HubSpot Service Hub: The Key to Delighting your Customers

The way people interact with businesses has drastically changed in the past 15 - 20 years. No longer are they tolerating interruptive bids for their attention -- in fact, they’ve got very good at blocking out the noise and flat out ignoring messages that simply don’t interest them. 

With that in mind, HubSpot’s goal was founded on the notion that people don’t want to be interrupted; they want to be helped and understood - not much to ask for right? The inbound methodology aims to deliver the right message, at the right time to the right people, and with HubSpot’s Service Hub, not only will it make your life easier; but you’ll also make your audience feel like you can read their mind (not in a creepy way, more in a “I know you, I care about you, and this is what I recommend” Inbound kinda way!”) 

We’re also less patient and expect answers right then and there. How often would you say you look forward to calling customer support?! No matter what your concern is, probably never - no one enjoys waiting on the line for ages! Instead, we tend to rely on Q&As, live chats, and reviews. What those have in common is the human feel - our customers demand conversational, contextual, human interactions. 

Customers' expectations have gone up, so we’ve got to pick up our game too. Providing poor customer service will prove more detrimental than you might've expected. In fact, 60% of consumers stop doing business with a brand due to a poor customer service experience -- don’t want to be losing that chunk of customers do we? Plus, happy customers are the new secret to growth - they will keep your wheel spinning! Service Hub will help you turn average customers into active promoters. You help them and they’ll help you! 

Let’s get stuck into the tools that allows you to deliver exceptional customer service.

HubSpot created Service Hub to enhance our interactions with our audience. Its goal is to continually provide value throughout the customer journey via simple communication tools and efficient support. With the tools in Service Hub, you can finally build a frictionless customer service experience. Think of Service Hub as the ultimate help desk with built in automation and reporting so you can turn chats and emails into tickets that are easily organised, prioritised, and tracked. 

1. Conversations

Customers are after various ways they can get in touch with you and they tend to prefer fast support like chat and socials. Having only one point of contact and isolating support to a single channel, we’re thinking phone calls here discourage engagement and we definitely don’t want that. That being said, juggling different channels can be a tricky affair. How will you remember what you’ve discussed? After all you’ve probably got 1000s of interactions and impressions happening every week! That’s where Conversations is your right hand.

Conversations is a stand alone tool which brings together all of your communication channels - email inboxes, live chat, forms and Facebook Messenger into a universal inbox. Because HubSpot does integration like no one else, it’ll complement your CRM too. Each conversation is enriched by the HubSpot CRM, so you have contextual information about the customer's history with your company. In that way, you’ve got context about who you’re talking to and what you know about them from a marketing, sales and service standpoint. 

2. Help Desk & Tickets

As your business and database grows, it becomes harder to keep track of who’s reached out to you. Queries get lost amongst the various channels you offer support on and it all becomes a big mess very quickly. 

No more forgetting with Tickets - this handy tool allows you to track, order, collaborate and consistently hit the mark. Tickets can be generated automatically and can be routed to the right agent and reported on. 

The ticket object can be associated with a contact so all your teams are able to not only see if a customer has an open issue but also help out where needed in a timely fashion. Tickets is especially handy when it comes to upsells - say you notice an open ticket and immediately see an opportunity to help solve their problem through an add on? Pretty cool right?

3. Knowledge base

Being on the support team can become quite repetitive. You can spend a lot of time answering the same question over and over again -- it’s frustrating and not a very productive use of your time plus it doesn’t help the customer if they have to reach out to you about a “common” problem time and time again. How often have you found yourself in a situation asking yourself “surely somebody else has encountered this problem before! Surely there must be some page on their site to help me deal with this issue right away!” 

What you can do is sort through your tickets and identify patterns. Find trends in tickets and turn them into simple, well structured articles on your site that automatically index on Google. Avoid the tedious tasks and offer a greater customer experience - kill two birds with one stone. 

With Knowledge base, you can swiftly create articles on “most frequently asked” topics and optimise them to rank high on Google. You can even see valuable insights on a reporting dashboard to identify how well your articles are at solving customers’ issues and deflecting tickets. 

4. Customer feedback

Taking on board feedback from your customers shows that you value their opinion. By involving them in shaping your business they also feel more attached to your company (which means they won’t want to leave and we love that for you, for us, for everybody!) 

Along with word of mouth, reviews and ratings from real customers are more influential than any ad you can put out there. So take the time to know what your customers think of you and how they’d like you to do business with them. 

You can start customer feedback with a series of surveys on a consistent basis to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback. Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is another goodie used to gauge the loyalty of your customers. Needless to say the higher the score, the better. With NPS you’re also measuring how likely they are to recommend your services -- all about that positive word of mouth. 

Once you know who your biggest promoters are, you can use that information to build customer marketing campaigns that help you spread the word about your product or service. You can ask them to write reviews on your website and get them involved in user generated content. 

With a whole bunch of new and insightful data to analyse, HubSpot created a shiny new service reporting dashboard to show you at one glance how your team is performing. What doesn’t get measured can’t be improved, so let’s see what the metrics are. 

a) Tickets 

Find out where tickets originate from, how long it takes your support team to get back to queries, ticket status and how many tickets you’ve got at any point in time. These reports will give you real indication as to how effectively you’re getting through queries, trends in response times and the channels that are working best. 

b) Knowledge base

As you put out more content and expand, you’ll start collecting data on the number of views, your top performing articles, what people are searching for, and more. Use this data to strategically audit your library of articles. Maybe expand upon certain helpful articles and turn them into an eBook, or update ones that lack traction. 

c) Customer feedback 

With survey data, HubSpot will be able to put together a number of really important reports such as: NPS over time, feedback over time, and feedback breakdown by sentiment. In that way, you’ll get a deeper insight into your customer opinion and have an overview of the health of your customer base. These metrics are good to keep an eye on frequently and take action as you go. However, bear in mind that results and improvement do take time before becoming noticeable -- so don’t give up. 

There you have it! With a positive customer experience being one of the most crucial factors towards loyalty, ensuring your customers stay happy is key. The best marketing money can buy is a customer who will promote your business for you — one who's loyal to your company, promotes your business through word-of-mouth marketing, and advocates for your brand and product or service. And for that to happen, you want to invest in getting to know your customers better and making their journey with you as smooth and seamless as possible. Give HubSpot Service Hub a crack -- you'll see where it's at.