This is one of our top picks in the category so we recommend it over others (you're on the right page), read below to learn why we love and recommend it! ⤵
This is one of the better tools in its category, see below if this tool is right for you! ⤵
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what they do well, and what they could do better. ⤵
Team inbox and chat tool that empowers teams to collaborate around email, SMS & social media messaging apps.
If Superhuman and a Help Desk had a baby, it'd be Missive.
Missive is a team inbox and chat solution that helps boost team collaboration on emails and messages. Missive consolidates emails and messages from various platforms like SMS, WhatsApp, and social media into a single, unified email inbox.
While Missive is useful for a single person to organize their inbox, the true power of Missive really comes into play when using it as a team.
If you're email inbox is exploding and you want to delegate your inbox, Missive can help take a huge weight off your shoulders.
Say you're a Founder and you get many emails that you wish your team could help respond to, but you don't want to give your team full access to your email inbox. Perhaps you're currently forwarding emails to different team members for them to answer, but it feels like a messy exercise and slightly impersonal as those folks who emailed you can see that you passed them on to someone else on your team 😬.
Well, with Missive you can assign specific emails from your inbox to your team members to answer. Or you can even take it one step further and use Missive rules to auto-assign certain types of emails to different team members (e.g. based on subject line or domain).
This allows others on your team to respond (as if from you) which will directly reduce your workload.
Something to note here is that while Missive will help you delegate your email inbox, we encourage you to think longer term about what may be happening to your inbox? Is it flooded with sales requests? Customer emails? Invoice requests? We generally recommend that a business set up separate emails for these types of business functions, like [email protected], or [email protected], or [email protected] so that the emails can be handled through a shared inbox.
In this case, only important emails (that require your attention specifically) will land in your inbox, and there will likely be less of a need to delegate your inbox as the volume of emails coming into your inbox will be much lower.
Every so often, we have teams reaching out to us sharing that they do most of their business through WhatsApp because that's where their customers prefer to communicate.
If this sounds like your business, highly recommend giving Missive a shot as it will allow you to collaborate as a team on WhatsApp messages. This means that messages sent to a business's WhatsApp number can be received and managed directly within Missive. You can delegate messages to different team members, assign tasks against WhatsApp messages (e.g. "Create Quote"), and pick-up conversations where they were last left off.
I tried out Missive a several years back when I had clients writing me on WhatsApp, email, and SMS. I felt like I was going a bit nuts jumping from application to application to respond to messages.
While Missive was a good solution to simplifying this, I now actually recommend folks put up better boundaries in terms of where customers write in. For instance, having a [email protected] email address and letting customers know that is the only place they should reach out to you, is far better than letting them reach out through a variety of channels.
At Efficient App, we have better systems. We don't give customers our phone number and are super clear that our support email inbox is the fastest way they will get a response from us. Professional systems like this actually help our clients trust us more as we're able to provide clear guidelines on how we do business.
Because we don't have multiple channels where our customers can reach us, we now prefer using Superhuman for our work emails, and Help Scout for our customer support desk.
That said, if for whatever reason, our business required us to be reachable through email/text/social media and onwards, Missive is an ideal solution to have a unified inbox for all platform messages.
Missive comes in handy if your team needs to collaborate on emails using their chat feature. Instead of taking email collaboration to something like Slack, you can simple tag team members to get their input right within Missive. This is an incredibly useful feature and can save dozens of hours per week, let alone keep internal communication much more organized.
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Missive solves a big need for teams that need to unify emails and messages among multiple platforms. It allows for in-app team collaboration via team chat, templated responses and snoozing messages for later. We've learned that teams that use Missive typically love Missive—they truly feel like they can't see life without it.
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The Missive interface is probably exactly what you'd out of an email app, especially if you've ever used Apple mail or Outlook. You have your inboxes on the left hand side, your inbox view within another panel, then your actual readable emails within a third panel. With that, there's truly nothing special about it.
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The Missive user experience is built around the team chat feature that allows for team collaboration. At the bottom of any email or message, simply scroll to the bottom and @mention a team member to get their input, or simply assign the entire email to them. Missive probably has one of the friendliest and easiest ways to collaborate as a team.
A Missive con is that it has a few "extra" features that seem to be unnecessary, adding clutter to the app. For instance, we're not crazy about the calendar feature within Missive (feels unnecessary) or the ability to "Add Contacts". Your company contacts should be stored within a proper CRM, not siloed within Missive.
Also, while on the surface adding tasks in relation to emails seems handy, we're not sure how useful this is. For instance, assigning an email to a team member, should within itself say enough (aka answer this email). Further, if there are multiple tasks involved in answering a customer support ticket for example, we think it makes more sense to put it into a project management tool instead of trying to handle task management within Missive.
The Missive mobile app easily allows you to triage your inbox on the go. Simple actions like swiping right and left will allow you to either archive emails or snooze for later. You can also customize these actions based on the ones you use most (we'd recommend going into preferences and adding *Assign* if you're using Missive to delegate your inbox).
Missive has native integrations with commonly used tools. Here are some of the most useful integrations we found:
Is Missive worth it? We think Missive is worth it if you're looking for a team email collaboration tool. While you can use it alone (and we think it's better than Gmail or Outlook), the true power of it comes when using it with a team. But, you're a professional that wants the "top standard" when it comes to email solo, we recommend also checking out Superhuman (it's what we use here at Efficient App).
If you're a remote team and need to collaborate on emails often with your team and are currently taking this into Slack discussions or other platforms, Missive is definitely worth trying.
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If you're an established business that wants to focus on improving customer service, we'd recommend using a Help Desk instead (our top pick is Help Scout). With Help Scout, you can set up inboxes that different teams handle, each with their own knowledge bases. You also have the option for customers to message you through Chat on your website.
A Help Desk will come in handy when you're primarily focused on customer support or sales specifically, while Missive is more so for broader team email collaboration among multiple platforms (email, SMS, social media).
We've tracked and verified the above companies are using this software in their team's stack.
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