Hiver
/
2024–25
Data from CRMs, project tools and e-commerce apps next to every support email, so agents stop switching tabs.
Result
Mean time to resolve fell 35% on tickets once agents started using a connector.
Company
Hiver
Year
2024–25
Role
Sole designer · with 1 PM, 1 EM, 5 engineers and 2 QA
The problem
To answer one email, a Hiver support agent left Gmail, opened Salesforce, HubSpot, ClickUp or Shopify to look up the customer, the ticket or the order, and copied the details back into the reply. On every ticket. It slowed resolution down and led to inconsistent answers.
In Video: User steps from opening a ticket to getting context from another tool
One feature, two users with opposite needs
Agents consume. The customer's data from those tools should simply be there next to the email, and acting on it shouldn't mean opening another tab.
Admins configure. Which connector, which mailboxes, which roles, which fields. Their fear is showing the wrong data to the wrong team.
The 35% came from the agent side. But agents only get that experience once an admin has set it up, so setup had to be easy enough for admins to do on their own.
Agents: the whole workflow inside the email
Agents never need to leave the conversation to see or act on data from their other tools. At launch:
Quick Access. Cards from each connected app sit in the side panel next to the email, showing only the fields their role allows. For a CRM, that means Contact, Account, Lead, Opportunity and Case cards.
Act without switching. Agents search for and link records, and create and update them from the panel, from a ClickUp ticket to a Lead or Opportunity in a CRM. Linked records stay visible to teammates who open the email later.
Added after launch, building on the same panel:
Smart previews pick up references in the email, such as an invoice number, and show the matching record on hover, so agents find the right record faster.
Sync conversation logs the email thread to the CRM record, with a clear status showing when it's synced.
In Video: Agent editing a ClickUp card from within the Gmail ticket
Admins: making setup possible
v1: Custom Connectors (internal). The first version, which I shared with our Customer Success team before launch, gave admins a library of connectors to set up themselves. I designed in a live preview, which shows admins exactly what agents will see, and an inline test request that confirms the connection works before they commit.
In Image: Version 1 setup screen with the preview panel and the successful test request.
What Customer Success caught before launch. Their feedback showed that even with a library, admins still had to fill in too many technical fields, such as base URLs and client credentials. Most admins aren't API experts. So we pre-filled those fields for every connector in the library, starting with the most-requested apps: Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify and NetSuite. Setup supports both OAuth 2.0 and bearer tokens, because different apps and IT teams have different security rules. The feature became “Apps”, and by the time I left it sat under “Integrations” alongside Hiver's developer APIs.
In Image: Final version of admin setup
The hard part: who sees what
Connecting an app puts customer data in front of every agent, and different teams in the same company need different data. The challenge was giving admins precise control without making setup confusing.
Three layers of access. Admins choose which shared inboxes, which user roles, and which fields can see connector data.
Per card or all at once. Visibility can be set separately for each card (Contact, Account, Lead, Opportunity, Case) or applied to all cards in one go, so simple setups stay simple.
Role hierarchy built in. Selecting a role automatically includes the roles above it, so an admin can't accidentally leave out more senior people.
Two steps, not one. I split setup into who can see each card, then which fields appear on it, so admins make one kind of decision at a time.
In Image: Visibility and field configuration, with the role picker and per-card settings highlighted
In the final version, admins go from library to live in five steps: pick a connector, authenticate, choose visibility, preview and test, save.
When things go wrong
A panel that pulls live data from other apps can break in three places. Each one got its own state, so an agent knows what happened instead of staring at an empty card.
Expired login. When an agent's connection expired, the card showed “Authentication required” so they could sign in again.
Data that wouldn't load. If a card couldn't fetch data from the app, it said “Could not load the data” with a Retry button on the card.
Failed sync. If an email thread didn't log to the CRM record, a “Sync failed” status appeared at the top of the conversation, so the agent knew it hadn't saved.
In Image: Expired login, data that couldn't load, and a failed sync. Screens recreated from my designs.
What I rejected
I rejected showing the agent view only after saving, and rejected testing as a separate step afterwards. Admins shouldn't have to save and hope.
Results
Agents: 35% faster resolution. Mean time to resolve fell 35% on tickets where an agent used a connector, compared with the 3 months before connectors launched. The data team measured it across mid-market and enterprise accounts that adopted connectors.
Admins: 8 ready-made connectors at launch, chosen from the most-requested apps, with more added later while I was on the team.
North star metric: accounts with more than one active field configured. One field means an admin connected something; more than one means they set it up to be useful for agents.
What I learned
The agent result depended on the admin experience. Agents only saw the benefit once admins could set connectors up confidently, which meant doing the technical work for them, letting them check their setup before saving, and giving them access control that's precise without being confusing.
