What Can You Automate In Customer Service? -Digital Prosperity Podcast Season 6 Episode 6

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Welcome to another episode of the Digital Prosperity podcast, where our host, Andy Gibbins, interviews Emma Ablewhite, our HubSpot specialist. This podcast takes a slightly different turn and talks about what you can automate in the HubSpot Service Hub. Read on to find out more.

HubSpot Service Hub: An Overview

Many business owners might be reading this and asking themselves: What exactly is the HubSpot Service Hub?

In very simple terms, Service Hub is the ideal solution for everything post-sales.

Emma Ablewhite said: “Everything that happens once you have won that person and they have become a customer is going to sit within Service Hub.

“So that could be feedback from them, it could be any queries they have, any kind of post-sales process you have, whether that’s booking services, an onboarding process, all of that is going to sit within the service hub.

“It’s where you are doing your best to make sure that customers have the best possible experience with you, it keeps them coming back to you or retains them as customers for as long as possible.”

Why Is It Useful?

Now that you have a better understanding of Services Hub, you might be wondering how this tool can be used in your day-to-day. Well, here at JDR, we are aware that it is easier and cheaper to retain customers than to win new ones. Hence, retention should be at the absolute core of any business looking to grow.

Mrs Ablewhite said: “Anything that you can do, therefore, to improve that customer experience should absolutely be something that you invest in heavily because you are going to get so much value from your existing customers and growing those customers and giving them a fantastic experience that’s the main draw of the service hub”

She continues by highlighting that by investing in the Services Hub, you will be able to systemise and automate most of it, freeing up a great amount of your admin time. This is especially important, since most businesses, particularly those of a smaller size, don’t have someone specifically dedicated purely to customer service, usually turning this into an afterthought and therefore not going to get the time and attention it needs.

Emma added: “Having a platform, a system and software that can help that person to do it and leverage their time.

“It’s going to make a huge difference to what they’re able to do, especially if it’s someone wearing multiple hats, which we know in small businesses, everybody is always wearing multiple hats.”

Having a system and using the automations is also good for upselling as it will automatically email them at a certain time, or certain date, which would further enable you to grow your business further with the people you have already worked with who were happy with your service or product.

What Can You Automate In HubSpot?

So, what automations can be done using HubSpot? Our HubSpot specialist mentioned that many of her clients saw great benefit in automating the creation of tickets or one-to-one emails to customers.

Mrs Ablewhite observed: “What I encourage my clients to do is that even after a deal closes, you start a ticket to move it through your onboarding process, your post-sales process, whatever that looks like for you.

“If you are using the service hub more as a query handling tool, you can automate it so that if someone fills out a form, WhatsApps or emails you, that creates a ticket in the same place, to ensure that all your channels are linked together.”

You no longer have people sitting and waiting on the phone or constantly checking your business emails, the automation will take care of it for you. The Services Hub also offers tools similar to the ones offered in Sales Hub, where people can be enrolled on sequences and receive a series of automated emails.

Emma highlights that Services Hub is the ultimate and ideal tool for any business trying to make additional revenue from, for example, their services department.

She said: “The biggest challenge I hear from businesses is that they have a massive manual process to remember that they need to chase a person down to get the service booked in.

“It takes ridiculous amounts of time, and being able to automate that process through service hub is actually revenue-generating, and it reduces admin because you don’t have to think or do a lot of that.”

Emma also mentions the chatbot tool, which allows customers to self-serve, helping you save even more time and further benefiting your business.

Watch the full episode now: 

Example Use Cases

If you’re still not fully convinced about the benefits of the service hubs, here are some example use cases:

Emma said: “One of the most interesting use cases I came across of the service hub was when I was working with a fairly large e-commerce business, and the thing with those businesses is that an awful lot of people tend to have issues with their products.

“This company had a team of five or six people who were dealing with returns; they ran the entire thing from an Outlook inbox and were under the impression that they were getting 50 to 60 emails a day, which was a manageable amount for this team, and they thought it was working fairly well.

“When we moved them over to HubSpot, they realised that they were actually getting more than a hundred emails a day, which is double what they thought they were, and they also realised that a lot of things were falling through the cracks.

“Some emails weren’t getting responses, there was no way of making sure that when a response came through, the person who had the context would be dealing with that, which made them realise that they needed to hire more people and that the things that were falling through the cracks were costing them money and that customers weren’t coming back to buy from them.”

Not only will the service hub help you gain visibility on your business processes, but it is also an excellent way to see where your customer service is not hitting the mark.

This HubSpot tool is an excellent way for e-commerce and any other businesses to earn trust, and therefore make it more likely for them to get repeat business.

Another use case Mrs Ablewhite experienced was with businesses that need to service machines.

She said: “In several businesses now, they had to remember which machines needed a service, and they would be using a massive spreadsheet which a single admin person would have to go through every month, update and work out which machines need a service.

“What this means in reality is that probably 10 out of 50 people who needed a service got emailed, and then maybe one of them would book a service, which meant that they were losing business due to their lack of efficiency or to competitors.

“When they moved to HubSpot, they were able to set up an assistant which would remind them which machine needed to be serviced each month and meant that they no longer needed to keep track through a spreadsheet.

“They also started using email automations so that three emails would automatically get sent to anyone needing to book a service to remind them to do so, making the whole process a lot smoother and easier.”

What Other Service Tools Are Out There?

If you don’t want to invest in HubSpot, there are a plethora of other tools that you can use that are available. For example, industry-specific ticketing tools, or feedback tools such as Survey Monkey. However, according to Mrs Ablewhite, HubSpot is unique because it can integrate with your marketing and your sales processes.

She said: “The challenge that I see with a lot of other ticketing platforms is that if you are running your sales process through a different platform, whether that’s HubSpot or something else, you often have to do big and complicated integration projects with developers, that end up costing crazy amounts of money.

“Another option is to move things out of your sales platform into your service platform manually.”

This HubSpot integration not only facilitates the follow-up process, but it is also extremely easy to use.

Emma added: “HubSpot knows what you’re going to need and has a lot of things out of the box, but it also has areas where you can make this more flexible and customisable, to make it easy to use during the process, integration for marketing and sales, and to surface.”

What If Technology Removes The Personal Element?

In the 21st century, not embracing new technologies can cost you a significant amount of business, hence why our HubSpot specialist highlights that this tool can be implemented at different levels depending on the needs.

She said: “If you are getting the majority of your business through word of mouth, which we know most people are, and you are offering a personalised service to people, that’s going to get 85/90% of people thinking you’re an amazing company.

“If you could up that by 5/10% by making sure that if somebody sends you a query, you will always get back to them in 30 minutes, because you’ve got a system that will alert you immediately as soon as that’s happened.”

This will help set your business as the experts with excellent customer service. Using tools like the service hub doesn’t mean that you no longer need your service team; it will help them leverage their time to ensure they are able to do an even better job with your customers.

Looking For Help?

At JDR Group, we have helped multiple businesses improve their systems and processes to ensure that customers have a great experience and are more likely to make repeat business. If you are unsure where to start, get in touch and let us give you the guidance you need to ensure that your customers keep coming back for more.

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