Groove Product Update: New Features and Upcoming Releases

The Groove Engineering & Product team has been busy building new features and making improvements to their existing products. This update covers what's new, what's in progress, and what's coming soon.

The New Groove Widget

A completely redesigned Groove Widget is now live. This widget is fully customizable, allowing users to brand it with their own colors and logo.

• The new widget includes a clean modern look and branding features.
• It integrates with the Knowledge Base, allowing visitors to search for answers before contacting support.
• It includes a custom question feature, allowing users to create their own custom questions for contact forms.
• In early testing, the new widget with Knowledge Base enabled resulted in a 33% reduction in support requests.
• The new widget is a prerequisite for the upcoming Groove Live Chat product.

Custom Snooze

Custom snooze is now live, allowing users to snooze conversations for any date and time.

• Users can now choose any date and time to snooze conversations.
• The "Last used" option makes it easier to snooze multiple conversations for the same time.
• Old snooze default options have been replaced with more logical options.

Performance and Reliability Improvements

The Groove team has made significant improvements to the Inbox's performance and reliability.

Speed Improvements

• Navigation between conversations and folders is significantly faster, with loading times reduced from 250ms to 85ms.
• Optimizations for larger accounts and older machines have been implemented.

Lazy Loading

• Lazy loading automatically loads the content of the next few emails in the list when navigating between conversations and folders.
• This ensures conversations open almost instantly.

Reliability Improvements

• Fixes for incorrect or out-of-sync folder counts.
• Improved collision detection.
• Resolved issues with dropped or lost drafts and notes.

Groove Interface Polish

The team has also focused on polishing the Groove interface.

• A new snooze indicator shows when a conversation is snoozed in the email list.
• A new snooze option to snooze until Monday.
• Cleaner names and events in conversation actions.
• New conversation headers for conversations marked as spam or moved to trash.
• New trash folder displayed on all accounts.
• Improved design of conversation header action buttons.
• A new indicator of the last message seen in classic view.
• New navigation buttons to easily move between conversations in classic view.
• Improved code highlighting in Knowledge Base articles.

Upcoming Features: Live Chat, Android App, and CRM

In addition to the recently launched features, Groove is also working on several other exciting products and improvements.

Groove Live Chat

Groove Live Chat is in progress and expected to launch in early Q4. The team has a working version internally and is currently adding the final features before the open beta.

Android App

The Groove team is working on native iOS and Android apps. The iOS version is expected to launch by the end of the year, with the Android version following soon after.

Groove CRM

Groove's new CRM features are in development and are expected to be released within the next few months. The underlying work for the CRM is complete, and the team is now focusing on integrating it with the Groove website.

• The CRM will include a customizable sidebar in the Inbox and alongside Live Chat conversations.
• Users will be able to add custom contact or company fields, set field order, and control visibility.
• The CRM is currently being used internally and is expected to be available to all accounts soon.

Other Improvements

Groove is also working on several smaller initiatives, including:

• Draft improvements to ensure drafts are available across all platforms.
• Additional polish and cleanup to improve the visual elements of the application.