Heymarket Ships Shared Inboxes For Teams On The Go

Heymarket Ships Shared Inboxes For Teams On The Go

Something’s broken when you get a “you up?” text message — from your customer.
 
It’s awesome your customer feels personally connected to your business enough to text you. But, no one is doing business at 1am on a Tuesday — and not from their personal inbox.
 
Scaling text messaging for businesses, and the personal relationships therein, can be tricky. With the right set of software, you can have all the good parts of texting your customers without waking up to text messages in the middle of the night.
 
Heymarket co-founder, Amit Kulkarni, founded Heymarket to scale messaging for businesses. This was after Amit got a text from the person who delivered his furniture. The delivery driver was apologizing for last night. This text was not meant for Amit. But, The Heymarket Team figured they could code snafus like this one out of existence.
 

Building Texting For Businesses

The Heymarket team built a web, iOS, and Android app that lets you treat SMS like email. You can segment users, build message templates, schedule SMS campaigns, and instantly reply to customers from the app. Initially, that’s how the users interacted with the app. Then the team saw some, shall we say, edge cases.
 
As Heymarket got more popular, Amit saw users doing unexpected things with the app. He was getting support tickets from single users asking how they could share their personal auth tokens with other users. Those auth tokens are personal for a reason, they’re meant for only you. They’re not supposed to be shared.
 
But, the shared auth tokens was only a presenting problem. The real underlying problem customers were trying to solve was sharing messages, templates and contacts with other team members so they could all respond to customers with a quickness.
 
Amit saw people using  Heymarket in “creative” ways as an opportunity. The team got to work building an SMS inbox not just for individuals doing business, but for teams doing business. A few months later they had the shared inbox.
 

From Shared Auth Tokens to Shared Inboxes

Heymarket’s shared inbox lets teams collectively monitor and respond to texts coming into their business through their Twilio-powered numbers (all without sharing one users’ authentication tokens).
 
Let’s say one employee is texting a customer using the shared inbox. The customer poses a question that the employee doesn’t have the expertise to answer. From within the inbox, that employee can reassign the customer’s question to another person at the company who has an answer. No email pings, desk knocks, or Slack spam.
 
This “many hands make light work” approach lets Heymarket’s customers respond faster to inbound leads, customer questions, and requests – and from anywhere.
 
“You can’t get as much done if you’re chained to your desk,” says Amit. “You need to be able to respond to customers’ inbound requests from anywhere.” With this philosophy in mind, the Heymarket team focused on making their mobile app powerful and dead simple. Team members can respond to inbound messages from the app, and templatize their responses within the app with a long press. At scale, it’s the little UX decisions like these that will save team members valuable time.
 
Since launching only a few years ago, Heymarket is now powering a litany of different businesses from a small army of SMBs to leading motorcycle retailers to nationwide flower delivery services. They all have a common goal to improve the speed and quality of their customers’ experience. Heymarket hopes to help them get there.