When I am looking at a Service Hub setup, I don’t merely consider how quickly the tickets are being closed, since I also want to know why the tickets appear initially.
A team might have a good response time and yet still face a genuine customer service issue. Even if customers continue to ask the same questions repeatedly, a quick support team will still be spending time dealing with something that could have been prevented from the start.
I’ve witnessed this occurring in simple cases. Customers end up not finding the correct information, the procedure isn’t clear, the change to the product wasn’t communicated properly, or there’s just no easy way for a person to work out the answer themselves and so they have to get in touch with support.
The ticket is then closed, and everything appears to be in order on the dashboard, but the same question arises next week.
Which is why I believe that the data from Service Hub can tell you not only how busy your support team is but also indicate where the customer experience is causing extra work that was unnecessary.
If the same kind of ticket continues to appear, I don’t believe that the first question should always be “how can we speed things up?” Sometimes it should be “why is it that customers are getting in touch with us about this in the first place?”
That change in attitude results in a number of interesting modifications. Perhaps the knowledge base should be updated. Maybe the onboarding procedure should be made clearer. Perhaps a frequently asked question should be answered earlier on in the customer journey. Or perhaps the process itself should be altered.
To me, Service Hub goes beyond being merely a ticketing system; its aim is not just to enable the support team to deal with a higher number of tickets but to help the business gain an understanding of what customers are actually having difficulty with.
There are occasions when the most useful support ticket is the one that has never had to be set up.
Hi @WebGuruz_Tech and thank you so much for sharing your approach and insights with the HubSpot Community!
I love your emphasis on understanding the root causes behind support tickets to really improve the customer experience and not just focusing on speed.
Service Hub can help businesses understand not only how quickly tickets are resolved, but why customers need support in the first place. By analyzing ticket trends and addressing their root causes, teams can improve the customer experience and prevent unnecessary tickets.
Here are some resources that can also help:
The Knowledge Base Agent can also help for this, you can check it out here: Promote Self-Service with Breeze Knowledge Base Agent
Also, I’d love to hear from our Top Experts: Hi @danmoyle, @Crystal_Hopper and @CarolinaDeMares do you have any insights to share, please?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Thanks so much and enjoy the day!
Bérangère
I agree with this, and I would add that repeated support tickets aren’t necessarily a Service Hub problem. Service Hub is often just revealing a problem that exists within the business or customer experience.
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The product or service
If customers keep raising the same issue, there may be an actual problem with the product, service, or process that needs to be addressed.
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The Knowledge Base
Having a Knowledge Base isn’t enough. Customers need to know it exists and be able to easily find the information they need.
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Self-service isn’t for everyone
Some customers genuinely prefer speaking with a person. They want to feel heard and understood rather than search for an answer themselves.
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Repeated tickets can indicate a visibility problem
If a customer keeps submitting the same complaint, they may feel like nobody is doing anything about the previous one. A customer portal can help by giving customers visibility into their tickets, status, and communication.
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Automation and AI
Once the business understands why these tickets are happening, Service Hub can help reduce the workload through automation, routing, knowledge base recommendations, and AI-powered support.
So for me, the question isn’t only, “How can we close tickets faster?” It’s also, “What is happening in the customer experience that is causing these tickets in the first place?”
@Berangere thanks for thinking of me! Once again we get some fun thought-exercise material from @WebGuruz_Tech. And I think you’re exactly right. What you’ve described is the piece a lot of Service Hub setups miss.
I’ve seen a similar pattern with clients. A team hits every SLA target, dashboard’s green across the board, and yet the same three questions keep showing up week after week. That’s not a speed problem. That’s a signal the team hasn’t looked at yet.
Where I usually start is the ticket subject or category field. If you tag tickets by root cause instead of just topic, you can actually see clusters form. Once you see “customers keep asking this because the last product update wasn’t communicated,” you’ve found something a close rate will never show you.
A couple things that have helped clients:
Knowledge base gaps. If the same question keeps coming in, that’s the article writing itself. Someone just needs to sit down and write it.
Site search data. If you’ve got GA4 site search tracking on, check what people are searching for before they give up and open a ticket. That’s often the clearest map of where documentation is failing.
Breeze Customer Agent. I can also see how Customer Agent can deflect the repeat, answerable questions in real time, which frees your team to spend their attention on the tickets that actually need a human. But I’d treat that as a symptom fix, not the root cause fix. It buys you time. It doesn’t replace going back and asking why the question exists in the first place.
The real win is when a support team starts treating tickets as product feedback, not just a queue to clear.
I agree. I’m far more drawn to finding out why people feel the need to submit a support ticket in the first place. It’s also my experience that once you become aware of these seemingly large-scale issues and work to resolve them at their source, a space is cleared for new issues to arise that you weren’t able to see initially. It feels good to find these smaller issues, too, because you’ll know you’re serving all the levels of your customer base in a meaningful way.
+1 on need to understand the root causes behind support ticket. As the founder of an AI platform focused on this challenge, I spend a lot of time with customers on it.
As @danmoyle suggested, basic ticket tagging + regular reviews is a good place to start. The key is consistent tagging, good agent training and a regular review cadence so support / product / CX can see the patterns and trends over time.
One thing I’d add is that in addition to frequency, it’s important to analyze the impact of a repeating issue (customer frustration, revenue risk, support load). When we analyze support conversations we routinely see prioritization change when impact is factored in.
I also agree to the point above about AI containment being a symptom fix. In fact you are deploying AI customer agents, it’s even more important to review root causes regularly to ensure (A) you are routing issues to AI that it is capable of resolving, and (B) AI answering tickets is not hiding problems that the business should be fixing.
+1 @Jignesh-at-Klarion and welcome to the Community!