Best Practices for Service Hub Automation

[JenBerenguer]

Hi all, 

If you didn't have a chance to see Adriti's session at INBOUND 2020, I'm sharing some of the learnings she presented to make sure you're getting the best out of the Service Hub while saving time and optimizing your process through automation.

First of all, let's remember why having a Service strategy in place is important:

- Upsell opportunities - Happy customers buy more

- Retention - acquiring new customer is hard and expensive, you should leverage the ones you have (see marketing to existing customers here) - Happy customers remain customers

- Referral and influence - happy customers bring you more customers 

With HubSpot there are a lot of opportunities to help you nail your Service strategy and also to automate many parts of your process. Automation however, is not a replacement for your human resource, but a way to ensure you unclog bottlenecks of admin tasks and streamline your Service operations. 

Here are a few things to start using in your Service Hub:

Chatbots

Use them to answer FAQs, point towards Knowledge Base articles, collect basic information (like name and email) and to create tickets. 

They are great to make up for the time you don't have a live agent available and to triage what really requires a ticket. For example, you don't need an agent to get involved just to reply to what your opening hours are or what's your return policy.

Help Desk

Conversations is a unified inbox of all the emails, chats and private messages in one place. The power of using this tool connected to a CRM is to offer a better experience to your customer, who won't have to explain the problem over and over, since all their past engagements are found in the same place.

Workflows

Use them to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. A few examples:

- Create email reminders based on tickets that had no activity for more than X days

- Rotate ticket owners

- Notify Service manager if a ticket has no owner

- Set high priority on a ticket based on customer criteria (High MRRs, for instance)

- Escalate a tickets marked as high priority

- Send automatic reply to customer once ticket is created

- Mark customers as advocates when they have positive feedback surveys

- Follow up with detractor customers when they have negative feedback surveys

Feedback

Finally, sending service surveys asking for your client's feedback AND ACTING ON THEM is essentially what will help you improve your services and delight your clients.

Set up automatic surveys to ensure you never miss an opportunity to collect feedback. 

I hope you find these tips useful but I'd love to hear your insights for an awesome Service strategy too.

Jen