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Whether you’re a small business owner without a dedicated customer service team or an enterprise company with a multi-person department, delivering exceptional support throughout the customer lifecycle is a big job.
It’s especially overwhelming in today’s fast-paced society, where consumers expect instantaneous solutions and 24/7 support services through phone, email, text, and online chat.
And keeping consumers happy matters一a lot.
According to data gathered by HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales enablement platform, a staggering three out of every five customers will abandon your business after just one negative experience.
On the other hand, loyal customers tend to spend more and make purchases more frequently compared to new customers. For example:
- A five percent increase in customer retention can increase revenue by 25 percent to 95 percent.
- Existing customers are also more likely to refer their friends and family一introducing new customers to your brand for free.
In this challenging landscape, HubSpot’s Service Hub is the essential solution. It helps businesses optimize customer service and support efforts, ensuring seamless integration of various communication channels and data management.
By harnessing the power of Service Hub, businesses can go above and beyond customer expectations, fostering loyalty and achieving long-term success.
Service Hub for Customer Support & Service Excellence
Service Hub is part of HubSpot’s suite of integrated hubs that comprise the broader HubSpot CRM platform. Other components include CMS Hub, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, and most recently, Commerce Hub.
The hub is designed with support and customer service teams in mind. It includes several tools that help deliver seamless service and delivery and facilitate customer growth. They include:
- A help desk consisting of a shared inbox, ticketing system, automation, and reporting.
- Self-service tools, including a knowledge base and customer portal.
- Customer feedback suite with industry-standard and custom surveys.
Help Desk
Service Hub’s Help Desk empowers your team to manage customer issues faster and more efficiently. It helps streamline the resolution process and uncover insights to improve the customer experience.
Shared Inbox & Ticketing
Help Desk provides a shared inbox dashboard across the support team, enabling customer communication via live chat, email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, chatbots, and form submissions.
A customizable sidebar enables the team to keep track of ticket management and issue resolution in real time. Everyone can check ticket status, where it is in the queue, ticket volume, or agent response time. Inquiry routing to your team members ensures the right reps respond to those meant for them.
Service Hub’s Ticketing tool enables your team to record, organize, and track all customer issues within a single ticketing dashboard一visible to everyone. You can set up different ticket pipelines for different issues, such as support inquiries and onboarding, and customize your dashboard view with filters for High Priority Tickets or SLA breach risk issues, for example.
Automation
You can even add automation to create and update ticket status and customize ticket properties. Automation can ensure the highest priority tickets get resolved first, trigger a deal, enroll customers into nurture sequences, or streamline customer feedback, all based on support ticket status.
Conversations
HubSpot’s Conversations tool integrates seamlessly with Help Desk, leveraging AI to enhance customer service experiences and streamline team workflows.
This tool acts as a centralized portal, optimizing communication with both contacts and team members in one shared space. Within Conversations, there are distinct inboxes for different needs, such as customer support, sales communications, and account management. Each inbox can filter conversations by team member, channel, status, ticket, and more.
For customer service and support staff, this integration is a game-changer. It enables easy access to relevant contact record data and ticket creation directly from Conversations, streamlining intake workflows. Moreover, team members can effortlessly switch communication channels within the same conversation thread—from live chat to email, for instance—adding documents, meeting links, knowledge base articles, or videos as needed. An AI-powered content assistant can also help reps edit and change the tone of their messaging.
Another notable feature is the tool’s AI-generated conversation summaries that enable smoother hand-offs between agents and recap progress for customers.
Finally, HubSpot is currently testing an innovative addition: GPT-powered chatbots capable of handling basic service issues. The feature is still in beta, and interested users can sign up on the waitlist to experience firsthand how this can further optimize customer service operations.
Reporting
Service Hub offers several options for creating customer service reports. These help you understand how well you're meeting your goals, identify staffing needs, assess areas that need improvement, and develop ways your team can become even more efficient.
Standard reports include conversation totals, average response time, most-viewed knowledge base assets, SLA breakdowns by rep, and more. You can even create rep-specific dashboards to use for coaching.
By analyzing these reports, you're gaining actionable insights that can inspire real change in how your customers view your company and produce happier, more successful customers overall.
CRM Integration
Service Hub’s Help Desk integrates with HubSpot’s powerful CRM platform, automatically tracking every customer detail and interaction. It offers contact context when you need it, boosting alignment between marketing, sales, and service.
Altogether, the Help Desk suite minimizes the chance of a customer issue slipping through the cracks, reduces the need for manual data entry, and helps your team spend more time assisting customers.
Self-Service Tools
When faced with a product or service issue, most people will first try to resolve it themselves. In fact, citing data from Zendesk, HubSpot indicates 67 percent of customers prefer self-service solutions to speaking with a support agent. As such, providing a robust suite of self-service tools gives customers the information they want, frees up your customer service agents, and saves on staffing costs, making it a win, win, win. Take a look at Service Hub’s easy-to-use self-service tools below.
Knowledge Base
A knowledge base can consist of articles, videos, ebooks, one-sheets, and other collateral that answer frequently asked support questions.
Your customers can easily find the answers they're looking for with a quick Google search or browse through your library—and your support team can respond to questions more quickly and consistently and spend less time answering repetitive questions.
If they need additional assistance, customers are directed to a one-to-one service option, such as a live chat, or phone number where they can speak to a live agent, for example.
Finally, detailed analytics tell you exactly what customers are searching for, identify gaps in your knowledge base, and inform future content.
Customer Portal
With HubSpot Professional or Enterprise, you can set up a customer portal to empower customers to take charge of their overall service experience, including current and previous ticket status. Indeed, a whopping 88% of customers expect brands to provide an online self-service portal for added transparency throughout their customer journey.
Service Hub’s Customer Portal works in tandem with HubSpot’s Tickets and Conversations tools. Customers can log in to view and reply to their support tickets, whether created via live chat, Facebook messenger, form submissions, or other. This eliminates the need for customer-sourced status calls or repeat ticket creation. And with Service Hub, no additional development resources are needed to add this critical functionality.
To make it easy for your customers, include a link to the portal in your ticket emails. Customers can access the portal via member registration or provision a single sign-on.
Customer Feedback
What’s better than customer feedback? Nothing.
In today's market, where up to 91 percent of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews, the importance of collecting and utilizing customer feedback cannot be overstated.
That’s why Service Hub’s customer feedback survey software is critical for every business. You can create and share surveys through email and your website to determine how your customers truly feel about their experiences. Choose from various survey options, including Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, or a customer satisfaction survey. Survey data can help you change aspects of your company to provide a better customer experience, leaving them delighted.
Get Started With Service Hub
HubSpot offers a variety of Service Hub options at various price points to fit every company’s budget. It can be a low-cost, low-commitment way for organizations to leverage the inbound marketing and sales enablement platform to nurture customer relationships. Engage and grow your customer base with Service Hub Free, Starter, Professional, or Enterprise.
The free option enables you to take advantage of key features such as contact management, ticketing, live chat, team email, ticket closed reports, the reporting dashboard, and shared inbox.
Starter, Professional, and Enterprise build off the free version, adding tools such as ticket automation, knowledge base, help desk automation, and goals.
How can you leverage Service Hub for your business? It compiles all of your customer service data in one place so you can seamlessly onboard, support, retain, and grow your customer base, resulting in happier consumers throughout their customer lifecycles.
Hypha HubSpot Development is a New York-based HubSpot Partner Agency specializing in Front-End Web Design & CMS Development, Inbound Marketing & Strategic Content, and HubSpot Platform Configuration & Integration services. Contact us today to convert more leads, close more deals, and exceed your goals!
