Service is at the heart of business. No matter what it is you do, taking care of your customers is a big part of your success. So what happens when you start outgrowing your current capabilities or are ready to scale up? You graduate from everyday service tools to something more powerful.
The HubSpot Service Hub has filled that void for many of our clients. You're probably thinking, "Wait, I thought HubSpot was just a marketing platform. What does it have to do with my customer support?" Well, surprise, surprise, HubSpot is actually much more than just an inbound marketing software. In fact, Service Hub is a pillar in HubSpot's ecosystem that has all the capabilities you need to streamline your customer service processes and make workflows more efficient, plus a whole lot more. Here are all the things we think help businesses streamline service and delight their customers.
Main components of Service Hub
Chatflows
If service is the heart, then communication is the blood pumping through your brand. It's what gets your message out and engages your customers so they're interested in what you offer. But communication isn't a one-way street. As your customers go along their journey, they're going to have questions, and what better way to offer unique and helpful customer support than by providing quick and accurate answers? I know, ‘Chatflows’ was just about to roll off your tongue (insert sly smile).
Let’s dive into a couple of cases in which chatflows could be helpful to the support team.
- Capture More Prospects: It can help you capture prospects who are looking for more information about a product or service you offer. One thing many websites feature is a chat box with a conversational bot that can provide answers in real time based on provided topics or questions. This is an easy way to give a prospect exactly what they need exactly when they need it to continue to nurture them along their buyer’s journey.
- Customer Support: You can also use chatflows as a customer service tool. Chatflows can help triage support requests and push them into a pipeline that makes it easier for your customer support team to prioritize follow-ups. This can free up a lot of space in your ticketing pipeline by moving requests into inboxes or over to a chatbot instead of relying on support tickets. It can also help to significantly improve your response times.
A pro tip to get the most out of your chatflows is to connect them to your company's Facebook messenger. This way, any message directed to your Facebook page will pop up in your HubSpot inbox where it's easy to find and respond to.
Inbox
Speaking of inboxes, that's another fun feature of Hubspot's Service Hub. The HubSpot inbox houses all of your communications in one central location. Yes, we mean all. Your conversations inbox, team emails, outside emails and chats are all at your fingertips so you never miss a single point of contact. Gone are the days of emails or customer questions falling through the cracks, along with their business.
As an added bonus in this particular customer service software, you can even answer all your communications right from the inbox. No matter where the message originated (whether it be Facebook, a website form, or chatflow), you can easily type a response right on your own dashboard and it'll send it out through appropriate channels. How's that for making customer relationships easy?
Service ticket pipeline
Automation has revolutionized the marketing world, so why can’t it do the same for customer support? Enter, the ticketing pipeline. Having a service ticketing pipeline that allows you to automate responses and routing so everything goes to the right person the first time can be invaluable. Not only does it help to boost your customer satisfaction, but it also helps to eliminate wasted time and energy among your support team.
The service ticket pipeline helps create efficiencies in your customer service and fosters better communication between team members by using automation such as auto-responses with snippets — which autoload quick replies similar to email templates — or automatically assigning certain tasks to certain people. For example, if a query is marked as an IT issue, it can get sent straight to the IT team instead of being dumped into a bucket with all the other various help desk tickets. This alone can prevent tickets from getting lost in the sheer volume of requests and make the overall process easier to manage.
Knowledgebase
Keeping information organized within a CRM can get confusing, but keeping it in folders somewhere can be even worse. That's why Hubspot's Service Hub includes your very own Knowledge Base: a one-stop safety deposit box for all the relevant information about your products and services. New customers will always have questions. In fact, even your existing customer base will have questions! Keeping the answers to these FAQs in one central location makes it easy for your team to grab them when needed or make them proactively available to customers.
Like with chatflows, knowledge base can work on two levels.
- It allows you to create resources for your customers so they can access the information they need on their own. Let's face it, in the age of smartphones and smart watches, everyone wants their information right now. We're all accustomed to having everything we need at our fingertips, and most of us don't want to reach out to a sales team or customer support representative and wait for a response. With HubSpot’s knowledge base, you can track your customers' habits with analytics to see which articles or problems they search for most and get a good picture of common problems. This allows you to create articles, white pages, or downloadable materials explaining how to solve those issues, thus creating a type of self-service troubleshooting platform.
- The knowledge base has benefits for your customer service team too. By providing answers before customers even go to your support team, you can significantly cut down on repeated questions and the volume of requests that come through forms, chatflows, or via email. So now, your support staff can focus on problems that need more hands-on attention and customers who are looking for a little TLC.
As an added bonus, you can use the knowledge base in other areas of the HubSpot CRM. Use it in your marketing hub or sales hub to provide your team with easily accessible knowledge to further empower their outreach efforts. Its functionality can be beneficial across the board.
NPS surveys
We've all used NPS surveys at one time or another, maybe as a free tool or as a paid subscription. It's a great feedback tool to get a pulse on customer satisfaction and common issues. The benefit of using these in HubSpot instead of through a third party is that you have endless customization options. You can include the survey as an email or directly on your webpage, choose what kinds of questions to ask, how people can rate you, and even include a section for comments. Then, the data is all put into a reporting dashboard within the Service Hub and you can easily scan them for great reviews and testimonials to include on your website or in your marketing.
HubSpot’s NPS Surveys are an easy way to capitalize on valuable information from your customer. More and more customers are realizing the benefit of providing feedback to a brand and by not offering that opportunity you’re missing out on golden nuggets that could reinforce brand loyalty as well as improve the next customer’s experience.
Who is it right for?
By now, you've probably noticed the HubSpot Service Hub is a double-sided coin. And, yet again, there are two answers to the question of ‘Who is it right for?’.
- eCommerce — eComm businesses are purely customer-service based and pairing with a customer service platform is like peanut butter and jelly, they just go together. Service Hub’s ticketing pipeline is an easy way to track customer service requests. This might be something like help desk tickets for SaaS products, common questions for retail items or even general questions about payments and shipping.
- Project Management — Bet you didn’t see this one coming. Yes, Service Hub can be a great way to manage team projects or internal processes/product launches, etc. Service Hub can help organize things like onboarding by creating a workflow that automatically advances new hires through the training process. You can also use this to track events or certain product launches your team is managing. It's an easy way to become your own brand promoter without having to spend any extra time fostering those leads.
Levels of Service Hub
The subscription levels and pricing for HubSpot vary, but to get in with all the features we mentioned, you'll want to look at Service Hub Professional. You'll get some great options with this plan, including:
- Knowledge base
- Chatflows
- Logged-in visitor identification
- Customer feedback surveys
- Ticketing Automation and Help desk automation
- 1:1 video creation
If you're looking for something even more powerful than this, you can consider the Enterprise plan. It's the next step up from Professional and includes a few extra features that further help you manage your team. You can do things like set and track team goals, create playbooks that outline specific sales or support processes, enjoy a single sign-on for your whole team and assign user roles so everyone only has to focus on their own tasks.
Happy HubSpotting!
