With the new reporting functionality, you can:

• Run any of the eight pre-built reports in your browser or export it as a CSV or HTML file.
• Build and save your own custom reports.
• Combine any single-part reports into a multi-part report.
• Schedule any report to be emailed to you and/or any other recipients as a once-off or regular occurrence.

The new reporting functionality is available to Hively customers on paid plans and can be accessed by selecting Reporting under the Actions sub-heading in the main menu. Some more details are included in the ‘Advanced Reporting’ section of this support article.

Within Sharing Tools, you’ll find information on the existing Wow Wall and social media sharing options as well as the new website widgets. The new widgets are the main focus of this post. We have three new widgets:

• The CSAT banner widget
• The CSAT side widget
• The CSAT user widget

CSAT banner widget

The CSAT banner widget features your overall CSAT score and any featured feedback (more on this later) in a banner format. You can see a live example of this widget below and in the footer of the blog.

CSAT side widget

The CSAT side widget is similar to the banner widget but the layout is better suited to being included in narrow parts of a website such as in a side pane. Here’s a live example:

CSAT user widget

The CSAT user widget differs in that the focus is on a specific user. If your employees are featured on your website, this widget would be a great fit there. For example, a Recruitment or Real Estate Agency with a page for each Agent. The widget could be added, for example, below the Agent’s picture.

Adding a widget to your site

To add a widget, go to Sharing Tools under Configuration in the main menu in Hively. From there, click the Get Widget button under the style of widget that you would like to use and copy the widget. Paste the code anywhere in your site that you would like the widget to display.

We’ve provided some default styling for you, but have added IDs to every element in the HTML so that you can change the styling to fit your needs. You can inspect the code for your widget using the developer tools in your browser or mail us for a list of the available IDs for styling. Be sure to add ‘!important’ to any elements you style to override the widget’s own styles. You can inspect the widget in the footer of the blog to see this in action.

Featured feedback

You may have noticed that the widget examples provided in this post feature feedback that we’ve received from customers. To show your own customers’ feedback in your widget:

1. If sharing isn’t already enabled, click the Enable sharing tools button at the top of the Sharing Tools page.
2. After sharing is enabled, raters will be asked for permission for their feedback to be shared when leaving a rating.
3. When a rater gives permission to share a rating, you’ll see a new option to mark that rating as shared for the account or shared for the team member in the menu next to that rating on the My Ratings and All Ratings page.

If you’ve set more than one rating as shared, Hively will pick one at random so that visitors to your site will see a range of quotes when browsing your site. If you haven’t set any ratings to shareable, the widget simply won’t show any quote.

So, those are the new Sharing Tools in a nutshell! We’re loving it as a feature and hope you’ll get value from it too and let us know what you think.

p.s. We’d love to see examples of these widgets in the wild. Send us a mail if you’ve added one to your site.

p.p.s. This feature was on the back burner for some time but we were spurred into action by a customer request to get it out the door. If there’s a feature you’re hoping we’ll implement let us know. You never know, it could be the nudge we need to add it to Hively.

• The main menu has moved to a fixed position on the left of the screen.
• The two column layout that was used on most pages has been replaced with a simpler single column layout.
• The pie charts on the Leaderboard have been replaces with bar charts.
• The new layout uses the full width of the screen on the more detailed pages such as those that include tables.
• The ‘Add & Remove Members’ menu item has been renamed ‘Manage Users’. This is a small change, but given the importance of the page we thought it was worth mentioning to save you from hunting around for it!

Change can take a little time to adjust to but we hope that you find these changes improve your day to day experience with Hively. We’d encourage you to read through the overview sections at the top of many of the pages as you might find that you can benefit from a feature that you had previously overlooked.

Over the next few months we’ll be focusing on refining existing features, so if there’s a bugbear or suggestion you have that’s in keeping with the theme of simplifying and improving Hively’s internals, we’d love to hear about it!

From the Hub page you can:

• Request a rating
• Manage your Rating Request Templates
• See your Rating Request summary statistics including total sends, total ratings and percentages for happy, satisfied and unhappy responses.
• View a list of all the Rating Requests sent from your account. The list is filterable by Team Member, Recipient and Template and you can search by Team Member, Recipient, Subject and Message. Clicking on a Rating Request in the list shows you the full details for that request including the fields on the rating page and a detailed view of the rater’s response, if a response is received.

Hopefully that gives you a feel for what to expect from the Rating Request Hub Page. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Rating Request Templates contain wording and settings that you can use when sending out your Rating Request. We’ve provided a few templates for you that cover some common uses of Rating Requests and customers on the paid plans can add their own templates. If you want to override any of the details of the template you can always do that when sending a request out.

In addition to the new templates, we threw in a few smaller Rating Request related changes into this release:

• Rating Request details can now be viewed directly when viewing a rating.
• You can choose whether to include a user’s profile picture in a Rating Request.
• Rating Requests and Rating Request Templates now have a Preview button so that you can see how your request will look.
• The Rating Request email layout has been updated for improved viewing on mobile devices.

This support article includes details on implementing Rating Request Templates.

We hope this release has you taking a closer look at Rating Requests and you can expect more enhancements over the coming months. If there are any specific enhancements you would like to see included or have some thoughts to share on how you would like to use Rating Requests in your organisation, please let us know as customer suggestions have a big influence on our product development roadmap.

• You can receive an incentive which could be as much as $1,000 USD.
• The company you refer will receive a bonus month on their first month’s premium Hively subscription for free.

The way the incentive works is that you’ll receive 10% of the referred company’s total spend for the lifetime of that account, up to a maximum of $1,000. Payouts are performed once a month via Paypal and you’ll receive a payout every time your total payout reaches $50.

To make a referral just send your referral link on to the person that you would like to refer to us and we’ll take care of the rest. You’ll find your referral link on the Settings page within Hively, where you’ll also be able to enter your Paypal email. If you would like to know more head on over to our Referral Program page.

We really feel that there’s something for everyone with this program and hope you’ll make use of it!

Who Is Ridestore

We are ​Ridestore​. A fast-growing e-commerce company founded over ten years ago. We are selling sportswear and streetwear clothing with a huge focus on snow. If we summarize the journey with one word it would be “change”. But one thing has always stayed the same, the customer focus. Today we are empowering an e-commerce tribe. A tribe in which we have to earn our right to exist. It’s not a job, it’s a connection. No long-term strategies are needed, no bosses making decisions. We know what to do by co-existing with our customers. If you are interested, you can learn more about our value on our company blog: ​inside.ridestore.com.

The Balance

This balance between customer satisfaction and our staff motivation is tough to measure and manage, it takes time and resources, also no one like surveys or being continually asked intimate questions about a certain experience. It’s annoying. That’s why Hively has proved to be such a valuable tool for us to track, measure and plot the customer journey. Revealing gaps, ways to improve or highlighting what we are doing right. The result?- Happy customers, happy staff and a blissful working environment. But how? That’s what we will explore in this article.

The Team

We feel it’s important to create a team of high calibre, like-minded individuals, to be able to best meet the expectations/requirements of our customers. Our European activity has made the creation of this team quite complicated.

Indeed, it was not possible for us to always find rare pearls capable of coming to work in our offices in Gothenburg every day because maybe this wonderful person is based in Italy or Norway or maybe even in Portugal. We understand that innovation can come from all backgrounds and all four corners of the world.

So we decided to create a 100% remote team. This allows us to choose the best people for their mindset, dedication and skill set.
It’s always complicated, especially when we settle on a new market to find the perfect person; and even when we find it, it is even more difficult to understand if their way of working corresponds to our values since we do not speak the same language. It was therefore essential to have the opportunity to understand the quality of the work done. Thanks to Hively, we have the opportunity to see if the effort of our new recruit meets the expectations of our customers.

Each year, our team is growing a little more. It is also important to have the opportunity to assess each other’s performance to provide support and/or training to members, empowering them to grow.

Understanding The Problems & Issues

Identifying what the problems are is key in finding a solution. So what have we observed are the issues that prevent us from offering the best experience for your customers and therefore keep our staff motivated and committed. Frank from our tribe has this to say, “Less anonymous feedback, so we can understand what happened and how to improve”, “it helps to understand if you’re good at what you’re doing, and if you’re not, you can know who is good and ask for help :)”

We place a crucial importance on the relationship we have with our customers. At Ridestore, the customer experience is at the heart of everything we do. It is the customers who, through our team, impact the messages of our brands. They are also the ones who design our new collections through different questionnaires sent before the production of our new models. That’s where Hively seamlessly comes in to play.

Identifying Solutions

Hively has been a tool that’s been integrated into our fundamental customer service and set up with a sense of ease. ​Hively is the simplest way to gather and measure customer feedback, and immediately reward your team members for providing exceptional customer service. Motivate your team and increase customer happiness. Happy customers. Happy teams. ​The program is user friendly, allowing staff to add their personalised rating snippet to every email correspondence with customers, it works on CRM programs as well! Team members can request feedback after any customer interaction, like phone calls, meetings or webinars. This gives us full visibility of the customer journey, while learning what the customers want and how to offer it to them. This is what Julia said “It was nice to see my ratings and also I really liked to read the customers comments, that’s always a little extra! The comments of the customers are so helpful, giving you something to aim for!”

What’s unique is that the engagement stats and ratings are sent to each team member via email- you can see how your colleagues are getting on, together you can work towards a shared goal. Learning from one another, growing and improving to ensure the customer is always at the heart!

The Results

The results are happy staff and happy customers. It creates a work environment that centres around trust. It helps that our products are of the highest quality with awesome perks but if customers have feedback for our products or our tribe, we think of this as a tool for improvement. A way to move forward, change, amend and develop. Of course, there is always room for improvement, Jeppe said “I would like to see some more improvements regarding API-solutions. I really like the team leaderboard and the way that you can get customized notification, but to be able to extract the information from Hively to use in dashboards for the team would be awesome! :)”, but the main point is that just like us, Hively is growing and developing.

Together we will start a revolution of sorts, a world of happy customers, where trade and products are more focused of the clients and not on profits, therefore helping the businesses that place the customer at the forefront to grow and offer an even better service.

Angelica Sykes
Ridestore Content Marketing Team

As well as being able to change the standard field labels you can:

• Add ‘hint’ text under the field to give raters more information about what you’d like them to tell you for that field
• Set your field as a text box to allow for longer answers or comments
• Set your field to be a drop down list to specify a list of answers
• Make any field required or optional for each rating type (Happy, Satisfied or Unhappy)

This opens up a lot of new ways to use Hively to gain a greater understanding of customer sentiment. Here are some examples:

• If you’re looking to understand a particular issue you can create a bespoke set of questions related to your objective and send it out to your customers via Rating Requests. Meanwhile, your Hively email snippet will still show the default rating page to customers if that’s what you would like.
• You can use a custom field set to differentiate between internal and external feedback – a simple drop down list (set as a required field) asking the rater to choose “Customer” or “Employee” is one way to do this. The results for this field can be analysed easily using the Reporting feature.
• If your company uses Net Promoter Score you could add a field to your rating page to collect this. Add a field asking the question “How likely are you to recommend (company name, product etc.)” with a drop down list with options of numbers zero to ten. You can add ‘hint’ text help explain the zero to ten scoring range. Raters will select one of the smiley icons giving you instant Hively feedback as well as a Net Promoter Score which gives you a different method to evaluate customer sentiment. The NPS scores can be collated and analysed via the Reporting feature.

If you’re keen to try out this new feature you can find it in the main Hively drop down menu under “Fields”. This feature opens up many new possibilities and as a result it’s a little more complex to set up than many of our other features so I’d recommend a quick read of our support article to run you through the ins and outs of creating a new field set.

Branded Thanks Buttons are similar to our regular Thanks Buttons, but have the look and feel of the site that they link to. This adds to the visual appeal of the buttons while also making the buttons more familiar to your raters which might make the rater that little bit more likely to go ahead and click the button! Currently, we have branding for FaceBook, Twitter, Yelp and Google. You can have as many buttons as you like and you can choose whether or not these buttons appear on positive, negative or all feedback.

If you’re an admin just log in and choose “Thanks Buttons” from the drop down list at the top right of the page and you’ll find everything you need to customise your Thanks buttons.

Here’s how it might look for your customers when they have finished leaving a rating:

Of course if there’s something else you’d like to see as a feature in the Hively app, we’re always keen to hear your ideas!

Using CodeTwo, the Hively snippet can be added once for all members of your organisation, simplifying the ongoing management of the look, feel and branding of your snippet.

There’s some great information on this partnership over at the CodeTwo blog, so be sure to check Kamil’s post out too.