HubSpot Service Hub

Avantages

We were already using the CRM features of Hubspot and liked the idea of combining with our service desk. We automatically create tickets from chats, which makes dropping the ball on tickets harder to do. The knowledge base is flexible, and the layout templates allowed us to get on-brand.

Inconvénients

I'd love to see an OAuth option in the future to put our knowledge base behind a login.

Avantages

I love how convenient it is to make filters to see your tickets, change the status or update ticket fields, add "Snippets" for responses frequently used, and how easily conversations are looped together without creating duplicate tickets. Even duplicate tickets can be merged together seamlessly!

I also love how easy it was to create and edit a "Contact Us" form, along with creating the workflow for the response email. It really gives us the power to do more with fewer technical skills needed.

Inconvénients

I would like for them to improve how companies are added to inbound customers who may not already be in the CRM; it is harder to automate/add to pipelines, as we are a B2B company, and the users of our product are most often not already in the CRM.

I would also love to be able to edit the email content previous to my responses; oftentimes our Client Success Managers will send emails forwarding a request from a customer, and I have to copy the previous email sent to exclude the instructions from the CSM. It takes a little extra time.

The other item I would like to be able to do is to paste small excel tables into the body of an email; I've had to switch to attaching the excel documents or reformatting the content to be in the style of bullets.

Avantages

Easy to retrieve all of the information on a customer. Can keep all the records/notes/emails all under one email address.

Inconvénients

The ticket system is not designed for high volume. You can't see if another team member is in the ticket. If the customer replies back to an closed to ticket it doesn't reopen so we miss emails unless we are double checking our notifications.
Limited reporting.

Avantages

Hubspot Service Hubs allows my team to be on the same page. We can not only see what everyone is working on and assist where needed but the resources available to my team members and therefore to our customers are all in the same space. It makes streamlining business practices much easier than we had experienced in the past.

Inconvénients

The software lacks a couple of keys features and the timelines/feeds are not the most efficient presentation as far as finding what you are looking for. For example, if we tag a user in a ticket who is coming into the ticket fresh, we've found that it's difficult for them to get caught up in an easy manner. It takes a little digging. that being said, Hubspot is continuously updating the software on the back end with the items that the Hubspot Community of users upvotes as important to the,m. This has created a trust in Hubspot that these hiccups will be adjusted and the user platform will continue to improve month to month.

Avantages

The ticketing side of HubSpot Service Hub is very flexible conveniently and seamlessly integrated with the HubSpot CRM. The line is blurred between ticket and conversation, which makes interactions with leads and customers more human (HubSpot's whole mission, essentially). There are good integrations with Calendly (new!), Appcues, Gmail, etc. plus the native features such as tracking knowledge base views, opens and clicks on emails, logging calls, etc. that make HubSpot a central record of all customer interaction and give us visibility on the whole journey. Associating a ticket with a CRM record (contact, company, deal) is easy and extremely flexible (unlike a help desk tool I've used before): in HubSpot there doesn't have to be an exact 1:1 relationship between all those things. We can just associate whatever message with whatever record it is actually associated with (helpful for cases like consultants who use our software themselves but also help out with other users' accounts). Plus, a couple other details: 1. being able to respond to live chat in Slack is great; ultimately, you need to view the customer/lead details in HubSpot anyway, but it's good to be able to send a quick, "Hi there, let me look into that for you!" even when I'm not on the chat page in HubSpot yet; 2. the "board" view vs. the "table" view for tickets is great to visualize the pipeline. Overall, I am pleased so far, and HubSpot shows a desire to improve this tool further.

Inconvénients

The radical flexibility and pulling all information about the customer together can get overwhelming and clutter up the screen. Luckily, you can filter out whatever you don't want to see very easily, but it's hard to know what to filter out if you're not looking at all of it to begin with. The knowledge base is not nearly as flexible as the other parts of the tool, e.g. you can't have multiple knowledge bases, and there is very little ability to customize the look/feel (although they are improving this part). Some other things that are strangely inflexible: the support/ticket form (we opted to use a marketing form instead and build a workflow to trigger a ticket, at our HubSpot account manager's recommendation!); and teams (agents can only be on one team and can only view tickets for their own team).