What Are Tickets in HubSpot?

HubSpot has many tools for different users. While the marketing and sales tools are perhaps the most well-known tools on the HubSpot platform, the service tools in HubSpot can be just as critical to a business’ ongoing success. Take, for example, the HubSpot ticket system.

What are tickets in HubSpot? How can you use the ticketing tools in HubSpot to support your business? How can you make the most effective use of tickets?

Let’s dive into this pivotal HubSpot Service Hub tool!

What Is the HubSpot Ticketing Tool?

The HubSpot Ticketing tool is a resource that is part of the Service Hub. This tool is primarily designed to help businesses organize their customer/user inquiries and track trends. Data collected from the ticketing system can help identify key issues that see frequent repetition. Additionally, the tool can be used to support service level agreement (SLA) goals by keeping service reps on track with responding to customer issues.

Ticketing is available on all tiers of the HubSpot Service Hub (Free Tools, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise). While all HubSpot subscribers have access to tickets, some ticketing functions and limitations differ based on subscription tier.

For example, ticket routing is not available on Starter accounts, but is available to Professional and Enterprise subscribers. Additionally, Starter accounts get to have two ticket pipelines, Professional accounts get 15 ticket pipelines, and Enterprise accounts can have 100 ticket pipelines. Free tools users get one ticket pipeline for their account and don’t have access to simple ticket automation or ticket tags.

Using Tickets to Track Customer Interactions

Interactions in the HubSpot ticketing system are automatically logged and tracked in HubSpot. This makes it easier to see what issues customers are raising in the ticketing system, assess the effectiveness of employee responses to customer issues, and determine if additional resources are needed to handle customer service or troubleshooting.

For example, say that your customer service team is meeting or exceeding their individual time-to-response and time-to-resolve goals for customer issues, but your backlog of unresolved tickets is still piling up. This may indicate that more resources are needed for the service team to keep up with volume.

Additionally, if two or three items account for the majority of customer issue reports, then it might be a good idea to dedicate resources to solving whatever is causing those reports to alleviate pressure on the service team.

Use Cases for HubSpot Tickets

There are several ways to use the ticketing tools in HubSpot for a business. Two of the most common applications of HubSpot tickets are using them to handle customer sales/onboarding and to provide technical support to customers so that any issues they face with a product or service can be resolved.

Using Tickets for Sales and Customer Onboarding

This use case combines the sales and service tools in HubSpot. Here, you might start by creating a workflow in the automation tools that triggers when a prospect signs a particular type of deal. The workflow would then generate tasks and tickets for your service team to resolve to ensure that all onboarding tasks are completed in a timely fashion.

Additionally, if a new customer encounters an issue during the onboarding process, the service team could manually generate a ticket to address the issue and have it tracked in HubSpot. Later, if a particular issue is encountered numerous times, you could modify your sales or new customer onboarding process to account for that issue so future customers won’t be impacted by it.

Using Tickets for Technical Support and Troubleshooting

The most common use of tickets is as a general customer support tool for troubleshooting issues that customers encounter with your products or services. Each time a customer sends in a query through the conversations inbox, the rep handling the communication can create a ticket by opening the “Ticket” dropdown menu in the right sidebar of a conversation in the inbox and clicking on “Create a ticket”:

This allows the team managing customer interactions to pass customer issues along to the service team quickly and efficiently.

Alternatively, you could create a form on your website to place on a customer support page that, when filled out, triggers a workflow to automatically create tickets based on customer feedback to forward to the support team.

Benefits of the HubSpot Ticketing Tool

So, what’s the benefit of using HubSpot’s ticketing tools? Some of the biggest benefits include:

Centralized Communication and Collaboration on Customer Issues

There are a lot of places in the HubSpot platform to manage customer interaction—the conversations inbox, the emails tool, social media tools, etc. Trying to track customer questions and concerns through all of these channels on an individual basis would be an enormous challenge.

With the tickets tool, you have a centralized location in your HubSpot portal to monitor and track customer issues. Here, you can verify that issues are being resolved in a timely manner, keep track of SLA adherence, and even reassign tickets if ticket owners are getting overwhelmed.

The centralization of tickets makes it easier to track them when they come in from multiple channels so critical customer issues are less likely to slip through the cracks.

Data-Driven Decision Making

When you can track your tickets in HubSpot, it becomes easier to see consistent patterns in the data. For example, say that 50% of all tickets submitted are done within the first three days of new customer onboarding and that the “issue” presented is due to a customer not knowing how to do something.

This information might tell you that there’s a deficiency in the new customer onboarding process. So, you could modify your onboarding process to include training that helps customers learn how to do whatever it was that the majority struggled with.

As with any part of your business, the more data you can collect and analyze, the more informed your decisions will be. Ticket information, in particular, can be useful for modifying products, services, and processes to prevent customer issues and increase customer satisfaction.

Streamlining Customer Support

Time to first response and time to resolution are both critical key performance metrics (KPIs) for customer support teams. Having a centralized tool for tracking incoming customer tickets and monitoring ticket statuses in a pipeline can be crucial for streamlining the customer support experience and keeping customers from getting frustrated by long delays.

By giving users in your portal several ways to create tickets (from conversations, forms, emails, automated workflows, etc.), you can streamline the customer support process for your customers. Instead of having to specifically seek out a support hotline or form, they can bring up an issue during a meeting, send an email, or call your hotline to report an issue. This makes it easier for your customers to seek support so they’re more likely to get issues resolved instead of getting frustrated with unresolved problems.

Best Practices for Using Tickets in HubSpot

So, you want to make the best use of the HubSpot Tickets tool. What can you do to maximize the ROI from this part of your HubSpot platform? Here are a few best practices to follow:

Customize Your Ticket Properties

HubSpot offers a variety of default ticket properties that address a variety of common needs. However, these default properties might not cover all of your needs. In such a situation, it’s necessary to create a custom ticket property to address this gap.

So, when using the tickets tool, try to see if there are any critical gaps in the default ticket properties that you may want to fill. For example, say that, for quality control purposes, you want to be able to track the serial or lot numbers for products involved in a customer issue. You could create a Lot # or Serial # ticket property. This would allow you to see if a particular production run of a product had a higher-than-average rate of defects—helping you issue a product safety recall or making it easier to check the equipment used to produce those lots for defects impacting production quality.

Automate Repetitive Tasks with Workflows

Workflows might be a separate tool from your tickets tool, but they can be combined with tickets to help you automate the ticket creation process. While manually creating tickets is always an option, using automation from a workflow to enroll contacts or companies that meet specific criteria and creating tickets based on that helps ensure that important customer issues aren’t missed.

For example, you could create a “Report an Issue” or “Have a Question about [Product/Service Name]?” form on your website. When contacts fill out the form, they could be enrolled in a workflow that generates a customer support ticket to follow up with the customer to get more details or resolve the issue they reported.

Create Distinct Ticket Pipelines for Different Situations

If you’re on a Starter, Professional, or Enterprise Service Hub subscription, you’ll have the ability to create multiple ticket pipelines. Creating distinct pipelines for different products and services, types of issues, or customers who have separate priority levels can be a great way to uphold SLAs and ensure that your processes closely match the needs and expectations of your customers.

For example, say that you have a subscription service where different subscription tiers have different SLAs attached to them. A “Gold” subscription might have a first-response SLA of one business day, while a “Bronze” subscription might have an SLA of five business days for first response. By creating separate pipelines for tickets that have different phases and SLAs attached to them, you can customize the experience for your clients and allow your service team to focus on the highest-priority issues first.

Alternatively, you could create separate pipelines for different business units in your organization. This would allow you to customize the ticket pipeline for each to most closely match their processes for resolving a ticket and give them a specific set of tickets to focus on in their HubSpot portal.

Contact the HubSpot Experts

Managing tickets in HubSpot can be a complex topic, as there are many different ways to create tickets, customize their properties, and even set up your ticket pipelines to ensure success. If you need help managing tickets in HubSpot, please reach out to a team of experts.

Bluleadz has staff with extensive practical experience in the HubSpot ecosystem. From ticket pipelines, to deals, emails, blogging tools, and more, we have the know-how to help you get more from your HubSpot subscription.