Internal Ticketing Service for Staff

[tcultech]

Hello!

We are currently setting up Hubspot Service Hub (Pro) for public-facing support for our members, but I, as IT Director, need a good ticketing system to manage helpdesk requests from staff for new equipment requests, troubleshooting broken systems, fixing access problems, etc.

I'm currently using askSpoke, but they were just purchased by Okta and that service is going away. I wondered what others are using for their internal help desk system amongst the various departments inside their organizations.

What do Hubspot staff use? Is it possible to use the same service hub for internal ticketing as well as external, customer-based service?

I'm worried that using Service Hub would make a mess of all my tickets and be harder to report on member-only activities and resolutions. I'm really curious about what best practices were with Hubspot and internal support and how others were solving this problem with or without Hubspot.

Thanks much for any insight into this!

-Zack

[SaifMohammad]

I have got same concern for my team.  should I get a new support desk system for internal support and keep it separate from our Hubspot instance? 

[AudreyM]

You can absolutely do it inside the single Hubspot instance. Set up two pipelines (or more if you have multiple external support pipelines). Keep your internal support tickets on their own pipeline. Then when you create reporting it's simple to seperate the internal ones out by filtering their pipeline out of the report.

Similarly, you can create views that are conditional on the pipeline to show different ticket information for different requests (internal/external) or you can create team views (if you have a separate internal support team vs your external support team).

If you want to have your internal team create requests via a form - you can create a separate form from your customer-facing one, and set it to automatically create the tickets on the internal team pipeline.

[DBoroi5]

Is there a way to change the ticket View to be different based on the pipeline? Here's my scenario: 

• Internal Pipeline I created to be used by multiple team members, but fields in the ticket view need to be very different from the External Customer Pipeline. 
• The only method I see to change the Ticket view (sidebars, etc) is by creating a team view. However, will this impact the External Customer Pipeline Ticket View if a team member is part of both the "Internal" Team and "Customer Team" 

[AudreyM]

If you have Pro licenses - You can update the "Default View" which is shared across all teams if they haven't been assigned a seperate team view, and then creation Conditional Sections that appear based on the Pipeline, etc. 

[PHix]

Hey @tcultech,

Also wanted to know what you ended up doing here as we've just had a similar request come through to set up an internal help desk and are considering HubSpot for this. Did you go with HubSpot or something else?

Thanks

[AudreyM]

This is pretty old, but I came across it while I was setting up the same general use case.

The tricks that I found to help make life cleaner and easier in the long term: Set up your internal contacts FIRST. Import your employee list, associate them with a Company object for your company. (Note that this is possible even for employees that are associated with Hubspot users). 

You can set up separate Inboxes for the internal service pipeline, and that inbox can have it's own SLAs, etc for reporting.

[laurabren]

Chiming in here - would also love to know what you ended up doing! We're considering the same thing, and I keep wondering if this will bite us down the road. But as one of our HubSpot admins, it would be amazing to be able to manage support needs within the same tool, rather than bouncing between two systems.

[Bryantworks · Accepted solution]

Hey @tcultech!  Since you're on Service Pro I would recommend just setting up a second pipeline for your tickets to break out Internal vs External tickets.  You could then utilize different forms, conversation inboxes, and even chatflows if you wanted to deposit those internal tickets into a different pipeline.

Having them in their own pipeline also massively helps to break out reporting as well.  Hope this helps!

[tcultech]

Thanks, Chris, that sounds like a good idea.

I wonder if this is a standard use case for tech support inside companies using Hubspot or if I'm blazing a trail here.

I prefer to be using best practices to avoid being bitten in the future. Do other companies do this? Is it a good solution that I can count on? Or should I get a new support desk system for internal support and keep it separate from our Hubspot instance? What does HubSpot use for internal support ticketing, I wonder?

I'm concerned about mixing staff and client data and creating confusion. I'm still questioning whether it's good practice to have staff in the CRM as regular contacts (we do now so we can send copies of email broadcasts). 

Thanks again for your great suggestion. I'll be sure to mark as answerd.

[RBoles1]

We're dying to know - did you ever get your questions answered?

[DBoroi5]

Did you end up using internally? Curious how it has worked out for you. 

[RBoles1]

Came here to ask the same thing! I have same exact concerns - i am also a new Hubspot Service Hub (Pro) SuperAdmin searching for an internal ticketing system solution. 

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