7 Tips to Improve Efficiency for Service Hub Users & Delight Customers
If you're using HubSpot, you've probably heard about Frictionless Sales and how much of an impact efficiencies can have on sales performance.
It probably won't come as a surprise, but removing friction for your service team goes a long way toward improving customer satisfaction.
By focusing on improving processes and efficiencies, you can keep your customers and team delighted!
Optimize the Conversations Inbox
Hopefully, your team is managing tickets through Conversations Inbox, this offers a centralized location for all customer service conversations (chatbots, live chat, forms, email replies, tickets, etc.) and puts all the information at their fingertips.
Just like the "About" section (contact association card) can be set up to display defaults on the contact record, those same defaults are available in the right sidebar of the conversations inbox.
Ensure the defaults apply to all teams and only require what is necessary so you provide the most flexibility for everyone on your team to customize the about section to work with their processes.
Tip #2
Understand the contact specific data that your customer service teams are tracking throughout the ticket response process and what information helps them better engage with customers in a personal way.
Do they need to know the date they became a customer? What custom properties would be helpful to understand? Is there a social profile that could provide background or context? What's their HubSpot score and how might that be relevant post-purchase?
Tip #3
Now you have the Contact "About" section optimized, look at the rest of the sidebar and rearrange the Associated records in a way that prioritizes the information, collapsing a record if it isn't needed at a glance.
Maybe you don't need to click the links to other tickets or conversations, but seeing the total count gives you a big picture view of the customer service experience.
Once each user has set their preferences, it will remain that way every time the inbox is opened, unless it is changed later on.
Creating a recommended setup guide for your team(s) can help new users get their views set up quickly so it is easier to follow along during training.
Automate ticket status changes
You're probably already using the update ticket status triggers based on email sends and replies from customers, but have you aligned your automation with your service team's processes by setting up additional status automation?
Tip #4
There are some automation tasks, like sending a notification for new tickets, that are fairly common, here are a few ideas to keep your service team accountable:
setup a task when a new ticket is received that includes helpful information to triage the ticket, this is especially helpful for new hires
setup a reminder after a set time frame (a day, a few days, etc.) to circle back if you haven't received a response from the customer yet
setup a task when the ticket is closed to verify ticket properties have been updated (using the advanced workflows will allow you to set the proper trigger criteria)
assign a task to update the knowledge base, FAQ, or other support documents to the appropriate team member (can also be based on a ticket property that flags the need for updated documentation, more on that below in #6)
Documentation, Documentation, Documentation...
We all know how important it is for customers to be able to answer their own questions, self-service is a major key to success, and keeping it up to date is just as critical.
Tip #5
Make sure your customer service team has the information at their fingertips bysetting up snippets to your knowledge base or documentation.
For common questions, you can include the response and link all-in-one, but sometimes the question can require a more custom response so you might also want to create a system to include "link only" snippets.
Setup a snippet that has the name of the article with the link and create a naming convention to help set these apart.
For example this snippet, "You'll need to verify your settings under account profile > notifications before you'll see the change in your account. Here is a helpful article to walk you through the steps (linked)." could be named "notifications explanation" but the link only version "Update your notification settings (linked)" could be called "notifications link-only" as one way to differentiate.
I've seen all kinds of naming conventions, from using a prefix like "link-" at the beginning of a snippet name to "kb" for knowledge base link and everything between, just choose something that works for your team, is relevant, easy to remember and be consistent!
Tip #6
Create a custom ticket property to flag updates needed for documentation. You might need more than one that work together to provide the necessary information to the content team.
One example would be to set up a property called "Documentation Update Required" with a few stages for tracking:
Need - or - Identified
In Progress
Pending Approval
Complete
N/A
I'm a big fan of not leaving properties blank if they aren't required 100% of the time, so having a N/A option keeps your customer service team in the habit of always updating the property.
The second property would be a single line text property (or maybe multi-line) where the specific URL can be provided that needs updating.
Tip #7
Close the loop and ask for feedback. If you're using the Knowledge Base included in Service Hub, you'll hopefully be getting feedback with the "was this helpful" feature.
This is a great way to capture unsolicited feedback, but when you're team is engaging with a customer directly and providing a resource, that is a great opportunity to ask something like, "let me know if this answers your question fully, or if you think something might be missing" using a snippet of course.
Improving efficiency starts with understanding your processes, and these tips are just the tip of the iceberg 😆 get your team involved, start asking questions, do screen shares to observe your team in action, and find ways to make the CRM and Service Hub work better together.
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