Ask Us Anything: Conversations Tool Best Practices

[mmcnaboe]

Hi HubSpot Community,

The Conversations tool is a versatile area where your team can collaborate while solving for your customers. As a member of the Support team at HubSpot, I have the privilege of helping HubSpot users get the most out of the Conversations tool every day. While powerful, this tool can seem daunting if you don't know where to start, or how to properly use the Conversations tool.

My name is Mo - I am a Senior Customer Support Specialist with a focus in the Conversations tool. Myself, along with some of my teammates Julia Gentillo (fellow Specialist) and Catherine Mo (Product Expert) are here to answer your questions about automation, best practices, and workarounds for the tool!

If you're stumped for what to ask, a few sample questions are:

• My bot may not be routing as expected, why is that and what can I expect out of Conversations routing?
• I want to have two chats on the same page at different times, can I do that?
• What are some ways I can make sure my team or teams stay organized within the conversations inbox?

We'll be answering questions from Monday March 30 - Wednesday April 8.

Look forward to hearing from you soon!

[StephenRS]

Hi, I have a long list of questions on Hubspot behaviour between tickets and conversations!

When a request is sent to an address that is connected to the inbox that is set to automatically create a ticket, what is the impact of working on the ticket vs working on the conversation?  E.g.,

Support see the new unassigned ticket in the pipeline, triage and assign it.  An email is sent to the sender of the request and the ticket is closed.  What would I see in Inbox (if anything)?  Would the conversation be assigned when the ticket is assigned?  Would the response be visible in the conversation?  Would the conversation be closed when the ticket is closed?

Similarly, someone in Support sees the new conversation in Inbox, assigns it to themselves and responds in the inbox directly to the email and marks the conversation closed.  Does this have any effect on the ticket or is it still shown as 'new' in the pipeline?

Hopefully you can see the point of the question - I don't want to create work for the team maintaining conversations if they are working the tickets or vice versa.

In a similar vein, I'm just thinking about subscriptions.  We haven't created a specific 'support' subscription - by definition if they're contacting support they must be a customer so the sales one-to-one subscription should apply.  Is this best practice or should we have a support subscription as well? 

[drafeedie]

Hello - can you elaborate on the best practices of converting inbox messages to tickets? What is the upside of making every inbox email a ticket, versus just using it as a shared inbox?

We typically mark all inbox messages "closed" after we responde to them. Why would somebody want to leave them open? It seems that if there's ongoing work to be done, or expected conversation back and forth with a customer, that would be the right time to open a ticket, right? 

Happy to hear any general feedback on these best practices as well!

[ltyler]

Hey there Hubspot team

THANK YOU for the new view and filters  for the contacts - I LOVE it!

Leslie Tyler

Jackrabbit Technologies

[nicblondeau]

Hi Mo,

A couple of questions with regards to conversations:

- What is the best pratice for naming the default 'ticket name' property when creating a ticket in conversations? Is there no way to automatically populate this property?

- In order to create a ticket, I first need to 'associate the visitor' of a conversation by mentioning their first name, last name and emailaddress. What if this visitor came through livechat and didn't leave any of the above mentioned details behind? Am I not able to create a ticket in this case?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Kind regards,

Nicolas

[mmcnaboe]

Hi @nicblondeau !

Thank you for the questions - happy to clarify here.

1. At this time, when we enable the 'automatically create tickets' setting within the inbox channel, the name of the ticket will default to be the Email Subject Line of the incoming message. It cannot be edited, however, we do have another idea posted that requests being able to edit that here. 

2. When an 'unknown' visitor comes in through the chat channel, you are able to manually associate that person using the 'associate visitor' button and we will need either an email or first/last name in order to then create that ticket. If they do not provide this information via chat, but you still need to create a ticket, I would recommend leaving the email address blank but setting a descriptor for the customer in the first and last name properties. That way, you'll be able to create the ticket and assuming you get that information later on, you can update the record! 

I hope this was helpful, please let me know if I can be of further assistance or provide more clarity.  

- Mo

[vincentF]

Hello Mo,

I hope that I am writting in the good section.

I have connected a professional mailbox to the inbox of Hubspot. This is working well. However, I have noticed that the originals emails in the professional mailbox (which is a gmail account) are never marked as "read" even when we have opened them and treated them in the hubspot inbox. It seems like gmail doesn't know that the mailbox is linked with hubspot and that the email has been read and sometime answered.

Can you halp me on this please ?

Thank you,

Vincent F

[mmcnaboe]

Hi Vincent - 

Thanks for reaching out - more than happy to clarify here! It seems like you're wanting gmail to recognize when something is read within HubSpot's inbox. At this time, this wouldn't be something that you'd be able to view from the Gmail end of things.

When you connect an inbox, you're essentially giving HubSpot permisison to send, read, and reply to emails using your gmail address. So while we can view opens/clicks etc from our end that may have occured in Gmail, it will not work the other way around as Gmail is never reaching into HubSpot to grab that information from the contact records or Conversations inbox.

I hope this clarified things a bit more for you! Let me know if I've understood your question correctly.

Mo

[vincentF]

Thank you for answering me.

Indeed, I understand. It is too bad since the gmail inbox will stay with all the emails marked as non read. It would be great if this could change in the future.

Thank you.

Regards,