It’s official everyone, the funnel is dead. In its place comes something new, fresh, and more powerful than ever: the Flywheel. Available right now, the Service Hub from HubSpot completes the stack of tools for every stage of a customer’s life cycle, offering tools and resources that businesses can use to best manage the experience of prospects during the attract, convert, close, and delight phases of the Buyer’s Journey all from one centralized platform.
When combined with HubSpot’s services in the marketing and sales platforms, you can monitor and support every aspect of a customer's relationship with you, from the moment they find you on the web, through the sales cycle, all the way through to the moment they are filling out a review for your business as a satisfied customer.
What Is It?
The Customer Experience and Service areas of the flywheel are the major additions to HubSpot. Here are the most notable platform features from both of these flywheel areas and how they can be utilized:
- Conversations Tool: This is the universal inbox that brings teams together to collaborate on the customer support process at scale. It serves as the centralized location for all team communications as well as the customer conversations. It lives inside the CRM, providing visibility to previous interactions from any marketing, sales, and service encounters you’ve had with the contact.
- Tickets: The tickets feature gives you a way to track, collaborate, order, and execute on a customer's needs and requests. Associate tickets with a contact so your entire team will know if that particular customer has an open ticket with the organization. HubSpot organized these much like the Deals page in the CRM with a ticket board inside the Services Hub. That board becomes the center of the customer support process.
- Knowledge Base: Inside the knowledge base area, you can create helpful support articles for your customers, check the Google ranking of those articles, and get constantly updated insight into if that article is truly solving customers' issues and preventing new support tickets from being created.
- Customer Feedback: If you want continuous feedback to help better service your customers, there are tools now available to routinely survey your customers in order to capture the qualitative and quantitative data you desire. Use a short-and-simple yes/no question about how a customer service experience went, or create a large, 25 question survey to help refine your Net Promoter Score. With the feedback area, you’ll be able to see who your biggest promoters are so you can then build targeted customer marketing campaigns to encourage them to keep telling their friends about your business.
- Service Hub Reporting: Dedicated reporting on your customer support efforts including ticket data, knowledge article results, and customer happiness.
- Helpdesk: Automate tickets so you can create build responses and help desk responses so customers get the answers they need, faster.
What We Love About It:
Obviously, we love new, data-driven tools that help businesses grow, but our favorite thing is that everything’s finally all together! Now, from the moment a prospect lands on your website for the first time to when they are a customer who needs to make a customer support request, it can be tracked, processed, and monitored from one place. Customer support will have exposure to everything on the marketing and sales side, and vice-versa.
The new tools also helps you to take your customers and easily transition them into your best marketing tool. Even with the best marketing strategies in the world at your fingertips, customers continue to be the most powerful voice for your brand. Now, the flywheel is making it easier to better support those customers so they are more likely to refer you (and give you a glowing review on Google, too.)
What We’re Not Sure About Yet:
Much like everything new, there’s gonna be some learning curves and some tweaks that need to be worked out as more users start using the tools. For example, connecting an inbox into the conversations tool right now automatically loads any of your inbox contacts into your HubSpot contacts, so be sure to delete the ones you don’t want after you connect to avoid sending out emails to people sitting in your inbox that don't make sense to be in HubSpot (like someone who previously spammed your inbox, for instance.) Obviously, little kinks like that need to be weeded out and refined, but HubSpot usually gets them under control pretty quickly.
Want to Start Using It?
First things first: the Services Hub is a $400 addition to your current HubSpot costs. Then, if you want to know how to leverage all the tools, HubSpot released an hour-long course in the HubSpot Learning Center, so for those go-getters who want all the nitty gritty of the features and how to use them, that’s gonna be the best place to get it.
For those of you who want to get a quick demo of everything, we’d be happy to set up a quick call to walk you through everything and show you a few ways it works. We just spent some time at HubSpot in Boston learning all about it and we’d be happy to share it with ya. Click below to schedule a time to demo with us.
