What is HubSpot’s New Service Hub and Can it Help You?

We love HubSpot - they’re always coming out with the next best feature that can help us (and our clients) be more productive and do our jobs better. Recently, HubSpot launched the “Service Hub” and our clients want to know what is and how it can help them be more effective in their marketing efforts.

Your customers are becoming more tech-savvy (and if they aren’t now they probably will later). We all know that we’re turning into a tech-dependent world. Odds are, your customers will rely on technology to help them get sh** done and they want access to you and support from you 24/7. I like to call them “technology dependent,” which means that as we rely on technology more and more every day, customer service strategies and solutions are becoming even more important. That’s why the service hub exists!

Prospect and clients demand immediate gratification and information whenever and wherever they are. That’s why it’s important to have a strategy for your business that provides the best customer service for your clients. This gives them a better experience and gives you a competitive advantage.

While there are many different use-cases for the service hub, we’re going to go over the main features, benefits and examples of how HubSpot’s new Service Hub can help you.

So let’s get into the features of HubSpot’s New Service Hub.

First, conversations

Conversations is a HubSpot tool that helps your teams collaborate on customer support, from addressing issues, to delegating tickets, to solving problems. On the flip-side, it can also help you with your marketing or sales efforts. For example, we created an instant message that pops up on a specific page of our website. When a visitor comes to our website and has a question, they feel that they are being answered by a real human and will get a response right away! While the initial message is automated, when a prospect responds it will send to your team to answer their question in real time. This is great if you want to create personalized instant messages on your services pages, FAQ pages, and even product pages.

What Your Website Visitors See: 

What YOU See In the Backend: 

At the same time, conversations works for leads who are already registered in your contact base. Once they start engaging with you, you can easily start chatting with them with context surrounding who they are (it’s already stored in the HubSpot CRM). This might be helpful for leads who are looking for pricing, would like to see a case study or are simply ready to do business with you.

Conversations also benefits support. When you think about the entire customer experience, providing excellent customer service can certainly differentiate you in the marketplace. With the conversations tool, you can document, address, and solve software issues. Not only this, but you can bring your sales, marketing, and support/service team in one place to get the ultimate feedback on your customer experience.

Here are some features of conversations:

1. Automation & Routing - You can streamline customer service and marketing workflows with ticket routing, escalation, and task creation. With automated responses and notifications, your customer or prospect will feel their issue is being addressed.
2. Team Email - Once hook up your team email to conversations, your website visitors or clients will submit requests. You get distributed messages across your team, which get forwarded into the conversations portal. This is great for delegation of requests and tracking progress.
3. Live Chat - We love the live chat feature! Depending on where your prospects are in the buying stage, they can ask questions at any point. This allows you to not only interact in real time, but you can also set up “away” times when it’s the weekend and you aren’t open. In this case, you can gather their email and get back to them on Monday.
4. Conversational Bots - Speaking of the “away” time, this is where bots come in. While you may not be there on the weekend, your bots have preset messages and can route prospects or clients to helpful information.

Second, customer feedback

At LAIRE, we’re always trying to improve and be the best we can. That’s why we value the customer feedback portion of the service hub. We believe there is always room for improvement. Feedback is essential for learning how your clients operate or where their concerns are, from your company, your service, your support or your team members. Once you realize their goals or pain points, you can build more, better experiences that help them be more productive and efficient.

Here are a few of the surveys that customer feedback offers:

1. The customer loyalty survey - This survey is essentially the NPS (Net Promoter Score), which gages whether or not the client would refer you or not. Once you get your clients rating, you should find ways to improve the score. Why? Well, hopefully you know why. If your client isn’t happy or seeing the results that were promised, it gives them reason to leave. It’s important to send out the customer loyalty survey every quarter to understand whether or not your score has improved overtime.
2. The customer support survey - Are your account managers or colleagues helping your clients solve issues? Or are they hindering those issues and not solving problems? That’s where customer support comes in. This survey tells you if your clients issues were solved. If they weren’t or had poor experience, why is that? How can they get a better experience the next time?
3. The customer experience survey (coming soon!) - This survey hasn’t been launched yet, but when it does you better believe we’re going to check it out. Stay tuned.

Third, tickets

Tickets can be directly correlated to your product, service or website. This is really the hub of where your tickets live. What employee is solving the most issues? What issues aren’t being solved? What issues are next? Which issues are most important? These are the questions that tickets helps solve for your support team or website team. HubSpot’s Tickets tool allows you to stay on top of everything - from your marketing, to your sales, to your support, helping you track the entire customer experience from top to bottom. (Check out some other HubSpot tools and tricks here.)

Tickets helps you:

• Get organized
• Solve customer issues, fast
• Keep your support team on the same page

In helping solve your clients issues, tickets works jointly with the conversations and knowledge base features...which leads me to the next feature.

Fourth, the Knowledge Base

If you’ve ever heard of Intercom or FreshDesk, then you could probably guess what the knowledge base is. Once your clients or website visitors ask questions, you can easily point them to How-To or FAQ articles that can help them solve their issues. This feature is not only helpful for your clients, but it’s also fantastic for SEO. Your customers want access to information quickly, and sometimes without reaching out to you first. By setting up this predesigned knowledge base hub, you enable your clients to work better and faster.

At the end of the day...

With this new shift in the customer experience and technology dependent era, we can only expect to see more of this focus on our clients and technology as we move forward. HubSpot is always making improvements to their CMS, enabling us to help you with your marketing initiatives. Check out the new Service Hub for yourself and let us know if you have any questions. We’d be happy to help. If you're not sure if you want to use HubSpot, check out this article.