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Problems HubSpot Service Hub Helps You Solve

Published January 10, 2022 By Klim Lugovtsov

Customers tend to have high expectations when it comes to queries or needing help, both in terms of quality and response time. If your company has a customer service team, you know how challenging it can be to keep on top of all your customer’s requests and maintain customer satisfaction. According to a report by The Ombudsman Services, UK businesses lose around £37 billion each year due to poor customer service. When customers have a bad experience with a company, around a third will respond by no longer purchasing from that brand and switching to their rivals. If you don’t want your business to become a part of these statistics, read on below to see how HubSpot’s Service Hub can help you to overcome the most common customer service challenges.

What is the HubSpot Service Hub?  

The HubSpot Service Hub is a customer service software package that helps organisations to stay on top of their customer support enquiries and align their team’s efforts in the process. The Service Hub includes, among other support tickets, feedback and survey tools, automation and e-mail templates, dashboards and reporting, chatbot and conversation tools and a knowledge base. You can use Service Hub as a standalone customer service software or as a part of the full HubSpot CRM platform. 

Poor response time and inefficient communication 

Do you know your business’ average response time? According to a report by HubSpot, 90% of customers rate an ‘immediate response’ as important or very important when they have a customer service question. 60% of customers define ‘immediate’ as ten minutes or less. But, if your company are like most others, you probably have other things to do than sit around and wait for customers to enquire about a problem. Your service team may also be spending unnecessary time writing the same e-mails repeatedly which can delay your response time. 

Another frustration point for many customers is inconsistent or lack of communication between service agents. If your team does not have a full overview of open tickets and issues, what has been said and when the customer may end up having to explain themselves repeatedly which can cause frustration. 

Solution: Tickets and e-mail templates

The solution for keeping track of your customer enquiries is the Tickets Pipeline. Tickets represent a request for help from your customers or users (e.g., something’s not working right, and someone needs help). The HubSpot tickets tool allows you to track these customer issues, regardless of whether they came in via a phone call, an e-mail, or live chat. The tickets tool also organises related notes, documents, and conversations in one place. 

 The Ticket Pipeline keeps track of your customer interactions as they progress over time. The tickets tool includes a default support pipeline that you can use to manage your ticket statuses. You can also set up custom ticket pipelines and statuses to define a simple business process around responding to your customers. The automation tool keeps your ticket statuses up to date in HubSpot and helps your service team to remember and understand the next action to take with a ticket. 

If you have a lot of tickets to keep track of, you can use the pipeline to track any progression. Here’s an example of how a customer service agent might use ticket stages. 

 

HubSpot interface for managing a service ticket, showing ticket details, email composition window, and associated contact information.
HubSpot ticket pipeline view showing columns for New Ticket, Working On It, Waiting on Technician, and Closed

Save time and make sure your communication is consistent with e-mail templates. With templates, you can save repetitive e-mail content as an e-mail template. Before sending a template, you can personalise and tailor the content to your recipients. The e-mail templates will not only ensure that your communication is consistent but will also free up time for your service agents who will no longer need to write the same e-mail multiple times. Manual work can be further reduced by using sequences to set up task reminders, or personalised e-mails that automatically go out to customers at a time that suits them.  

Lack of customer feedback 

Forbes research indicates that it is five times more expensive to attract a new customer than retain an existing one. Still, many companies focus more on acquiring new customers and tend to forget to focus on their existing clients and investing in retention through customer feedback.  By investing in customer feedback, you can identify areas to grow, capitalise on what you're doing well and cultivate a more positive relationship with your customers. 

Solution: Customer Feedback Surveys 

HubSpot Service Hubs feedback survey feature allows you to collect all the customer information you need. You can send your survey via web link or e-mail and efficiently share insights with your teams. 

HubSpot will help you to choose the most appropriate feedback tool and delivery method for your specific goals so you can increase response rates and build a baseline of data over time. Service Hub’s built-in feedback dashboards also monitor the performance of your surveys right after sending accrue all your insights into one view. 

Depending on what kind of information you are looking for, HubSpot has three different types of surveys available: 

  • Customer satisfaction (CSAT) measures customer satisfaction with a business, purchase, or interaction 
  • Customer effort score (CES) measures how much effort customers put in to interacting with your business 

  • Net promoter score (NPS) is a benchmark for customer loyalty that tells you how likely your customers are to recommend your business to someone they know 
Customer loyalty survey dashboard displaying various metrics

Lack of resources to provide 24/7 customer support  

Enabling your customers to ask questions 24/7 can be a necessary option, but you don’t want your customer team to be working day and night to reply to your chat. You also don’t want them to be spending too much time answering basic questions when they could be spending their time helping your customers solve real problems.  

Solution: HubSpot Conversations and Knowledge base 

With Service Hub’s live chat, your customers can talk to a real-life person who can answer their questions in real-time. For out of office hours, you can use Service Hub’s chatbot tool to answer simple questions or direct your customers to the right place on your website. The great thing about the conversations tool is that all inboxes will be gathered in one place, making it easier for teams to pick up on open conversations. 

Customers almost always prefer to find the answers to their questions themselves. A study by Forrester confirms that customers prefer knowledge bases over all other self-service channels. With the Service Hub Knowledge base, you can turn customers’ most frequently asked support questions and tickets into a search optimised library of help articles and documentation. You will benefit from a knowledge base that saves you from answering the same questions repeatedly. Moreover,  your customers can instantaneously find what they need, when they need it. 

Other great features of the Service Hub include: 

  • Reporting - use Reporting dashboards to view data on ticket volume and response times, knowledge base usage, customer feedback, and more. Using the Reporting tool will help you to figure out areas for improvement 
     
  • Automation - use automation for recurring work such as repetitive e-mails, assigning ticket statuses, updating properties, and adding tasks. This way, you’ll have more time to solve problems and delight your customers
  • Goals – measure your teams’ performance with specific quotas for each user or team 
     
  • Forecasting – create detailed and customised forecasts for renewals and upgrades based on data from your contacts database

Conclusion 

Happy customers are the key to business success. Without satisfied customers, you won't see any sales. As a result, an efficient customer service process is absolutely integral. If you fail to take the customers' views into account in your business, it's likely your business will not be successful. HubSpot's Service Hub has a lot to offer to help you address some prevalent customer service problems. Using a combination of these features will help you to align your business operations across the entire organisation, improve your customer service and break down silos of information between your sales, marketing and service team.