HubSpot has launched their new and greatly improved Service Hub. It’s a pretty fundamental update and it’s solved a lot of pain points for current customers. With it’s new features, it may just be the best service solution out there right now… read on for why.
If you’re already familiar with HubSpot Service Hub and just want a rundown of the (very) cool new & improved features, skip to the details here.
We're going to cover:
Why should I care about HubSpot’s Service Hub?
Retaining current customers is often more effective, and less expensive, than finding new ones. That’s a sweeping statement, but there’s a lot of evidence to back it up. Research shows that customer service-focused companies are 60% more profitable! By holding on to current customers and getting them to repeat purchase, you make your life easier and keep your pipeline a little less stressful.
Repeat customers = reliable revenue = the ability to take exciting marketing risks, make bold business decisions, and confidently hire new staff.
What has repeat customers got to do with HubSpot Service Hub though?
Happy customers come back. Have you ever been in a coffee shop or takeout and you got a little something extra for free because the cashier liked you? That’s going to make you want to go back there again, because you felt a personal connection with the staff… and because you felt you were getting more than you paid for.
Good customer service is the easiest way to create happy customers. By being helpful and delightful, you can wow your customers so much that they’ll feel indebted to you and want to get all their friends involved in the magic. HubSpot have done the research and recognised this, so they’ve invested tons into their new Service Hub to make it the best possible solution for customer service and retention. And looking at the previews, their investment has paid off.
What’s HubSpot Service Hub then?
Service Hub is a catch-all, integrated customer service solution. Basically, it’s a platform that helps customer service teams be way better at their jobs. It lets you prioritise customer experience to deliver authentic, connected service and support in an efficient and easy way.
HubSpot are uniquely positioned to provide this because they have such a brilliant, integrated system already: with different technologies and tools all seamlessly connected through the CRM as a single source of truth. This means your customer service team will have way more information and tools in HubSpot’s Service Hub than you would in many other competitors.
And if you don’t have a customer service team, the easy-to-use interface will make dealing with ad hoc issues much easier to keep tabs on.
HubSpot’s Service Hub is part of the overall HubSpot platform, created specially to optimise the customer experience. My favorite thing about it is the powerful automation elements that you can use to upskill service teams on the fly and create a seamless user-facing experience - which I’ll cover in more detail further down.
HubSpot Service Hub features explained
The easiest way to understand the many different technologies within Service Hub is to split it down into three connected elements:
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Modern help desk
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Omnichannel service
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CRM powered automation
Let’s go through each of these, what they are and how they can help you to deliver a top-knotch, connected and authentic customer experience.
1. Modern help desk
This is what it sounds like: a modern, slick version of the classic customer service tool, the helpdesk. There’s a lot of debate within the customer service industry about whether a ticket-based or conversation-based approach is better. HubSpot blends both, giving you the flexibility to choose what works best for your team and your specific customer's needs.
As part of delivering the best help desk possible, HubSpot Service Hub offers:
- A shared inbox
- Conversation routing and forwarding
- Agent presence
- A handy knowledge base
- Custom views and inboxes
- A mobile inbox
- And a customer portal!
What I’m most excited about for this is the customer portal. We’re so used to being able to get answers immediately and view all the information we want, so having a portal where customers can view their tickets and seek updates whenever they want can make a huge difference to how they experience the problem.
2. Omnichannel service
Ok, prepare to get excited. HubSpot recognises how important it is that customers can contact you on whatever channel they want to use. Whether it’s email, text, or social, customers want to be able to communicate with brands like they do with other people in their life - seamlessly over many different channels.
To facilitate this, HubSpot has put in a really cool feature of channel switching, which means conversations can continue over various different channels when the same customer gets in touch, without the view changing for the agency. It’s seamless, futuristic, and super cool.
Another feature that got partner’s really excited on the briefing was inbound calling. That means you can send and receive calls straight from HubSpot’s platform, and track them. And when I say track them, I mean HubSpot creates transcripts that are easily accessible within the customer record. So you can monitor all the calls happening without paying for an expensive third-party platform! This has huge implications for successfully managing service teams and optomising customer experiences.
Now I’ve finished nerding out, here are all the features relevant to omnichannel services:
- Chatbots
- In-app chat
- Facebook Messenger Integration
- Inbound calling [Beta]
- Conversation APIs
- Channel Switching
- Post chat feedback
Again, a big benefit of using HubSpot for this is that you can easily aggregate post chat feedback and use that to follow up with an automated workflow: meaning you can automate a personalised response… the dream.
3. CRM powered automation
As I mentioned earlier, HubSpot Service Hub have a great balance between tickets and conversations. Their ticket functionality makes the most of automation and CRM informed content, using pipelines and workflows.
Something that really excited partners with big customer service teams was customisable SLAs for chatbots. They’ve also got shiny new customisable service analytics reports as well, giving you the same amount of control over reporting that you’re used to in other HubSpot Hubs.
Here’s the full list:
- Ticket pipelines
- Ticket automation
- Help desk automation
- CSAT/CES/NPS and other customer surveys
- SLAs
- Service Analytics Reports
HubSpot will be releasing more information over the next couple of months, including loads of documentation and training about how to get the best out of it, so check out the HubSpot Academy if you want to learn more.
If you’re interested in getting some HubSpot Service Hub training, or just want some advice on if it’s right for you, we’re happy to help! Just get in touch.
