6 Tips for Making the Most of the Free HubSpot Service Hub

Whenever businesses consider customer relationship management software or platforms, all they usually see are dollar signs.

And it's true. At times, a full deck of analytics, metrics, and automation tools can come with a pretty high bill.

But HubSpot's provided a solution to that problem. They have a free service plan.

What Do You Get With a Free HubSpot Service Plan?

A lot.

Probably more than you'd normally get from another service that you paid for. HubSpot has put multiple tools together into one hub in an effort to help boost your customer service and retention.

Here are the key services you get with their free service plan:

CRM

HubSpot's customer relationship management system captures and centralizes new contacts and all of their important details in one place.

Perfect for your sales, marketing, and service teams, you can keep track of every issue and ticket that enters your system.

Ticketing

You can log customer issues as tickets and assign them to team members quickly and efficiently. Ticketing is a great system for organizing and prioritizing problems, all while keeping the safe in a single, central location.

Team Email

You can create a team-wide email that will automatically convert emails into tickets. Your team can access them with ease on the conversation dashboard, making follow up engagements seamless and personalized as the ticket passes from one rep to the next.

Email Templates

Another useful tool for team members across departments in HubSpot software, email templates make it easier to personalize and automate emails sent out to customers.

Live Chat

You can help customers directly and one-on-one by engaging in contextual conversations through live chat. It works in real time on your website, providing quick turnaround to those in need.

Ticket Creation Bots

Assuming your staff isn't on call 24/7, you can also utilize chat bots to keep up chat efficiencies and re-route customers to relevant resources.

If they need further help, they can generate a service ticket through the bot that will populate on your dashboard to be attended at the next opportunity.

Meeting Scheduling

Customers can book meetings directly to your calendar due to CRM integrations. This helps your team stay organized and capable of addressing high-priority tickets quickly.

Reporting

When it comes to measuring your customer service efforts, you'll want reporting tools to make sure that you're on the right track.

Built-in reporting tracks your user data, ticket volume, response time, feedback, and more.

How to Make the Most of Your HubSpot Service Platform

The beauty of HubSpot is that pretty much everything is customizable. You can adjust your dashboard, automations, lists, and processes to your own standards.

That being said, here are just a few tips to help you get the most out of the software:

Automate Everything.

Leverage the automation features as much as you can.

When it comes to sales and service, prospects and customers appreciate a personal touch. And while it's a nice sentiment, it can be a lot to try and replicate a personalized experience again and again.

With email templates, quick meeting scheduling, and automated task assignment, you'll find that you'll really be cooking with oil and seeing a much faster process take place.

Customize Your CRM.

This seems like a given, but not everyone takes full advantage of all of HubSpot's CRM features. As you integrate your email lists and other data, it will make it far easier to locate and access everything if you define your custom fields and filters early on in the process.

Practice Using Filters.

Filters are the perfect way to set yourself up for success.

Whether you segment your tickets by issue, demographic, new customers, returning customers, or anything else you can think of, you'll have a much easier time addressing and engaging with that individual if you know how they relate to your company.

This is especially true when you're uploading customer data and contact lists. The more organized you can be, the better.

Build Custom Fields.

Custom fields will help you automate your tasks and keep track of a customer's lifecycle. They'll also help keep your entire team on the same page when it comes to day-to-day activities and responsibilities.

Automatically Schedule Meetings on Your Calendar.

We mentioned earlier that this is an available feature with the free Service Hub plan, but it's definitely something that you should prioritize using.

Have you ever been on the other end of the phone where you were told someone would get back to you as soon as possible to follow up on your issue, but then it was ignored for weeks?

You don't want to abandon your customers, but at the same time, you need to prioritize your schedule and attention.

If you have your calendar connected to the hub, then you'll be able to offer customers meeting windows that work for both of you. If the conversation is online, then they can easily and automatically book time with you as HubSpot keeps track of your availability.

It takes the guessing out of it all.

Keep Your Database Clean.

Using custom filters and fields will help keep all of your activity and priorities organized and your processes efficient.

Poor data quality is a huge contributor to service slowdown, and you'll see productivity drop dramatically if you let things pile up. And when it comes to services, it doesn't take very long for that to happen.

Without regular organization and clean up, your team will find themselves swimming in tickets and service calls without any real insight as to what the problem is, where it's stemming from, or how they can even begin to help the customer.

Save them the headache and spare your customers the frustration by staying on top of your database's cleanliness.

As you can see, there's a lot to be gained from using HubSpot's free Service Hub. And the perks just keep coming if you choose to purchase it.

You'll gain additional features, like customer feedback tools, video creation features, multiple ticket pipelines, and more!

Hopefully, these tips will get you on your way to providing A+ service to your customers.