When contacting customer support, most people assume that your entire customer history can be viewed by the support representative on the other end of the phone or chat. Often that's not exactly the case. The support team may have access to your support history but are unable to view your purchase history. In other cases, the support rep may send you over to sales, and then sales sends you back to support -- leaving your frustrated and confused along the way.
HubSpot is eager to solve such challenges. The company, already known for its Sales Hub and Marketing Hub, has announced general availability of Service Hub. The new offering is an all-in-one customer service system. The platform is powered by HubSpot’s free CRM, and can provide companies with a complete record of a customer’s journey, which could translate into faster resolution times and happier customers, HubsSpot believes.
The new platform allows customers to interact with support on their preferred channel. The goal is to turn these positive interactions into marketing with positive word-of-mouth results.
HubSpot Service Hub Capabilities
Service Hub includes:
- Conversations – A universal inbox that unites messages across chat, email, and other channels to help team collaborate and enable customers to engage with companies however they want.
- Tickets – A CRM object to track, record, and organize customer needs.
- Automation – Platform-level automation that uses workflows to route Tickets and create a help desk request.
- Knowledge Base – A tool that helps you create simple well-structured help articles from templates that automatically index on Google search and a reporting dashboard.
- Customer Feedback – A tool featuring guided survey creation, feedback collection, and audience insights analytics.
- Reporting – A new service dashboard featuring reports on how your team is handling tickets, how customers are sharing feedback, and the efficacy of your Knowledge Base.
HubSpot also introduced a new inbound service framework and HubSpot Academy lesson to help users create a strategy to turn customers into promoters.
According to the company, the inbound service framework can help businesses:
- Engage more customers in meaningful interactions across different channels with Conversations.
- Stay organized and meet customer expectations with Tickets.
- Guide customers with proactive solutions like Knowledge Base.
- Grow their relationship with customers by listening and understanding their needs with Customer Feedback.
Word of mouth marketing has always been one of the strongest ways to attract new customers. HubSpot is clearly trying to give businesses the tools they need to turn current customers into evangelists. It is an interesting approach for a customer service platform to take. Many platforms focus on Time to Resolution (TTR) or try to reduce workload for service desks through automation processes. While there are some levels of automation through Service Hub, they are laser focused on helping the customer feel good about a service provider's support.
For a highly competitive arena, like the MSP market, putting the focus on creating customer evangelists could pay off in huge revenues. According to Gallup's Guide to Customer Centricity Report, 2016, B2B customers with high customer engagement scores achieve 50 percent higher revenue/sales. We'll be watching to see if HubSpot ServiceHub becomes a preferred platform for IT services customer support.
