Why go HubSpot Service Hub? (HubHeroes, Ep. 10)

HubSpot Service Hub provides service teams with a powerful suite of tools that not only help them deliver better outcomes for your clients and customers, but also enables them to enjoy their job more – from ticketing, live chat, and playbooks, to the ever-popular knowledge base, customer feedback surveys, and full CRM integrations. (And that's barely scratching the surface of its full capabilities.) 

But what are the true capabilities of the HubSpot Service Hub? And, if you're serious about future-proofing your business by prioritizing customer delight, is it the right investment for you? To answer those questions (and many more), we're joined this week by HubSpot Product GTM Specialist Eric Brenner. 

WE ALSO TALK ABOUT ... 

• What HubSpot Service Hub really is, for those who have heard of it but maybe don't know a ton about the platform itself.
• How the HubSpot Service Hub "completes the suite" of HubSpot Hub products, and why that is so important. 
• The key features and benefits of HubSpot Service Hub you need to know about it – and we dig beyond the usual product descriptions. 
• If you're considering HubSpot Service Hub, we dig into who it's right for and what may make it not the right fit for you.
• The undeniable and almost under-appreciated power of the HubSpot Knowledge Base in Service Hub, and the different ways it can be used.
• If you're thinking about moving to HubSpot Service Hub from another service platform, Devyn gets honest about the dos and don'ts of migrating to HubSpot Service Hub.
• What you need to know about ticketing in the HubSpot Service Hub.

We also talk about our favorite features, what folks often get wrong about the platform, and so much more ... trust me, you've just gotta tune in to experience all of the HubSpot Service Hub goodness we cover.

RESOURCES FOR THIS EPISODE

Some of these we talked about, others we're adding because they're only going to make the episode that much sweeter for you ... 

• What is customer delight and who's responsible for it? (HubHeroes, Ep. 9)
• What makes great content? The Attract phase of the Flywheel (HubHeroes, Ep. 2)
• HubSpot Flywheel: Engage phase ... and is building trust crap? (HubHeroes, Ep. 7)
• Have questions about the HubSpot Service Hub? HubSpot consulting is always available if you want me to address your specific HubSpot customization challenges 1-on-1 with you!
• Join The HubHeroes Podcast community!
• Wait, what the heck is The HubHeroes Podcast?!

YOUR ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

When you're focusing on the growth and future success of your business through your marketing and sales, it can be all too easy for customer delight and your service team to end up last on the list of your priorities – often with the best of intentions. 

While I fundamentally believe that HubSpot Service Hub is an essential way for companies to throw fuel on the fire that is customer delight, your one thing from this episode is to simply start by thinking differently about how you prioritize service in your company. Because, without the right mindset about customer delight (and the service team you rely on to deliver those smiles), no amount of technology will be able to get you where you need to go.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT 

Intro: Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by silo departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, Lord Lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge. Never fear hub heroes.

Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

George B. Thomas: And for yet another week, we have to add another person because last week, it was Christina Garnett. Now we got Eric Brenner. Eric, I'll come back to you in a second. But ladies and gentlemen, Hub Heroes podcast listeners, one of the things, one of the questions that you can ask yourself that probably might be the most important question you ask in your life is why. Why am I doing this?

Why do I need this? Why? And so today, we are actually answering the question, why HubSpot Service Hub? And we have a special guest. Yes.

Eric Brenner from HubSpot is here. Eric, first of all, let's let the Hub Heroes podcast understand who you are. So it's real simple. Who are you? What do you do?

And they already know that you do it for HubSpot.

Eric Brenner: So I am Eric Brenner. I'm the go to market service hub specialist, which is a fancy term for anything and everything I could do to get service hub out there and get customers and partners and everyone's information back to our product because I want them building awesome stuff. I've been at HubSpot for almost 5 years coming up on sabbatical. Feel free to send me your ideas for where to go on sabbatical because right now, it's to my front yard to do some yard work, which no one wants to do for a month.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. No. No. No. Yard work for a month is not a good thing.

We have to find a good place. So Hub Hero podcast, make sure on Twitter, you use hashtag hub heroes podcast and where you think Eric should go on sabbatical. That is a challenge to everybody that is listening right now, but let's start with the foundational piece, the very beginning of the conversation that we like to cover. And by the way, we do have a method to our madness. Last week, we talked about delight.

This week, we're talking about service hub. Now that doesn't mean that service is the only thing that should be delighting. If you didn't listen to the last episode, go back and listen to it because we're actually gonna back into hopefully next week or the week after into sales, the week after that potentially marketing, and it's all under this idea of why that hub, but delight service, they go hand in hand. Here's where I wanna start. And Max, Devon, historical trainers, you know, this is like a thing that I just love to do.

When you have to explain and by the way, Eric, you're gonna pitch in too here in a minute. When you have to explain what is the HubSpot service hub, how the heck do you explain that?

Max Cohen: It's gonna be a very emotional and electric episode software that helps you be there for your customers when you need them the most. We talked a lot about Delight in the last episode. These are the tools that really help you do it. That's as far as I'm gonna go because we're gonna go really deep later.

Devyn Bellamy: It makes the service team not a red headed stepchild. That's what it boils down to. You always hear, is your organization a sales organization or a marketing organization? You never hear people asking, is your organization a service organization? And that that's just plain wrong.

And what it does is it ties these poor, neglected people back into the communication structure of their organization.

Eric Brenner: I will say, I think that there's a huge miss for a lot of companies on customer service. Like we can all think of many examples of horrible experiences you had with a company that now make you never touch that company again. And so I totally agree with you. It's a red headed stepchild, but it shouldn't be because it's your almost while marketing can help with this and sales can help with this. When your customers have an issue, when your customers have questions, they're not going to your marketing team.

They might go to your sales team, but they're probably not gonna answer every single question. That's what support's for, and that's what service sub helps do.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. I love this. And for me, the only thing that I would add to this is this layer of voice of customer and the ability to use surveys and chat and things like that to actually hear. And then because you heard something, be able to create knowledge articles and places of education where you can go to that next level for your customers. Again, customer success, customer service, call it whatever you want.

But being able to listen and then execute on those things is key. So here's the thing. What I wanna ask is this question, and I need kind of a knee jerk response of when you hear this. So when I ask the question, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? What makes HubSpot service hub special?

Max Cohen: So let's clearly define what's hyper unique about the Service Hub that you don't get anywhere else first so we can frame that up in a context. The big things that you get with Service Hub are things like the ability to create a knowledge base, the ability to build automation around your ticketing process. So, like, tickets, it's a top level sort of object inside of HubSpot. It's a digital record of you helping someone with something or delivering a service, whatever it may be. We also allow you to do things like the conversations inbox, customer portal to manage your tickets, and also surveys.

The thing that makes Service Hub special to me is kinda like the narrative that we always kinda gave it when it first came out. I always look at any big things that HubSpot adds into its its product offering, if you will, of, like, how it kinda fits into the history of how HubSpot's evolved over time. We said this thing when when HubSpot came out saying it completed the suite. Right? Complete the suite was like the big sort of terminology they used to kind of frame up where service hub sort of fit into the equation.

And the way that I always told people about it when I was training people and giving them the context of why it was such a big deal is that if you look back to even the original inbound methodology, before it was attract, engage, and delight, attract, convert, close, and delight. Delight was always part of the equation. However, our tool set, our product offering, our suite of cert like, you know, tools, whatever you wanna call it, our software, We had great tools to help you market. We had great tools to help you sell, attract, convert, close. We kinda had that figured out.

But when it came to Delight, our answer was kinda just, you can email people, survey monkey links, Delight. And it would like it didn't really our tool didn't really help walk the walker, talk the talk, or whatever that means. It didn't really help deliver on the Delight part. The service hub completely changed that. And it finally made HubSpot have the ability to really attract, engage, and delight across the entire, kinda, customer life cycle or journey or across your organization, however you wanna think about it.

It. That to me is a huge missing piece of the puzzle that we always needed, and then it slotted right in there. And that was a great day, and I've been a fan ever since.

Eric Brenner: Helped with that Halligan flywheel. It was that 3rd piece to make it spin. I always think too I think the amount of customers I had when I was in customer onboarding who were doing hacky ways of creating like deals without revenue. This helped us adjust as powerful and maybe more powerful than custom objects was. Tickets was this.

Now we could track this stuff in its own place, but still on the HubSpot CRM, which is the best power of HubSpot.

George B. Thomas: The day we got a ticket pipeline, like, the angels came down, seas were parted, all sorts of references that we could throw on here. So, Devin, when you heard that question, what makes HubSpot Surface Hub special? Where did your mind go?

Devyn Bellamy: Oh, I'm thinking operations completely. When you're talking about your sales team and your marketing team being able to see everything that happens presale, you need to know what's happening post sale sale too. If you're dealing with some kind of recurring process or if you just wanna rehash an existing customer, you don't wanna go away and talk about, hey, don't you love it when this person has, like, 12 tickets open because they hate your product? You need to be educated on what's going on with your customers at every stage of the flywheel. And that's why, to me, Service Hub is perfect.

Every sales manager should be rooting for Service Hub. Every marketer should be rooting for Service Hub. If you can quickly identify potential detractors using Service Hub. To me, Service Hub is a no brainer.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. And it's it's funny. I always think of things a little bit sideways. So when I answer what I feel makes it special, it's also gonna let the cat out of the bag of what tool I really love most. Although, I love all the tools in the service hub.

But, man, SEO, brothers and sisters, knowledge articles is so important for a secondary way to leverage search engine optimization for your sales service, marketing, all of it. And the reason I bring this up is because of a historical story that happened to me. You know, I believe in creating content. You know that, Max, don't start. We already have a whole episode where you talked about good content and laid it on the line.

But at the end of the day, I've had people come to me, again, don't work for HubSpot, and be like, oh, I need help with HubSpot. And I'll be like, oh, well, what hub do you have? And they're like, no. We don't have HubSpot. We wanna buy it because we actually watched your content.

This is what happens. Even though you're designing knowledge articles for your customers. People who are not customers stumble on these SEO optimized on purpose or not articles and are like, oh, well, shoot. I already know how to do these 17 things. Maybe I should just buy it because because it make my life easier.

So for me, it's just another opportunity to edumacate people on the things that they need to be edumacated on. And, yes, I said that on purpose the way that I said it. Here's the thing. The next thing that we have to get into though is because I know somebody is gonna search why HubSpot service hub. They're gonna find this page.

They're gonna listen to this podcast or whatever comes out of this, and they're gonna be like, yeah. But but Max, Devin, Eric, George, how do I know if it's for me? How do I know if I'm a good fit? Everybody buckle up cause I already know Max is gonna go ham on this one. So but the question is, who is a great fit for the HubSpot service hub?

Eric Brenner: I mean, if you have customers, you want service hub. I I'm sure Max has got a much better, longer answer than that. We can get in how many customers and size of your support team and size of your customer, But realistically, you got customers. They got questions. You have field service, project management.

You need all this stuff.

Devyn Bellamy: If you got customers, you need Service Hub. That's it. If at any point, somebody I mean, unless you are selling something that is literally idiot proof. If you are selling I can't even think of any even if you're selling a cookie, somebody might have a complaint about the cookie. They're gonna wanna talk to you.

It's an opportunity for you to connect with your customers. If you have customers, you need service up. That's it.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Let me jump in here for a second, because, Max, I just wanna hold the anticipation just a little bit longer, because he's losing his mind. It's gonna be one of the snippets that we put out on the hub heroes YouTube channel because he's literally losing his mind right now. First of all, Devon, if somebody complains about cookies, they got life problems, and they need to get therapy. I'm just gonna throw that out there.

That needs to happen. The other thing is, Max, just so you know, I'm going to allow you to answer this how you wanna answer it, but I am gonna throw a curve ball after you answer this because I am built this way, and I have to ask the next question. But until then, who's a great fit for HubSpot service hub, Max?

Max Cohen: Everybody. Like, I and I think this is the hill I'm ready to die on, right, completely. I mean, the thing is is, like, I remember when I was onboarding customers on the marketing hub and because that's, like, all we kinda had when I was doing onboarding. And I was like, how have you guys great experiences with your business. And guess what?

They wouldn't be referring people just because you had a really cool marketing process or just because you had a really great sales process. It's everything you did after they became a customer, which made that person put their trust in you when referring friends, family, colleagues, and other people that they care about to your business in what whatever way, shape, or form you wanna think about it. The other thing is that even if you don't have customers, if you're some kind of organization, people get really hung up in the jargon of customers or or non customers or prospects or, like, whatever. You've got some sort of equivalent of customers. You've got people that you're trying to help with stuff, and genuinely, you wanna keep them happy.

And I think the other thing, and maybe we'll talk about this later. You gotta think about arming your folks who are at your organization whose roles is to help others. There's a lot you can do to help them. They have it in them to be able to help others to their full ability. Put the oxygen mask on first if you will, when being able to take care of others and make their lives easier.

Everyone can use service hub. The worst thing you can do is say, oh, we can't because we're a SaaS company. We work because we're not a SaaS company. There's a huge misconception that we've gotta work to break, but I'm gonna stop because, again, I'll ramble

George B. Thomas: on forever. Yeah. I know. It's all good. And we love the ramblings of Max Jacob Cohen.

I'm just gonna throw that out there. But here's the thing. As the voice of reason, AKA the guy who doesn't work for HubSpot, I have to push back that if everybody could use HubSpot Service Hub, there'd be no reason for Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, things like that. And so really in this next question, even though Max is willing to die on the hill for that last question, I have to push to more of the granulars and ask, is there anybody that is not a right fit for the HubSpot service hub and why?

Devyn Bellamy: Zendesk, those tools get the job done. I mean, they're they're decent products. The thing is is that it's not just about service hub. You need a service solution, period. And if you're gonna go one of those, great.

What makes Service Hub stand apart? It's the fact that it integrates seamlessly and was built to connect everything else. That's what it does. Can you imagine if your social media team could create service ticket based on something that they captured on Twitter and make that happen immediately? So you tie in your service team immediately and address the online issue immediately?

That's something you can do with service hub, in collaboration with your other hubs. It's like having ServiceHub as part of a multi hub solution is where it's at. Now, if you have your own stand alone service team that exists on an island and the only way that they handle business is by someone calling in to an 800 number that's listed in small print on the back of package that the person already threw away, then fine. That's great. Get your own disconnected stand alone system.

But if you want to connect your teams and actually function as an organization and have informed employees throughout your organization, that's where Service Hub comes into play.

Eric Brenner: I think you're kind of explaining why HubSpot wins in general. I say this to people for years. The CRM is not a sales thing. I know people hear CRM, and they're like, oh, sales. It's like, no.

It's like this customer relationship management, and HubSpot built that and then everything on top of it, Marketing Hub, Ops Hub, Sales Hub. Like, that's the power of HubSpot. I know what you bought because I can see your deals. I know what pages you viewed because I have your contact activity. Like, I have everything in one place to know that this is what's good.

Max Cohen: I know why you're mad because I can listen to the sales rep's recording and see where you were misled and set wrong expectations. Context.

George B. Thomas: Oh, man. Max either got really cool or really creepy right there for a second. I'm not sure. I'm not sure which one that was. But here's the thing.

I can't leave this yet. I can't leave this yet because I have to ask it in a different direction, and I know it is what it is. We'll move forward here in a second. But you're telling me there's nothing that the service hub is missing that a company out there might need that disqualifies it from being an option for a thing that they can use.

Max Cohen: Well, that's different. If we're talking about, oh, I need specific x feature. The point that I'm trying to make is that things like giving your customers easy ways to self solve problems on their own, giving your team a little bit more of a structured way of solving problems when people do have to get involved, and getting feedback and taking action on it is business, industry, segment, vertical agnostic. Everyone needs to do that somehow in their own way. Sure.

Are there gonna be people who have hyper niche very like, is there gaps in the product that people might need? Sure. But I'm just saying, like, using those tools in general, you give me literally any business model, I can easily find a use case for each one of those big tools that's in it. You just have to think creatively about it. The beautiful thing about the service hub is that the 3 big tools that it adds aren't anything crazy complex.

They're relatively inherently simple tools. The power comes out of the creativity in which you deploy them and use them and tie them all together.

Eric Brenner: I will say that there are definitely gaps and things we have. I mean, let's be honest. HubSpot has been around from service hub standpoint for 4 years. Maybe Zendesk has been around for 10 and only concentrating on one thing. If you really think about it, there's plenty of room for us to grow, whether it's better inbound calling, more with knowledge base is more with like, honestly, every tool.

It's one of the joys of HubSpot that I have seen in my years here is that, like, we never release something and then say, enjoy, we're done. It's like they release it and then the team turns around and is building 7 more versions to make it better. The other side of it that's nice is we may not have something, say, like a flexible SLA tool today. While I think we're gonna get there, we may not have it today, but integrations, our app marketplace, like partners can most likely get you where you need to be. So even if we don't have everything, we can get you there while staying inside of Hub Spot and keeping marketing sales and service in one place and not having to say, nope.

I'm gonna leave this team with Freshdesk over here or Salesforce for sales over here. Like, we can get most, if not all of it done. It just might not all come out of the box.

George B. Thomas: I love that you mentioned, Eric, pairing of, you know, a good steak and a good wine, but pairing of possible integrations. We'll we'll get to that. I wanna definitely circle back around to that, but I want your personal preferences at this point with this next question, and that is just what is your favorite HubSpot service hub tool and why? And it can only be 1. Only 1.

I'm gonna go first. I love ever since the day that we had custom surveys added in and the power that that gives us. Again, I'm a big fan of I need to be able to hear what my customers say. I need to understand the emotions that they're going through, and a and a custom survey done right is a very empowering tool. So with that said, Devin, Eric, Max, what's your one favorite tool for Service Hub and why?

Max Cohen: It's literally easier for me to choose my favorite daughter than this. Devin, go ahead.

Devyn Bellamy: For me, it's knowledge base. No question. Because, you know, I am at my at my core, I'm a marketer, and I love the ability to not only give people an opportunity to solve their own problems, but like you said, get that little extra little link juice is dope. I love the fact that knowledge base is flexible. I've seen it be used very creatively.

There was this one group that was using it specifically for their marketing. It's where they housed all of their content for their blog, their podcast. Everything was put in the knowledge base just because of the way it's organized and the way you can store content in it. It was, for them, a perfect fit.

Eric Brenner: I will say I am, like, super excited for, like, 2023 for what HubSpot Service Hub has in stores. My answer will change if you invite me back next year. But I will say it's like it's like I said, we never stop doing something. While I think inbound calling is good, I think there is plenty of room for it to be great. And I know that we'll get there.

I know what we're building and I know what the long term plan is, and I think it's good. I will say I have to say it's it's feedback surveys because they're listening posts. They don't have to be just after a ticket. They don't just have to be after a chat. Post sale, 30 days later.

How are you feeling? Still happy with what you bought? A year later, still happy? And if not, let's use automation to figure out should your sales rep call you? Should a manager call you?

Should someone talk to you? It's not just a well, it is a service hub feature. It's not a service tool. It's like a everyone tool. Hell, use it on your on a website page.

Was this helpful? Did you find what you were looking for? Like, it's all there for you to get your answer. But, man, I mean, I think Max was the one who taught me years ago. If you have a question about HubSpot, search for it on Google.

If it comes up with a knowledge based article, we do it, and you know how to do it. If we don't, and it comes up with a community article, maybe we can, maybe we can't. Maybe a partner can help you. And if it doesn't show up with anything, you're asking the wrong questions. So, like, knowledge base is pretty powerful tool just how it is today.

Max Cohen: Okay. I I'm just gonna be boring, and I'm gonna say tickets. And here is why. The ticket object, I think, is really what took HubSpot out of the this is just a marketing and sales tool box. Because that ticket object can be so flexible.

And it can mean so many different things. It can be that run of the mill. We have a support team and this is how they manage how they work. They have tickets. We can see how we've helped people.

We can run metrics and performance off of that. Great. But you can also use it to measure how you deliver a service. You can use it for onboarding. You can use it for tracking.

Let's say, you're a a company that maybe sells commercial lighting and you wanna be able to track the project of designing Ticket pipelines can give you different stages and thus unlock a 1000000 different creative use cases for the ticket object. So I love it just for its the creativity you can deploy and all the different things you can do if you just think about outside of the box.

George B. Thomas: You know the thing I love about that section is there was these subtle strategies, these tips, these tricks that just came along for the ride of our favorite tools, which made it very valuable for the Hub Heroes listeners. The next thing I wanna go into here, and you know, humans were just really weird people. I don't know if you have ever run into this, and actually I do know that you probably have run into this, where you're on the freeway and all of a sudden, it's just slow as all get out. And you finally get up to the reason why it's slow, and it's because everybody looked at the wreck. Everybody's gawking.

And if they would've just kept on driving, well, that's because we'd like to see the train wreck every now and then as terrible as it is. So my question is, what are some of the train wrecks that you've seen? In other words, how companies have just got service hubs so wrong, so wrong. What are some of the horror stories?

Max Cohen: I think there's like a couple things where it's like, maybe make sure you don't forget to do this because you're leaving a lot on the table if you don't, and you could call that a bit of a train wreck. You know, a very simple one. It's like, hey, if you're doing NPS surveys, what sort of automation are you setting up if someone gives you a bad score? How are you actioning feedback? How are you making sure when someone tells you they are dissatisfied, that you're actually doing something about it instead of just being like, they hate us.

They're not gonna improve from this at all. There's so much you can learn from it, but there's also just very simple steps you can take to ensure that when you're gathering the feedback, if someone's unhappy, you can notify the right person, set a task for something to follow-up. Really make sure that, like, you're you're fixing that problem versus just kind of letting you go and ignoring it. So it's like sleeping on a lot of the little detail stuff that people just kinda don't think to set up.

Eric Brenner: I mean, I think one of the worst things I've seen customers do is not think about the end result and just like jump in and start using a tool and setting something up. I used to always tell my customers like build in reverse. I don't even care what you're talking about. We can be talking about a marketing drip campaign with just emails and a workflow. You should build it backwards.

It's the same thing where people just would jump in and be like, alright. And the tick pipeline, here are my statuses. And it's like, did you talk to your team to know what these steps are, or did you just start running with whatever we gave you as default? You're setting yourself down a path of you could turn it around, but, man, is it not an easy turnaround to try and fix something once your team is using it? So setting it up the right way, like having a conversation with your team to make sure that it, like, actually matches your process.

I know I'm biased because I used to be in onboarding. It's part of the reason because they sit down with you and they're like, what is your process? What do you do today? And then they help you put it in HubSpot so that you don't just run wild and all of a sudden realize I built 6 workflows that could have been 1. Like, what did I just do to myself?

Devyn Bellamy: 2 things. 1 is I feel like I say it every week, but if you're using Service Hub to replace preexisting tools, stop trying to make Service Hub work like the preexisting tool. That's kind of a big one. The other thing is treating Service Hub and, by proxy, your service team, like an island. Like, having them in the basement and just they're out of sight, out of mind.

I I've literally seen an organization that would handle their tickets in Service Hub and hand off reports on the tickets in paper to different stakeholders around the organization. And it's like, what are what are you even doing? Like, what? It was just so mind boggling that you're just using one small piece of the software and not fixing the actual problems with your process. That is basically like Eric said.

It's like you you have to solve the problem and not use the software as a little Band Aid to solve one small issue you're having.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I fully know that the next words out of my mouth are either gonna people are gonna continue to listen or they're gonna turn the podcast off. 1 of the 2. If what I say is you, first of all, know that what you're doing is a travesty.

2nd of all, know that I still love you. 3rd of all, know that you can reach out, and I will help you get past this thing that I'm about to talk about. Ladies and gentlemen, I can't tell you how many portals I've gone into, and they will have multiple hubs, marketing hub, sales hub, service hub. And you can definitely tell that they're creating deals in the deal pipeline, and they're forecasting, and they're, you know, doing all the things in the marketing hub. They're creating custom properties and using dependent fields in forms.

And then all of a sudden, you look at the service hub, and there's absolutely nothing going on. They are paying for a product and they are not using any of it. If this is you, shame on you. And at the same time, I love you because I get it because here's what I hear over and over. Well, we have that because we got special pricing to buy it as no.

No. No. You have it. It's a set of tools. Use them.

You that's the train wreck. The fact that you have something at your fingertips that could make your business better and you're not using it. I will get off my soapbox and we will move on to the next thing, which is maybe gonna be a little bit more helpful to the ladies and gentlemen that are listening. And that is one super ninja tip, trick, hack that you think people could implement today using the service hub that will just make their life that much better.

Max Cohen: I have 2. I have 2 that I really wanna share. First off, I'll just pitch it. Wouldn't it be great if when your customer is waiting to hear back from your support or service representative that they hear back from them before they get another marketing email trying to sell them something. This is the things that are possible when you're running everything under one roof.

It's pretty easy for marketers to either add a little step in the workflow or create a suppression list for their emails to say, hey, if there's a contact that we're about to send an email to, and they have a ticket associated to them that's currently in the stage of waiting on us. They probably wanna hear from support before we probably try to sell them something again. This is stuff you can only do when you're running everything on HubSpot. Otherwise, it's extremely complicated. In HubSpot, you're pointing and clicking around the settings for a little bit, maybe getting creative in a workflow, but it's all there for you to do it.

It's all one system. That's one thing.

Eric Brenner: Let me say this before you go to the second thing. Because this, I probably should have said with the last answer as well. When people don't use reporting, it's a similar concept. The amount of people who I try and push to build a companies that I own with open tickets report, That way a sales rep doesn't call and say, hey. Would you like to buy something?

And they've got, like, 4 open tickets. Man, talk about a horrible experience. Yes. I do wanna buy something. I wanna buy a working piece of the thing you already sold to me.

Don't call them. Figure it out first. Build reports. Check it before you do something. Like, we knew this at HubSpot.

So it's like a similar to, like, the marketing emails when you're waiting on a customer support response.

Max Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. The second one that I have is using net promoter score surveys in a smart way. Here's the truth. Most people don't know what SNPS means.

They think, oh, we got a 10. That means we got a 10 out of a 10, which is like a 100. We got a a on the test. That's what it is. No.

Net promoter score tells you a very specific thing given the way the question is asked. When you ask the net promoter score question, you are specifically asking, how likely are you to recommend x product or service to a family, friend, or colleague, or whatever? It is not telling you how satisfied someone is. It is telling you how likely they are to tell somebody else that you rock their socks. And how likely they'll recommend you to someone else.

A cool thing that HubSpot did a little while ago is they added a workflow action to allow you to create contacts via workflows, which if anyone has ever tried to build a referral program in HubSpot before, you may have noticed it involve a whole lot of zapping in and zapping out and doing some other complicated stuff maybe with the API to have one person fill out a form and have that create a new contact besides the person that filled the form out. But now you can do that in HubSpot. And what's really great is if you're a marketer and you wanna be able to segment folks for some sort of email campaign to try to drive referral traffic or get referrals, who better than to easily be able to segment your contacts by the people who have literally said, they're very likely to recommend you to someone. It's and it's all just it's all just magically in there. You don't have to integrate with another tool doing NPS.

You literally just send these surveys out. You can easily find the people that said, yeah. I'd be pretty likely to recommend you to somebody and target them directly versus taking a stab at the dark.

George B. Thomas: I love it. And, Max, you actually I think I came up with HubSpot service, new tagline. It's the HubSpot service hub. It's magically delicious because it's just it's all magically in there. It's absolutely amazing.

Devin, though, we haven't heard from you.

Devyn Bellamy: Sure. I alluded to it earlier. Well, no. I I didn't do it. I alluded so much as said immediately 12 times.

But being able to leverage social media is another good example was a lot I'd say even most of, like, the Fortune 50 does it. Like, one time I had the stem from the avocado was in my guacamole from Chipotle. And I put out a tweet that was basically like, WTF Chipotle. And they're immediately, like, oh, my goodness. Let's reach out.

Let let let's talk about this. And then I'm in contact with a service person. It's, like, you can do that with social media listeners. You have already have people who are monitoring chat. If you don't, you should have someone who's monitoring your, chatter on social media and having listeners, for mentions.

And if you see that, boom, ticket. This needs to be addressed immediately. That's something you could do with Servicehub.

Eric Brenner: I will say Max kind of took one of mine earlier, which I loved was the tickets was his favorite thing because I won't say we named it wrong, but sometimes I wish tickets was named something else because, like, you can use it for anything. I've seen it used for presales and design, for for help with presales work, whether it's onboarding. I had a customer do a solar panel roof installations. Like, you can use it for anything, and the stuff you can do with a deal when it closes that creates the ticket that then hands off to the right team that then tracks the process. And if there's an issue with the installation, you have another ticket, and there's all of these ways that you can use this to not just be for online support.

It probably called it service hub, not support hub. There's more to do with a ticket than just I have an issue, fix it.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. It literally is my go to for onboarding processes because there's no revenue attached. Like, that's the other thing. By the way, speaking of train wrecks, if I back up a little bit, if you've got onboarding process or some other process that's actually in deals and has nothing to do with revenue, move that junk to tickets immediately. I'm just gonna throw that out there.

Please. Please, by all that is holy. Move it.

Max Cohen: Especially if you don't have, like, an enterprise version and you can't do a custom object. Tickets are right there waiting for you. They're your buddy. Use them.

Eric Brenner: I will say I know I've said this already, the power of the CRM. I think one of the best things that you get with service pro or really any pro or higher subscription with HubSpot is workflows. What you can do to make your team efficient and stay on track, make sure tickets don't fall through the cracks, make sure we're escalating. I mean, I remember I started in go to market and they were like, we need macros. And I was like, that's just a property that triggers a workflow.

It might not be like you press one button on your keyboard, but you can do like a yes, no drop down. And when yes, escalate ticket. Here's how this works with if then branches, for company tiers, support tiers, all this stuff. If you can take the time to map it out and build it, you will save yourself so much time and effort in the long run that it's the efficiency part more than anything else in well with HubSpot.

George B. Thomas: Love it so much. Let's move forward because holy macro, look at the time. And ladies and gentlemen, we know that you gotta get back to work, but you're getting educated, so we're gonna keep going for just a little bit longer. And we're gonna dive into the question again. It's, you know, a good wine and cheese or a good cheese and steak or barbecue sauce.

I don't know. I'm getting hungry. Devin mentioned Chipotle, and it's been downhill ever since then. But here's the thing. What in your mind is 1 or 2 marketplace integrations that you think are just super dope for HubSpot Service Hub users.

Max Cohen: Really cool one if you're using live chat a lot and you support customers around the world. There's a really, really cool conversations And then you can use the notes feature to tag this bot, translate, and reply in your own language, and it translates back for you and sends the message. So all of the sudden, your English speaking support reps, all of a sudden, can communicate with 65 different languages through your live chat, which is wild. It's really, really cool. That's 1, Timer Man SLA from a8 Labs.

If you need your SLA stuff to work a little bit differently than the native by the way, the native SLA stuff in the conversations tool is awesome. But if you have to apply that more directly just to the ticket level and you're you're not really using that conversations in mocks, and and you wanna get a whole bunch of rich data for how long tickets are spending in certain stages, and it even works for deals too as well for deal velocity reports and stuff like that. Timer Man SLA is a super cool addition. Again, just like Babblebot, it's a really great example of HubSpot partners building in net new functionality into HubSpot to maybe do something a little bit better or make up for a gap where we don't have something in the tool. And that is, like, the most exciting thing about HubSpot's future, to be honest with you.

Or at least from the partner side of things. And then the last one, and we didn't really talk about, like, what are the big things missing from HubSpot. Something I definitely think is, like, missing from service hub, which I hope in the future we kinda go in this direction, is field service management for small to medium businesses. So think about, maybe you're like an AC or HVAC company and you need to be able to send people out on location and assign, like, technicians and do all the stuff that you would need to do when you're, like, managing a fleet of people to kinda go out and work in the real world. There's a really cool app called Zubetter.

Zuber, s z u p e r. It's like super with a z. And they're a field surgeon for service management tool, but they build this really really solid integration with the service hub, which allows you from a HubSpot ticket to go create a job for to actually send someone out to a physical location to do a bunch of field service work.

Eric Brenner: First of all, a makes amazing stuff. Timer man is maybe their best one. We actually had them join us at inbound because it was so great. Zuper, the CEO, calls it it's super, but it needed to be more than super. So it's zuper, which I thought was a great tagline of, like, this is great.

And the fact that your field service reps on the app can take a note or a picture and it comes back into the ticket inside of HubSpot. It makes that frontline person never have to leave HubSpot, and your field service person never have to leave Zuper, and they're all working together that anti silo side of things.

Max Cohen: Real quick, their integration they built is a gold standard example of what can be done with the CRM extensions API. For anyone out there who has some sort of internal system that does that, go look at how Zuper does it. You can do that too if you have the resources to build it, which is great. Sorry. I just wanted to, like, plug the CRM extensions API because that is like a huge huge deal.

Eric Brenner: No. No. I mean, Zuper was was probably gonna be one of my 3, so I'm glad you took it. I will get really nerdy with you for a second. I believe it's pronounced Babel bot, not Babblebot, like the Babelfish from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Just in case anyone goes searching for it and can't find it.

George B. Thomas: No. No. No. No. No.

No. The Tower of Babel. Actually, hang on. Let's go real nerdy for a second. I would think that it's Babel as well because the Tower of Babel in the Bible is where God actually mixed the languages so that they couldn't speak together and actually build a tower up to heaven.

So it may actually be Babblebot instead of that because it makes sense. It's an app for languages.

Max Cohen: If you are the developer of this app, you need to get on Twitter and you need to settle this beef right now and tell us what the story is. And also thanks. Thank you for building that.

Eric Brenner: I was gonna say, thank you for building it. It's awesome. I will say before I say one of my favorites is this is the joy of HubSpot is when we have a gap, we're not like, we don't have a gap. We we see Zuper and we're like, you guys wanna partner with us? Let's build something.

Oh, we don't have this Babblebot, Fablebot thing. You guys have it. Can we work together to make this work in HubSpot? We're not afraid of the gaps. We wanna if we can fill them ourselves, we will.

If we can't, we're going somewhere else. We're not just gonna be like, you don't need that. I mean, it's after I like PSO hub Just from a time tracking standpoint, you can track billable hours through a ticket. Oh,

George B. Thomas: snap. See, that's this could be just a whole episode of the app marketplace. And as I'm listening to you guys talk about these, I'm also thinking about my ninja content strategist person, Liz. I'm like, maybe we should just create videos for every single HubSpot integration on demand because then I would actually know about all of them because I too, Hub Heroes listeners, am learning today, right now. Now here's the thing.

I got 2 things to say, and, one is one, one, I like to keep it simple. So when you think about Devin and the fact that he said immediately immediately, 12 times, one One of my favorite integrations is Slack and Slack with workflows and just immediate communication into being able to communicate with the humans. So keep it simple. It's an old tried and true, but I had to mention it. The other one, as I was getting ready to talk about it, I'm like, alright.

Maybe maybe, just maybe, Dax and Connor should call us, and they should sponsor the hub heroes podcast because I was gonna mention clone attack. Because being able to clone tickets and clone deals, the amount of time that that app has saved me personally and clients that I serve is absolutely redonkulous. So, Dax, Connor, yeah, call us. You you can sponsor the podcast at any given point in time that you would like to, and we'll mention you. Oh, crap.

We just mentioned you for for free. Anyway, moving on. Moving on, because we gotta get people back to work. We wanna end this with one action item that people can take after this episode. Let's go Eric, Devin, Max, and then I'll close this bad boy out.

A action item that listeners can take around the HubSpot service hub.

Eric Brenner: Oh, man. An action item. Let's see. We've just explained to you in however long this has gone on a million ways that people aren't using service hub correctly. I would say, go look at it and see if you're using tickets in just one way or more than one way.

And what else should you be doing?

Devyn Bellamy: For me, I'd say stop treating your service people like they're lepers. Bring them into the fold. Bring their process into the fold. Make the information they collect and their process not an afterthought. Make it a part of how you can make your sales process better, how you can make your marketing better, and how you can just make everyone communicate with each other and see what's going on with your customer from every aspect of their journey post sale and beyond.

Max Cohen: I'm gonna big time agree with with Devon. I think if we're looking at service hub as a way to be like, oh, we have to keep track of literally every single thing our service people are doing and make sure they're doing their job. That's the wrong way to think about it. You wanna think about Service Hub as a way to act as a heat shield of a lot of the stress that is working in customer success? And what can you do to enable those people to enjoy doing their job better and have a little bit of extra balance and some tools that'll make them more productive and increase their quality of life as a service, support, success, whatever, representative at your company.

What can you do to make their jobs easier so they can have a funner time doing it? Thus, be able to pass on a lot of that positive energy to taking care of your customers. You don't want it to be a drag. You don't want it to be difficult to be able to help people. Because if you're not helping your employees who who have this as their responsibility, you can't really expect them to do a bang your job helping other people.

Look at it through a little bit of a different lens, lead with empathy, really make sure your people have what they need to to do right by your customers. Because if you don't do right by them first, you're you can't expect them to do right by others.

George B. Thomas: Can I get an amen to all the Hub Hero podcast listeners? I'm actually gonna give you 2 action items because I have to go back to what made me so freaking passionate in this. If you're listening to this and you're not doing anything with Service Hub, stop it. Stop it. Start doing stuff with your Service Hub.

Now with that said, if you are using it, and I think it was the words of Eric about gaps. If you're using Service Hub, find the gaps, go to the app marketplace, and find the integrations that pair well with the things that you're doing to enable your teams. Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast?

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