like to start this product update post with a huge, heartfelt thank you.

Many of you have been customers for many months since we first started; things were certainly different then. Our product was less mature, we weren’t as stable as we’d have liked and there were hiccups along the way.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support and loyalty through that time, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to be where we are today, with a product that looks nothing like what we started with, but that delivers value to thousands of happy customers.

There’s a lot of work to be done, and there always will be, but in looking back at what we’ve done over the last several months, there’s been more progress and success than ever, and I’m incredibly grateful for your support that has let us get here.

And with that, I’ll jump into what we’ve been working on at Groove…

New Integrations

On the heels of our Slack integration release, we’re pushing out two new exciting integrations in the next couple of weeks:

1) Zapier

Zapier lets anyone connect together the web apps they use to run their business, without writing code, and now that we’re pushing this integration live, you’ll be able to integration Groove with more than 350 popular apps.

The possibilities are endless:

SMS alerts or push notifications for new Groove tickets
Create JIRA issues or Trello cards from Groove tickets
Create Salesforce cases from Groove tickets
Create Groove tickets via Gravity Forms
Create Basecamp to-dos from Groove tickets
Create Github issues from Groove tickets
and many, many more…

We’ve been beta testing this integration over the past few weeks, and have seen our testers build some really cool Zaps.

2) Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor Integrations

Going into beta testing this week, our Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor and Constant Contact integrations will let Groove users connect their help desk with their email marketing software.

The integrations will make it possible to:

See customer mailing list subscriptions next to every ticket
View a customer’s profile for any mailing list
Subscribe or unsubscribe a customer from a Mailchimp list without leaving Groove

Remember, our integrations are chosen largely based on your feedback. To let us know which integrations you’d like to see us build, just fill out this form.

Groove API

We recently released our open API, and dozens of companies are already building integrations into Groove. The API lets developers build Groove functionality right into your own apps:

Automatically create Groove tickets from external events (for example, when a customer places an order)
Display Groove tickets for a specified customer in that customer’s profile within your own app
Reply to Groove tickets directly from another app
Update tickets from external apps (for example, once a story in Pivotal Tracker is completed)
Import old tickets and customer data from another helpdesk
Export your entire Groove ticket and customer history for your records

To get started with Groove’s API, just visit our API Docs.

Spam Filters

We’ve made big improvements to the way Groove handles spam. Instead of using Rules to manage Spam, you can now mark an email as Spam to post the sender’s email address to an account wide blacklist. Any email coming in from that email address will automatically be marked as spam.

If you need to remove an address from the blacklist, you’ll be able to unmark as spam in your spam settings to start receiving emails from that address again.

Uptime

Working on our core infrastructure has been a huge focus for our team since our early stability issues. After our bad downtime incident a year ago, we stepped back and refocused all of our efforts on shoring up our tech, and I’m proud to say that the team has done an awesome job: uptime since last March has been at 99.9%.

Coming Up

As we keep our heads down and work to continue improving Groove, two big goals are at the forefront:

A Big Parsing Fix

We’ve battled parsing issues (where long email threads may display awkwardly) since the beginning; it’s a tough part of working with emails, and it’s something we’ve spent a great deal of time and resources on.

We’ve managed to get around 90% of parsing issues under complete control, and now we’re working on getting the remaining 10% contained so that no Groove customer ever has to run into this issue again. It’s no longer a common issue, and very few Groove customers encounter it, but our goal is that by the end of this current push, it’ll be eliminated forever.

A Mobile-Responsive App

The iPhone app we have now is not good enough. It’s not stable enough, functional enough or user-friendly enough to deliver as much value as our web app.

And the truth is, we haven’t worked on it in many months, as we’ve focused on bringing our core product up to the standards of our vision for Groove.

That all changes now.

We’ve recently started development on a mobile-responsive Groove app that will work on every major mobile browser and give you all the functionality that you need to manage support on the go.

I’m really excited about this one, and I know a lot of customers are, too.

Search Enhancements

When we updated Groove Search several months ago, it got a lot easier to quickly find tickets and customers in a couple of clicks. Still, there was room for improvement in the way we suggested results and displayed tickets.

We’re finalizing and will soon be releasing some updates to in-app Search that will make it faster and more intuitive than ever.

A Few Customer Shoutouts

We recently launched the new Customers page on the Groove site. The goal of this page is to spotlight some of the cool ways that customers in different industries — and with different use cases — are getting the most out of Groove.

There are nine case studies now, with a few more already on the way.

Interested in having your business featured as a Groove Success Story? Just head over the Customers page, click the button on the bottom and send me an email.

We’d Love To Hear From You

The growth and development of Groove is always going to be driven by what you — our customers — want and need.

That means that if there’s anything we can do to make Groove better for you, no matter how small or large, I hope you’ll let us know.

You can reach me anytime at alex [at] groovehq.com.

Thank you.