HubSpot introduced Service Hub in 2018. The product is designed to do for customer service what previous hubs have done for marketing and sales. Using the tools available in Service Hub, you'll be able to improve help ticket response time for your customers. In some cases, you might even eliminate the need for them to contact you at all.
The result is more satisfied customers that will result in more word-of-mouth advertising, better customer retention, and higher sales. In this post, we'll go over the most essential features in HubSpot’s Service Hub that you can use to reduce your help ticket response time.
The first step in reducing your help ticket response time is to know what that response time is. Like all HubSpot products, Service Hub provides you with a wealth of analytics that you can use to track performance. Metrics like average response time and average resolution time will tell you how quickly your support agents are replying to tickets. You'll also learn how quickly your team resolves problems from start to finish.
Comparing these times with the ticket volume that you are receiving will give you a good indication of whether you need to hire more support staff. By making use of the powerful reporting features in Service Hub, you'll be able to monitor the status of your support operation at a glance. You can also make more informed decisions about how to streamline your help ticket response time (as well as your entire customer success pipeline).
Let's talk more about using the reporting capabilities of Service Hub. Having someone in management keep track of response times and other important support metrics isn't going to maximize the results you can achieve. For that, the entire staff needs to be involved. A great way to do that is to set up reports that will track specific goals. These goals could include reducing total help ticket response time or the number of communications it takes before a customer's issue is resolved.
By setting up these reports and making them available to the staff, you'll get them to take an active role in improving the numbers. These goals should be set up on both a group level and an individual level. Each member of your support staff can have their own goals to beat. You'll know which members of staff are already performing well and which may benefit from additional training.
Gone are the days when customers communicated with your support staff exclusively through email or your website. Customers expect to reach out to you with problems from the places that are most convenient to them. This means you'll be getting messages from social media accounts, email, chat systems, and more. This can make it difficult to keep track of past conversations with customers, which can provide key information to reduce back and forth questions. You could also use the data to respond more quickly to problems in the present.
Service Hub allows you to aggregate your conversations from all of these disparate sources. Your staff can refer back to any communication that your team has had with a customer throughout their life cycle. Because this inbox is universal and collaborative, everyone on your staff will have access to it. They can immediately pick up where another agent left off if need be. No longer will there be delays as a new agent gets up to speed on an old issue.
Service Hub can easily assign tickets to appropriate members of your team, track them all in one convenient place, and set priorities on them based on the severity of the problem. At a glance, you'll be able to see:
The significant time savings comes when you allow Service Hub to automate the ticket creation for you. Any ticketing software can create a ticket when the customer explicitly does so through your website. But Service Hub will automatically create tickets from emails, chats, and other communication methods.
In doing so, it will cut down on the time it would take your staff to create a ticket and enter all the relevant data manually. At the same time, it reduces human error that could add to delays in getting the customer's issues resolved. With ticket automation, your staff spends more time helping customers and less time on administrative tasks.
Live chat is a vastly superior way for your staff to connect with customers. The technology benefits everyone. Customers get answers to their questions in minutes rather than hours, support staff can get the answers they need quickly while the problem is still fresh in their minds, and both of them can multitask while engaging in the chat to keep productivity high.
Service Hub comes with its own built-in chat software the integrates nicely with all of the other features, making it one of the most powerful chat programs you can use. These benefits can be amplified further with the aid of Service Hub's chatbots, discussed below.
Despite all of live chat's benefits over other forms of communication, it also has some inefficiencies of its own. Different problems may require different members of support staff to address. Other problems may have an easy solution that is mentioned on an FAQ page or in another document somewhere on your site. Also, customers may need help outside of business hours when there is not a live person to talk to.
These inefficiencies are not a problem when a chatbot is the initial contact for a customer. The chatbot can solve common problems on its own without the need to get a human involved. If human intervention is needed, the chatbot will be able to intelligently decide which members of your support staff are best equipped to handle the problem. Finally, a chatbot can be there for your customers 24/7.
We mentioned the chatbot's ability to refer customers to a knowledge base to improve response time. You can't do that if you don't have a knowledge base on your website. That's why Service Hub has knowledge base software built-in to it. Not only will a knowledge base provide instant answers to customers who reach out to the chatbot, but it will allow them to find the answer on their own without having to reach out to staff at all. This eliminates the need for human help entirely.
This also means no wait time for that customer. Your support staff will spend less time answering common questions and more time responding to other customers with more unique problems.
The quality of your customer service can make or break your company. Quality of support is a key factor in almost any in-depth review you'll find comparing two products. You want to make sure that you are the one coming out on top in those comparisons. The best way to do that is to respond to your customers promptly and resolve their issues quickly. The tools in Service Hub will allow you to do that.
Eniture Technology specializes in helping e-Commerce merchants grow by providing useful information, digital marketing services, off-the-shelf apps that solve common problems, and custom programming services. If you're interested in accelerating the growth of your online sales, please contact us. You might also enjoy this free information on the 10 reasons why you should be using HubSpot to grow your e-commerce business.