Speaking the Language of Your Customers with HubSpot Service Hub

[danmoyle]

Customer service. Customer support. Customer success. 

Whatever you call it, how you interact with the people who buy into your business is critical. 

Look, we all know it’s less expensive to keep a customer than to find new ones. 

And let’s face it: People need attention. 

So the question is: How do you help your customers once they’re in your world?

How you serve them, how they find success with your services or products, and how you make life a little easier for your team all play into your decision on a customer service solution. 

The 🐘 in the Room

First, an acknowledgement. In our modern, connected and fast-paced world, customers have become pretty self-sufficient. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, customers want to self-serve when they have questions.

This is why when we* think about building a customer service communication channel, we think about HubSpot. 

You see, HubSpot isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s a business tool to help you grow smarter and communicate better, delighting your customers along the way.

*By we, I mean Impulse Creative, a Diamond Solutions Partner.

HubSpot Conversations/Inbox (Website Chat, Messenger, Email)

HubSpot’s Service Hub helps your teams communicate with your prospects and customers as a team. 

• Inbox
• Chat bots
• Live chat
• Facebook Messenger chat
• Shared email
• Tickets
• Surveys

Let’s start with the Conversations Inbox. With a central inbox, any one of your teams can streamline communication with your customers. And when it’s your service team… boom!

Your customer service team, or customer support, will be available to help your customers with efficiency and all the information they need. Maybe your team already shares an email. Great. But when you add the HubSpot layer onto that to bring them even more data (and power), you create a powerful communication tool to delight your customers.

When your customer service inbox is connected to your CRM, your support team can see all of the interactions your customers have with your brand— including how they prefer to communicate, what products or services they've purchased and more. That’s real power when your communications are connected to HubSpot's CRM platform!

Plus you can connect all the different channels to your customer service team inbox so you can view, reply and manage all ongoing conversations in one place.

Learn how to create a HubSpot inbox for your customer service team so they can efficiently delight your customers!

When your service team has a central inbox that connects to your CRM data, they’ll be empowered to understand who they’re speaking with, what that journey has looked like and how your business can better serve them. 

Chat for Customers Specifically

When you want to speak the language of your customers, you’ll want to explore chat bots. 

When a customer comes to your website, they may be looking for help or looking for pricing— either to upgrade or to check pricing updates. 

Where to Place Your Bot

It’s important to think about where you place your chatbot. The home page is a common starting point. But what about your pricing page?

If you’re using HubSpot lifecycle stages, you should be able to tell when a customer is there, versus a non-customer. This will help you customize the greeting, which we’ll cover next. 

Another important location is any product or service page. Again, a customer may be coming to find information about how to use what they’ve bought. A chatbot welcoming them back and offering helpful resources speaks their language.

How to Personalize the Greeting

When you’re speaking someone’s language and helping them to feel welcome, you’re anticipating their needs. 

A returning customer seeing a “Welcome back [Name]” message with a few choices could feel like they’re ‘coming home.’ 

What kind of choices? Start with something like “How can we help? What are you looking for?”

• I’m looking for help with [product/service].
• I want to speak to my account rep [or customer service].
• I’d like to explore an upgrade.

Remember to ask the right questions. They’re already a customer, don’t sell to them like they aren’t familiar with your company.

One more note: Be sure to give them the option to hear from someone. Even if you don’t have live chat enabled, you can move the conversation to a representative and get back to them.

What Happens When You Need Escalation

Sometimes a customer or client needs more than a simple chatbot journey. What happens when you need escalation? Tickets!

Tickets to Manage Requests

With HubSpot’s ticketing solution, we can keep track of customer service requests in that shared inbox we set up earlier. It helps us organize our team, prioritize incoming requests, and optimize for a more effective customer service experience for us and them.

The great thing about a ticket pipeline is that you can use statuses to define your own business processes, as well as automate ticket statuses and actions.

A few examples of helpful statuses include: 

• New
• Waiting on us
• Waiting on client
• Closed

Once you’ve set up your statuses, you can create automation when a ticket gets moved. 

For instance, when you move a ticket to closed, you can send out a Customer Effort Score survey asking how easy it was to solve their problem. 

According to HubSpot, there's plenty of evidence that the ease of a given experience could be a better indicator of customer loyalty than simply measuring customer satisfaction.

So even if they have a problem, they aren’t necessarily going to see you in a negative light. If you can fix the problem, they may become even more loyal. 

Ticketing can definitely help you speak the language of your customers.

DIY Help with a Knowledge Base

One more way you can speak that language is to enable your customers to help themselves. 

A well-maintained Knowledge Base can help your customers and your customer support team both. 

Not only can your customers find their own answers when they want, but customer support or customer service can include knowledge base links in their communications with easy links in snippets.

Plus as you set up your Service Hub system, you can include those links in chatbot responses for common questions! 

Boom. Now you’re speaking the language of your customers and easing the burden on your customer success/service teams!

Service Hub Continues to Serve Us!

At Impulse Creative, we’re all in with Service Hub. We’ve set up our shared inbox for various teams (Revenue Team, HubLMS Support, our podcast teams), added chat to the website, created ticketing pipelines for managing escalations, and even worked on mapping out the needs of clients ahead of time. 

The more Service Hub grows and evolves, the more we’re able to speak the language of our customers.

How are you using service tools to connect with your customers?