GrooveHQ.com Review and Alternatives — Efficient Help Desk Tool for Frictionless Customer Support

GrooveHQ.com is a help desk software with the primary goal of helping businesses provide better customer experiences via a unified platform for keeping track of customer emails, ticket management, task assignment, and more.

When it comes to customer support, email is still one of the best ways to reach out to your customers/clients and answer their queries. The issue that businesses most often have with this form of communication is that, without additional tools, it lacks the efficiency that their operations require. It is essential to be able to keep track of every agent and the email that they are responding to at a particular time. Team members have to be able to collaborate, or the entire process can become tedious and less productive.

Help desk software can solve this problem in a variety of ways, such as through task assignment — by eliminating confusion about who is supposed to do what and when.

While your first instinct may be to opt for the solution with the most features, you should know that it tends to be a double-edged sword. In other words, you will be exchanging an oversimplified option for one that might be so overloaded with features that it will undermine your overall productivity. 

What makes GrooveHQ stand out from the competition is its straightforward and intuitive navigation. It is a lot like the email that you’re already familiar with, yet it comes with features that make processes more practical and fruitful. It not only implements email integration but also provides options such as reporting tools and knowledge management. There is also a live chat feature that is going to be added soon.

In this review, we will cover all the crucial features of GrooveHQ so that you can make an informed decision on whether it suits your business’ requirements. We will also present you with alternative solutions, as well as other complementary software that can improve your user experience and boost the overall satisfaction of your customers.

Why You Should Trust Us About GrooveHQ

We at Sell Saas are far from rookies when it comes to outreach and lead generation software. Our CEO, Mathieu Picard, had enormous success with his previous company — AnyLeads. For the past five years, AnyLeads has helped big players such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Coca Cola, and many more generate over 10,000,000 leads. 

Our results prove that we know what we’re talking about. It is, however, up to you to determine the best course of action for your entrepreneurial needs. To help you make an informed choice, we have reviewed more than 20 tools that you should look into as alternatives to GrooveHQ. 

Let’s get down to what Groove’s desk help tool is all about, as well as its strengths and drawbacks.

GrooveHQ Basics

GrooveHQ’s primary goal is to introduce simplicity, personalization, and cooperation to customer support in a single package. Via a user-friendly UI, your team can make use of its features and integrate other tools to provide the best possible customer support.

The good news is that you don’t have to commit to any paid plan right away. The company offers a gracious 120-day free trial. Not only will you be provided with a substantial amount of time to assess the tool before you decide to invest in it, but you’ll also get most of the perks of the Pro pricing plan. 

GrooveHQ.com Homepage

You can find the “Free 120-day Trial” button on the website’s homepage. Click it, and you will be prompted to sign up with an email address. You can also do this directly via Google or Office 365. Next, you’ll have to answer a couple of questions, input your name as well as the name of your organization, and set up a password. When you’re done, you’ll be redirected to the GrooveHQ tool, where you can set up an inbox right away and browse through the features at your disposal.

The tool’s UI is intuitive, but useful prompts will pop up to guide you anyway. For additional information, you can always check GrooveHQ’s Help Center.

After the extensive trial period, you can decide whether you want to keep using the tool with one of its paid plans or look for an alternate solution. The paid options are as follows:

• Starter

• Plus

• Pro

• Company

GrooveHQ Pricing

You can opt for the regular monthly prices or save 20% by choosing an annual plan. There are more affordable options for small and growing teams. If your organization requires the maximum number of inboxes or you need to use all the integrations that the tool has to offer — including Salesforce, HubSpot, and Jira — you will want to stick to the Pro plan. 

For sizable businesses, there is also the Company plan option that includes exclusive features such as unlimited mailboxes, SSO/SAML, enterprise-grade security, and more. If you are interested in this plan, you have to contact GrooveHQ.com via the “Let’s chat” button. On top of it all, there is a very generous offer for early-stage startups. If you apply for this offer and pass the nine questions that will determine whether you are qualified, you will get a 93% discount off the Pro plan.

Before we cover GrooveHQ’s key features in more detail, let us overview some of the essential information about the tool.

GrooveHQ Features

GrooveHQ’s features can be sorted into four main categories:

• Automation

• Personalization

• Reporting

• Integrations

Automation

Automation is what GrooveHQ excels at. It provides a variety of functions that aim to boost the productivity of the entire team by making tasks easy to track and automate. Email is an effective customer support tool, but it is difficult for teams to handle without a system. Groove’s desk help tool makes it possible for every agent to take part in the process by knowing their exact role and being able to collaborate. Every email is automatically ticketed and can be assigned to a particular agent, tagged according to its priority, and appointed a status — open, snoozed, or closed. Everyone can follow what is going on in real-time and leave notes that only team members can view.

Assigning, tagging, and appointing statuses can be automated by using Rules, which are formulated as if-then conditions. This is an efficient solution for saving time by reducing the number of tasks that have to be done manually.

To set up a Rule, you need to:

1. Go to Settings > Conversations > Rules

2. Click on the option to “Add Rule” 

3. Input a name and description

4. Define the conditions

GrooveHQ Rule Conditions and Actions

Image source: GrooveHQ.com

You can add multiple conditions and choose that the Rule gets triggered when either “Any” or “All” of them are met. Then, select the action(s) that you want to take effect in the given context.

GrooveHQ Rules Management

Image source: GrooveHQ.com

It is essential to manage your Rules because they run in the order that you set up. A Rule which is lower on the list might get triggered by an action defined by a Rule closer to the top, so you have to be careful about how you specify the conditions. 

You can either delete a Rule that you no longer need or disable it if you think that you’ll be using it later.

It’s also possible to automate the process of answering the same questions repeatedly by implementing canned replies. Canned replies are predefined answers to the most frequent questions that your customers ask. Combined with Rules, they constitute a streamlined and coherent method for providing top-notch customer support. 

GrooveHQ Canned Reply Setup

To set up a canned reply, you need to:

1. Go to Settings > Conversations > Canned Replies 

2. Click on the option to “Add Canned Reply.” 

3. Set up the category, template name, and email subject

4. Formulate the answer in the text box. 

Once you’ve got your canned replies prepared, you can either manually insert them into an email via the “Insert Reply” button or automate them within a Rule.

GrooveHQ also enables the creation of knowledge bases. You can compose and build a database of support articles that your customers will use to find the answers to the most common questions. It is more than just a simple FAQ because GrooveHQ offers a variety of options for you to organize, customize, and optimize your articles. 

GrooveHQ Knowledge Base Dashboard

GrooveHQ’s dashboard makes it easy to create and manage your articles, customize them according to your brand, and gather valuable insights on how they are performing. 

In the Articles section, you can overview your entire database, check the status of each article, and edit or write a new one. The intuitive editor will help you compose and optimize every piece. For starters, all you need to do is add a subject and description before you get down to writing. Once you’re done with the basics, you can manage essential details such as:

• SEO settings

• Tags with related keywords

• Related articles

• Open graph settings

• Article slugs

The next step is organizing categories. In this section, you can choose the order of articles within a category according to their relevance and performance. You can also control settings like:

• Descriptions of categories

• SEO settings

• Open graph settings

• Category slugs

The Look & Feel section is where you get to personalize your knowledge base on a deeper level. In the theme editor settings, you can customize a variety of options such as:

• Choosing from one of the predefined themes

• Adding navigation links

• Setting up a header background image

• Inserting your logo and favicon

• Picking custom fonts and colors

• Customizing the text of your H1s, H2s, and search inputs

• Implementing custom code

Personalization

Personalization is another crucial aspect of customer support. According to Hubspot's report, in 70% of cases, a customer’s journey depends on their evaluation of how they feel your organization is treating them. Clients want to be recognized as individuals valuable to your business. For that to happen, you need to get close to them and earn their trust and loyalty. GrooveHQ makes it possible to personalize your customer approach in a couple of ways. 

For starters, you can personalize your auto-replies. 

GrooveHQ Auto-Reply Personalization

Image source: GrooveHQ.com

To activate auto-replies, you need to:

1. Go to Settings > Conversations > Mailboxes 

2. Toggle the option “on” or “off” 

You can then edit the default subject and response, as well as insert variables. A variable will automatically add a detail to your message when it gets triggered. Remember to click “Save Mailbox” once you’ve set everything up.

It is important to note that auto-replies are one of the features that are only included in a paid plan, and you won’t be able to use them during your free trial.

To get up close and personal with your customers, you can use GrooveHQ’s options to communicate via phone, chat, and social media as well. This is, however, only possible through its integrations —  with Facebook, Twitter, Slack, JustCall, etc. — so you have to opt for at least the Plus pricing plan. The Starter plan has no integrations, stripping the software down to an enhanced email service.

Reporting

GrooveHQ’s reporting feature primarily covers inbox and knowledge base reports. 

GrooveHQ Inbox Reporting

Image source: GrooveHQ.com

You can check the statistics for your mailboxes altogether or individually. Under the “Conversations” tab, you can overview all the metrics relevant to the volume and different types of exchanges with customers. Right below is a table showing the busiest times for incoming messages. You can see the performance of individual team members in the “Team Leaderboard” section, while the “Productivity Report” displays the efficiency of your overall customer support. “Agents” and “Teams” reports summarize workload and performance statistics.

GrooveHQ Knowledge Base Reporting

Image source: GrooveHQ.com

Under the “Knowledge Base” reports tab, you can view all the relevant metrics for your articles, such as:

• Percentage of users who performed a search

• Percentage of users who viewed an article

• Total visitors

• Total visits

• Total articles viewed

• Average time on article

Below, you can see the lists of your most viewed articles, most searched terms, and failed searches.

Integrations

GrooveHQ Integration

GrooveHQ comes with 40+ integrations, the most popular being HubSpot, Salesforce, Jira Software, and GitHub.

As for other native integrations, it includes Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Slack, Trello, and more. To top it off, you can connect with Zapier and pick your favorites out of thousands of other apps. Check out the full list of GrooveHQ integrations here.

GrooveHQ Drawbacks

GrooveHQ is a desk help tool that does a decent job trying to be the middle ground between simplistic and oversaturated. This doesn’t mean that it does so without flaw. For software with so much effort put into its user-friendly UI and practical features that are intended to make the whole customer support process frictionless, it tends to be unduly slow. This can be a dealbreaker, particularly for businesses that use a lot of HTML in their emails. 

The pricing is higher than it might seem at first. It may be affordable if you’re running a small team, but it is expensive for larger organizations because the listed costs are per agent. The current offer for a 120-day trial is exceptionally generous, but once it’s over, you’re most likely going to have to opt for the Pro paid plan — unless you are willing to downgrade and lose some of the features you’ve been using. The Starter plan isn’t worth investing in because it has zero integrations which undermines the tool’s purpose considerably.

Why You Should Consider White-Label Software

GrooveHQ claims that it provides white labeling with its Pro plan. What you get is only stripping the knowledge base feature of its logo so that you can present it under your brand. If you are looking for actual white-label software, you should check out some of the products that we have to offer.

Lucky for you, we at Sell SaaS have got a variety of white-label tools that you can both use and resell.

Our chatbot widget automates chat with your visitors and collects essential information about them that you can use to generate leads. You can choose whether you want the info to be sent to your email, mobile device, or straight into a Slack channel. 

We are yet to see what GrooveHQ’s live chat feature is going to be like, but we can contend that an automated chatbot that collects customer data is a superior option. With a large number of clients, automation becomes unavoidable. This is when predefined events, conditions, and triggers can solve a lot of the user issues that human agents don’t have the time to manage.

Sell SaaS doesn’t require subscribing to a paid plan. You get to choose a tool — or the whole bundle — for free. Use our software and resell it at your price. You should try it because reselling digital products is a proven lucrative venture. The only obligation you’ve got is to share a percentage of your profits with us. The more you sell, the more revenue goes to you.

Beside the chatbot widget, you might want to consider some of our other software, such as: