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What is HubSpot's Service Hub?

Author: Jack Williams
Published: 26th September 2018
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HubSpot’s newly introduced customer service software has been specially developed to help businesses manage, engage and gain a deeper insight into their customers. With the introduction of the flywheel to replace the traditional funnel, customer service is now a key aspect alongside marketing and sales where the purpose is to turn your customers into advocates of your business.

HubSpot’s Service Hub:

  • Is a complete marketing, sales and customer service suite
  • Provides new ways to engage with your customers
  • Offers helpful avenues for your customers to find the answers to their questions
  • Allows you to capture qualitative and quantitative feedback from your customers
  • Uses the Inbound Service Framework as a base
  • Helps you engage, guide and grow using HubSpot’s flywheel that puts customers at the centre of your business

Read on to learn:

  1. Why you need it
  2. What’s included
  3. How to use the Inbound Service Framework

Why you need it

The introduction of HubSpot’s Service Hub has been sparked by a shift in the relationship between businesses and their customers. Customers have higher expectations of a business and are demanding more contextual, human interactions. In fact, this is revealed by various research such as Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report 2016 where they state, 60% of consumers stop doing business with a brand if they’ve experienced poor customer service. This means customers have more control and options than ever before.

While this trend is prominent, there’s still a huge disconnect: "80% of companies believe they deliver superior customer service BUT only 8% of customers believe they experience superior service. Therefore, it’s clear that businesses need to be changing their approach to how to they engage with customers.

Happy customers equals more customers. They buy more, stay with you longer, refer their friends, and tell the world they love you.

To make this a reality, you need to take a proactive approach to helping your customers — and the Service Hub software not only makes it possible, but also easy.

Service Hub gives you modern customer service tools to adapt to today’s empowered customers. Using these tools, you can analyse and understand their needs, improve their experience and ultimately exceed their expectations.

What’s included

Conversations is a stand-alone tool but also a core component of Service Hub. It combines all your communication channels in one dashboard. So whether you’re talking to customers via email, live chat or another channel, you and your whole team can collaborate on the messages in one spot.

The best bit, it provides you with a single view of the customer for all your teams. It's built on the HubSpot CRM, so you’ll have all the information you need to know about who you're talking to from a marketing, sales and service standpoint.

Tickets, a new CRM object, offers a way to track, order, collaborate and deliver on customers’ needs and expectations. The ticket object can be associated with a contact, so all your teams will be able to see if a customer has an open issue (a really nice thing to know before someone reaches out for an up-sell, for instance).

Tickets also come together to form a ticket board in Service Hub. The ticket board is a new home base for your support team. They can come into the office, see what’s on the board for the day and get to work helping customers and solving problems.

Knowledge base. With the knowledge base, you can quickly create helpful articles - much like FAQs, make sure they rank on Google and see valuable insights on a reporting dashboard that tells you how good a given article is at solving customers' issues and deflecting tickets.

Customer feedback is a tool built to help you better understand your customers. Customer feedback starts with a series of surveys, that you can use to routinely capture qualitative and quantitative feedback from your customers. This can be as simple as a yes-or-no question related to a support experience or a 20-question annual Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey. You’ll be able to build a plan to regularly survey customers, so that you can start to understand common issues they have and work to resolve those effectively. For example, maybe all of their frustrations concern onboarding. If that’s the case, shift your team’s priorities to focus more on that specific part of the customer journey.

With data flowing in on customer happiness you’ll also start to figure out who your biggest promoters are. Use that information to build customer marketing campaigns that help these customers tell the world about your product or service. Some examples could be asking them to write reviews on a review site, become a case study, share social content or write a guest blog post about your company. Today, the customer voice is more influential than ever - so taking advantage of that is key.

Reports is a new service dashboard with built-in tools that allow you to measure the impactfulness of your customer service efforts, track usage data from your knowledge base, response times and time volume, report on customer feedback and more. These reporting features will provide you with a real-time window into your teams’ utilisation rates, what channels may be working better than others and to take action on items that need attention.

How to use the Inbound Service Framework

While having shiny new tools is always great to have, in order to offer a complete and successful customer service for your business, you need to be able to implement an effective framework that complements these tools to help you reach your goals.

The framework, based on the HubSpot flywheel, is a methodology split into three simple parts:

  1. Engagement - The shift in consumer behaviour has meant customers are looking for meaningful conversations. Businesses will be able to take advantage of this using conversations and gain access to a universal inbox that encompasses multiple communications channels such as email, live chat and social media.
  2. Guidance - What do you do with all the data you accrue from your customers over time? Use things like customer feedback to learn what they need and what they don’t. Be proactive and provide helpful, useful information such as resources to your customers in their time of need.
  3. Growth - Delighted customers are more willing to provide positive responses about your brand. Identify your top promoters and get them involved in telling your story - whether through a case study, review or another avenue - this will help promote your growth.

It’s Time to Implement Service Hub

We’ve previously talked about HubSpot’s move from the traditional funnel to the flywheel, which aims to put customers at the heart of everything a business does. The secret to business growth today is to implement this approach to create a truly authentic, customer-centric experience. And the best way to achieve this is through the Service Hub, which provides you with all the tools you’ll require.

Request a free demo today and we’ll show you can you can build a customer service system that is modern and helps you provide personal, relevant and timely information for your customers - keeping them nurtured for time to come. 

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