Happy customers are the secret to growing a business. They buy more, stay with you longer, refer their friends, and tell the world they love you. On the flip side, 60 percent of consumers have stopped doing business with a brand due to a poor customer service experience.
To make sure you have more happy customers than lost opportunities, you need to take a proactive approach to helping your customers. One of the easiest ways to miss opportunities is a lack of visibility. When, for example, sales and marketing teams aren’t sitting in on conversations service reps are having with customers, they don’t know what types of service requests are being made. Without this valuable information, it’s difficult to know what to improve when it comes to offering a more useful product and a better customer experience.
That’s all changing with the new HubSpot Service Hub. It’s a way to address that third leg of the stool and make it more visible across your organization. It makes it easy to manage and connect with customers, understand them, and help them succeed. You’ll make customers happier, keep them longer and grow your business faster. Here’s why we’re excited about the Service Hub and where we see the most potential.
In the interest of full transparency, HubSpot is offering a professional-level version of the new product at this time. The price tag is $400, with five seats included. Additional users can be included for $80 apiece.
The team at HubSpot notes that there has been a massive movement of power and trust away from companies and into customers’ hands. Customers are control in 2018 and beyond.
Above and beyond all else, happy customers are the best way to grow your business at a time like this. One of the best ways to keep customers happy is properly communicating with and handling concerns in a timely manner, and the new tools are designed to help you do just that. In fact, delighting your customers and turning them into promoters is the final stage of the inbound methodology. Doing so improves retention, increases profitability and reduces customer acquisition costs.
Companies need a framework for communicating with customers.
The new service is not just a new product line, but a new framework for delivering customer service. HubSpot is calling it, “an all-in-one solution for your customer journey.” Because HubSpot builds tools to match the inbound methodology, the new Hub is no different.
Up until now, there haven’t been many tools in the “close and delight” phase of the inbound journey, so releasing the new Hub is one way HubSpot is augmenting its offerings in this area. It is “designed to turn customers—and clients’ customers—into promoters.”
The new portal has four features customers can utilize:
You may be the ideal user for HubSpot's Service Hub if you use a CRM but are not entrenched in other service/help desk tools. Think about it: It’s difficult to provide exceptional customer service when you don’t have customer records in the same system you’re doing customer support in. The Service Hub conveniently provides contact records exactly where you need them.
Additionally, a service professional or account manager needs to be able to efficiently communicate with customers. The new tool meets these needs with templates, snippets, meetings and other ways to facilitate communication.
Proactively answering your customers’ questions. Fifty percent of support and service requests start online, according to HubSpot. That means we need an online presence for prospects to get answers. Rather than guessing about what type of content customers want to see, you can use the new Knowledge Base to answer the questions they already have. Additionally, having ready-made answers makes your team more efficient.
Improving SEO. The knowledge base articles help to boost SEO so you’ll appear at the top of Google for these inquiries. (HubSpot’s Knowledge Base is a great example of this; you can search how to do just about anything related to marketing and a HubSpot knowledge article is usually the first thing that pops up.)
Responding to customers faster and more efficiently. Systems like Zendesk that manage customer service tickets and inquiries don’t necessarily integrate with SalesForce or HubSpot, so those handling these tickets have to move back and forth between different technologies to respond. Using one software for all your customer service needs is more efficient and allows you to share information across departments with ease.
Influencing sales conversations. Understanding your customers’ most common questions and requests helps your sales team be better prepared to address them during the sales process. When all your departments have easy access to the customer data they need, giving customers what they want is facilitated.
Surveying customers and using survey data. No more need to use third-party platforms to get survey data. You can get it right within the Service Hub. Many of our clients already use survey tools like SurveyMonkey, but that data lives elsewhere and it’s not easy to know what to do with it.
Boosting referrals. Your promoters are your greatest opportunity for improving revenue.
Kuno has transformed its sales process to better align sales, marketing and customer service. We are using conversation tools instead of relying so heavily on forms. We’re having conversations with prospects in real time, often before we schedule a call with them. And we’re keeping track of all of it to see how we can help our clients put it to good use. Are you ready to take the next step?
