HubSpot Service Hub is an all-in-one customer service platform that helps businesses deliver exceptional customer experiences. It offers a comprehensive suite of customer service tools, including ticketing, live chat, a knowledge base, customer feedback, and more. With its powerful automation engine, Service Hub helps businesses streamline customer service processes, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
Service Hub also offers valuable insights into customer data, enabling businesses to make informed decisions and deliver personalized experiences. Service Hub has a wide range of features that can help businesses looking to provide exceptional customer service.
We covered the functionalities of HubSpot Service Hub in our recent SmartTake webinar. Our panel discussion featured Adriti Gulati, Senior Instructional Designer at HubSpot; Jake Dagan, Senior Channel Partner Manager at Aircall; and Megan Golden, Senior Marketing Strategist at SmartBug Media. The three experts shared their experiences with using HubSpot Service Hub to implement customer surveys and dashboards to improve overall customer experience.
Before capturing customer feedback, it’s important to have clearly defined goals. A few questions to help outline goals may include:
Once you define your goals, an action plan can be implemented.
“Maybe some of the feedback you get on your surveys [isn’t] going to be positive, and that's OK—that's why you're sending them,” explains Gulati. “But you'll want to make sure that you have an action plan in place before that first survey is sent. From there, you can decide what are the best steps as far as moving forward with technical implementation.”
Dagan defines the steps to use when implementing an action plan:
Are you talking to them via phone, email, chat, SMS, WhatsApp? How are you talking to customers? Identify those channels, and make sure that what you're using for all of them is integrated so that everything is flowing into HubSpot automatically. If there is a human process involved—think copying and pasting and manual data entry—communication will get lost. Not all the information will make it into HubSpot, and you’ll lose valuable feedback and insights.
This includes understanding the different types of calls, chats, and emails. Scope out the different types of conversations you're having so you can set up reporting and tagging and start to understand how you want to classify these.
Golden says, “It goes without saying that you'll want to make sure your customers are in HubSpot and ready to be reached out to, and that your customer success team is also bought in on your action plan and [they know] what they're taking part in.”
There is a customer feedback tool in HubSpot that includes everything in the feedback journey from creating survey automations to sending surveys out at the right time. There’s also a dashboard view that allows you to evaluate data. HubSpot's customer dashboards are designed to give businesses a comprehensive view of their customers by providing detailed insights into customer data, including customer profiles, purchase history, engagement levels, contact information, and more. These customer dashboards help businesses identify customer trends (via survey responses and scores) and react quickly to customer needs.
“Everyone has probably filled out a survey similar to, ‘How likely are you to recommend X company to a colleague or friend?’” says Gulati. “I would say if you are just starting out on your feedback journey, this is the one to start with. Send it out twice a year, and this is really what you're using to understand your general customer sentiment.”
This type of survey is not tied to a specific event. Instead, the survey is intended to find out how customers are feeling about a brand or company.
Another survey option within HubSpot is generally tied to customer support and used to create a customer satisfaction score. For example, after an interaction with customer support, customers will receive a survey saying, "How satisfied were you with that experience?" based on a 0-10 point scale.
Additionally, there is a survey within HubSpot for the Customer Effort Score. This is used for measuring ease and efficiency. For example, if you change something on the website or in your software, you can send out a survey with feedback options such as “This experience made it easy to handle my issue” or "This organization made it easy to handle my issue."
“Those are industry-standard surveys,” says Gulati, “and what I love about these surveys is that they're so easy—you don't have to think about how to word the question and you can also compare it to your peers.”
If none of those surveys work best for your company, HubSpot offers a feature to create your own survey.
Pro tip: The HubSpot Service Hub Software Certification has a lesson on best survey practices and how to create your own surveys.
Another way to improve customer satisfaction is making sure that you can access survey results via phone, chat, SMS, apps, and so on so you can quickly pull them up and refer to them when talking to customers.
"Anytime customers fill out a survey, they're going to expect your support team and CS team to have access to that information, and they don't want to repeat themselves,” says Dagan. “So the more we can make sure we have easy access to those results for our one-to-one conversations, the better.”
In HubSpot, the feedback surveys are found in the company and contact record, so your customer service, sales, and marketing teams can easily access that information.
Golden kicks off the conversation by sharing this story:
I have two different clients that use Service Hub in two different ways. One of the clients offers some live events in online courses, and they send an NPS survey after the course is complete, asking, “On a scale of 1-10, how happy were you with this course name?” And from there they can understand, “OK, what were we doing right?” Then they'll follow up with people who are happy [and say], “Thank you. What specific topic did you like? If possible, would you mind sharing your positive review somewhere?” And then if they're unhappy, they'll send an email and say, “We're going to reach out. We're going to call you and learn more about this experience, if we have your permission. If not, can you fill out a form and let us know what you didn't like?” That way, they can understand through specific events how happy or unhappy someone is.
These surveys have enabled Golden’s client to pinpoint what makes their customers happy after a specific experience and determine if they have an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell or to invite the customer to join them at another event.
Golden continues:
Another one of my clients that is in the financial industry uses Service Hub to its fullest ability through ticketing, communications, inbox... pretty much anything Service Hub offers, they utilize it. ... Prior to using Service Hub, they were having their customers call them, fill out a form on their website, email them, and use their app. It felt like their customers were coming in from all angles, and their customer success team really had a hard time making sure that all issues were followed up with and then creating an action plan, if necessary. They started using Service Hub, so they were able to put all of the information in one platform, and then once they resolved some of the issues, they could start surveying their customers. I will say the first set of surveys we sent out, maybe it wasn't the prettiest results, but over time we could start seeing that growth in customer happiness. And their customer success team was thrilled. At first they're like, “Oh, you're going to measure our close date, how long it takes us to close a ticket, or how happy a customer feels afterward.” But then in the long run they're like, “This has made our lives so much easier.”
Gulati chimes in to say how important it is to understand the customer feedback and promote a transparent company culture in which employees know the feedback being captured.
“The responsibility really should fall on everyone in the company to know who's saying what,” says Gulati, “and when the responsibility lies on everyone, there's more collaboration and bigger and better solutions.”
Overall, Service Hub helps solidify communication across the organization to centralize customer feedback so you can conduct deeper analysis, identify customer pain points, and implement processes to improve customer experience.
In Service Hub, it is easy to find out who your happiest clients are through workflows. Companies can create a workflow that notifies them when someone gives a 9 or 10 rating on an NPS survey. By knowing your company’s evangelists, you can spread the word of mouth digitally by asking for reviews and including them in case studies or client testimonials.
“I've seen some really cool things where you're utilizing some of the quotes that your customers are saying about you in some of these surveys, and using them in social media campaigns, obviously with their permission, and just showcasing how happy your customers are,” explains Golden. “You can use that as word of mouth to make sure that other people are seeing how happy your customers are.”
Surveys are a great way to solicit feedback, but sometimes customers will offer impromptu feedback as well—for example, during a call with a customer support or sales representative.
“At Aircall, we use custom properties and tags such as a tag that says ‘great customer feedback on...' [so we can] tag a call where a customer provided good feedback,” says Dagan. “You can have an active list set up for all those to flow into and have marketing be able to pick through those, reach out for more context, and get some really good material out of it.”
The answer to this question depends on a company’s industry and overall goals.
“I’ll usually ask, ‘Do you have any benchmarking data that we can start with to gauge where we think we want to be?’” advises Golden. “Most of the time, that's not available. So we may start by sending out a survey of some sort knowing that it will probably serve as our benchmarking in the future.”
Long-term goals are important to establish, but companies should start by working to understand a bit more about their audience and the impact their surveys are having. Measuring week over week (if companies are sending out a lot of surveys) or month over month will help companies see the overall positive impact. This way, even though companies may not be able to identify a specific number, within their dashboard, they'll be able to quickly see the impact surveys are having, the ticketing close time, and more. As time goes on, benchmarking will inevitably get better.
“Another really important thing to be tracking, in addition to overall customer happiness, is the overarching theme of ‘How easy is it to get in touch with your team?’” says Dagan. “This means setting SLAs [based] on, what is your email response time? And how long do we have, when an email comes in, to get a response? How long are your folks waiting on hold? From there, we can sort of break that down into having goals and things to strive for.”
Through implementing goals and using HubSpot’s customer dashboards and Service Hub as the centralized customer feedback data source, companies will be able to efficiently create personalized customer experiences and track customer satisfaction. With their intuitive design and powerful features, HubSpot's Service Hub and customer surveys are beneficial for businesses that want to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
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