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When it comes to running a business, there are a variety of factors you must focus on in order to keep it running successfully. One of the most important of these factors is the satisfaction of your customers: happy customers can sing praises about your business and become your strongest advocates, whereas unhappy customers can reject your business entirely and spread their negative experience with other potential customers.
One of the many ways to help keep your customers happy is to be able to answer their questions quickly and easily whenever they arise, and one of the best ways to do this is through the use of a Help Desk! Recently, HubSpot released their own Help Desk tool to help their customers further improve upon their customer service, and in this article we’ll go over what a Help Desk is, how it can benefit your business, and how HubSpot’s Help Desk tool can help.
What Is A Help Desk?
In general, a Help Desk serves as the central hub for customer support where your support team handles inquiries, technical issues, and service requests. It functions as the frontline of communication between customers and the company, providing timely solutions and support. Help Desks mainly collect these inquiries through the use of an organized electronic ticketing system, allowing support teams to be notified when a new inquiry comes in as well as see the status and history of said inquiries. Through the use of a Help Desk, your customer support team can keep better track of your customers’ support requests and ensure that they are answered on time.
How Is HubSpot’s Help Desk Tool Different Than HubSpot’s “Conversations” Tool?
Although there are some similarities between HubSpot’s “Conversations” tool and the new Help Desk tool, there are many disadvantages when it comes to just using the “Conversations” tool alone. Before Help Desk, HubSpot users had to deal with:
- Having to jump back and forth between the “Conversations” tool and the “Tickets” tool, which can be tedious and confusing
- Having to manage both the “Conversations” and “Tickets” tools, and spend more time trying to keep things organized due to different owners and statuses
- Having to choose between the “Conversations” tool features (such as SLAs, real-time updates, etc.) and “Tickets” tool features (such as customizable UI, advanced views and sorting, etc.)
- Having to figure out which tool would be best for your support team
However with its launch, Help Desk brings:
- The best of HubSpot’s “Tickets” tool and “Conversations” tool together into a single support-oriented experience
- Focus on just one object type (Tickets) instead of two
- Improved tracking of ticket lifecycle
- Improved reporting and workflows
- Additional helpful features
How HubSpot’s Help Desk Tool Can Help
With the release of HubSpot’s new Help Desk tool, it's easy to keep track of and resolve all of your incoming support tickets now more than ever! Here are some of the ways that HubSpot’s Help Desk tool can help your business’ customer support team thrive:
Supports A Variety of Channels
Another great feature of HubSpot’s Help Desk tool is the ability to connect a wide range of support channels your customers can use to reach out for help. Whether your customers email your support team directly, reach out via a phone call, or use a chatbot on your website, HubSpot can quickly create tickets for these different channels and route them to the correct support team. This not only ensures that all support inquiries are being collected and logged within your system, but it helps give your customers more options to reach out to your support team that works best for them. This also means that if you have separate inboxes for different types of support requests you can have them all connected under one roof, preventing key customer information from being siloed from different members of your support team.
Filter Your Tickets Easily
When it comes to looking for specific tickets, it can be difficult to do so within a standard support inbox. Luckily, with HubSpot’s Help Desk tool you can quickly filter all of your existing tickets in order to find exactly what you’re looking for! From specific ticket owners, to how high a priority the ticket is, to when a ticket was last responded by, you can combine a variety of filters to more efficiently find what you’re looking for and save time while doing so.
Send Quick and Helpful Replies with Ease
Another great feature that HubSpot’s Help Desk tool offers your support teams is the ability to quickly insert a variety of content to their response to customers with ease. From custom snippets and templates that help save time by pre-populating responses to contacts, to adding helpful articles from your knowledge base, to quickly adding a link for your customer to schedule a meeting with you, HubSpot’s Help Desk gives your support team the ability to give your customers faster and better service.
Ensure Specific Teams See Specific Tickets
If you have multiple support teams that handle different customer inquiries (i.e. “billing”, “technical support”, etc.) but share a single inbox, it can be difficult for these teams to keep their unique inquiries organized and easy to find. With HubSpot’s Help Desk tool, you are able to create unique ticket views for each of your teams based on specific criteria such as the support pipeline the ticket is assigned to, how high a priority the ticket is, if the ticket hasn’t been responded to within a certain time, and much more! You can also assign viewing permissions to specific teams, employees, or make it private to yourself, allowing you to ensure that your support teams are only seeing what’s important to them. HubSpot’s Help Desk also comes with pre-made views to help you get started (as seen below).
Ensure The Most Important Information Is Seen
When it comes to supporting your customers quickly and efficiently, your support team needs to have access to all key information on the customer they’re helping at the same time they’re assisting them. HubSpot’s Help Desk tool allows you to customize the customer data that is shown right next to the support ticket as your support rep is helping them, allowing them to have all the needed information on hand without having to dig around to find it. Some of this information includes:
- High-level contact information
- Files/documents previously sent
- Company and Deal information associated with the Contact
- Past feedback given by the contact
- Playbooks available to collect additional contact information
This key information can also be customized for each unique support team you may have, ensuring that each team member has all of the necessary information on your customers when the time comes to support them.
Ensure Tickets Are Resolved On Time
When a customer reaches out for support, the last thing you want to have happen is for your support team to respond late or (even worse) not respond at all. To help prevent this from happening, HubSpot’s Help Desk tool allows you to create Service Level Agreements (SLAs for short) that set the standards for how quickly your support team should respond to and close tickets, ensuring that your customers receive help on time!
And if there comes a time when a ticket has not received help for a certain period of time, HubSpot will send a warning message to the assigned support rep to let them know that the ticket needs to be responded to soon or is overdue. This in turn can help your support team keep track of all of their assigned tickets and respond to them in a timely manner. Plus, you can also set up your SLAs based on specific properties your ticket matches (i.e. the “Ticket Priority” is high AND number of times contacted is less than zero) in order to ensure your support team stays on top of specific tickets.
Have The Right Support Rep Take On The Right Task
As important as it is to respond back to your customers’ support tickets quickly, it’s also important for your support team to provide accurate and helpful answers (especially with complex inquiries). The best way to do this is to ensure that the tickets are routed to the right support reps based on their experience, but this can be tricky and time-consuming to do manually. With HubSpot’s Help Desk tool, you can set up skill-based routing rules that automatically assign support tickets to the right reps based on their experience. This can include language proficiency, technical skills, or any other skills that correlate with your business.
Once you’ve created the list of skills associated with your business and assigned them to the correct support reps, you can then create custom ticket routing rules based on these skills as well as specific criteria the support ticket itself matches (as seen above). With these rules created and running, your team will be able to resolve your customers’ support inquiries more efficiently!
See Key Insights About Your Support Team
Have you ever wanted to know how well your support team is performing when it comes to helping your customers? Or maybe you’ve wanted to see how long on average it takes for a support rep to close a ticket, or which support rep has closed the most tickets? You can see these kinds of stats (and more!) through the help of HubSpot’s analytics tool for Help Desk, allowing you to see more detailed information on how well your Help Desk and support team are doing in general. With the help of HubSpot’s reporting tools, you can view such information as:
- The average time it takes for a ticket to be closed
- The average time a customer waits for someone to respond to them
- The total amount of open support tickets, and what stage they’re in (i.e. “Waiting on customer response”)
- How long a ticket has been in a specific support pipeline
- How well your support team is meeting SLA standards (separate from Service Analytics)
With this information, you’ll have a better understanding on how well your support team is performing, as well as being able to uncover specific areas that your team can improve upon!
Help Desks can be a key tool for your support team when it comes to bringing high-quality and fast support to your customers, and can help keep them happy with your business. Not only can HubSpot’s Help Desk tool keep all of your support tickets organized under one roof and easy to find, it can also help empower you and your support team with powerful ticket routing customization and support tools to ensure customers receive the best support as quickly as possible. Level up your support team and keep customers happy by taking advantage of HubSpot’s Help Desk tool today!