What is HubSpot’s Service Hub?
Entrepreneur Jim Rohn once said, “If you make a sale, you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service, you can make a fortune.” It should go without saying that customers are the most important part of your business. The product or service you are selling might be amazing, but without customers there to buy it, it means nothing.
Keeping those customers happy and providing a personalized experience for them is at the forefront of HubSpot’s Service Hub. If you want to support, retain, and grow your customer base, then connecting all of your service data and channels through HubSpot is the answer!
It’s Time For Your HubSpot Service Hub Onboarding Plan
Do you know everything your smartphone can do? Probably not. Now imagine if upon purchasing your next phone someone spent 2-3 months walking you through all of its features and functions. The extent to which you would be able to take advantage of all its capabilities would be immense.
The same is true of choosing to onboard following your purchase of HubSpot’s Service Hub. Without onboarding, you risk missing out on realizing the full potential of your purchase. With onboarding, you ensure every employee is on the same page beginning day one and becomes familiar with the software and all it has to offer.
While the choice of whether or not to onboard is an easy one (big YES), the choice of how to onboard can be more difficult. There are two options to consider:
- Onboard via HubSpot directly
- Onboard via a HubSpot agency partner
First up: onboarding with HubSpot directly.
Service Hub Onboarding with HubSpot
When you choose to onboard directly with HubSpot, you will work with your own dedicated consultant to make sure your team understands and properly implements the software. Most of the heavy lifting will be done by your own team, with the consultant serving very much as a guide, not a doer.
Here’s what you can expect when you choose to onboard with HubSpot for their Service Hub:
Account and Tech Setup
This initial stage is about learning the fundamentals of the hub. If this were a summer basketball camp, this would be the “learning to dribble and pass” portion. Nothing in this phase goes too in-depth, but without all of the necessary installing, connecting, importing , and configuring, your team would not be able to use the product properly.
This setup phase is not particular to the Service Hub, but is required anytime you use HubSpot to onboard. Some of the areas you’ll receive guidance on in this stage include:
- Adding your team members as users
- The installation of HubSpot tracking code on your website
- The connection of your shared team email addresses to Conversations
- Edit/embed the support form on your website
- The importing of contacts and/or tickets into HubSpot
- Configuring your conversations notification preferences
- Collecting incoming tickets from customers via the creation of a form
Primary Goals
The following three stages will involve the completion of three primary goals. These goals can vary from company to company, but in general they tend to revolve around delighting customers and improving their overall experience.
Completion of First Goal (sample: Delight Customers at Scale)
If you’re not delighting your customers, then there’s a good chance they’ll find someone else who will. Research has shown that people are actually willing to pay more for a product or service from a company that is known to offer excellent customer service. If you choose to onboard with HubSpot, one of your three primary goals should be similar to this sample. Here’s what to expect with a goal like this one:
- Set up an automatic ticket assignment (if possible)
- The setting up of workflows to: update ticket properties, move tickets to new stage, create tasks for ticket’s owner
- Creation of pipelines to manage different functions
- Optimization of service pipelines/stages to your team’s processes
Completion of Second Goal (sample: Help Customers Help Themselves)
Bottom line: things should be simple for your customers. If you make finding answers and troubleshooting easy for them, they will appreciate it. Who doesn't want that? A goal revolving around this concept would receive guidance on the following:
- Creating a knowledge base in HubSpot or importing an existing one to HubSpot
- Knowledge base is designed to optimize for Google search and customer satisfaction
- Development of categories/subcategories to make knowledge base easy for customers to navigate
- Improvement of the end experience for customers thorough collection and implementation of feedback on knowledge base
- Give customers a visual walkthrough by adding videos to knowledge base
Completion of Third Goal (sample: Measure and Improve Customer Experience)
Improving your customer support is one of the main (if not THE main) reasons for purchasing HubSpot’s Service Hub. This goal should be mandatory for almost all companies. Here’s what to expect when receiving guidance on a goal like this:
- Creation of customer loyalty surveys
- Closing a ticket automatically triggers the sending of a customer effort survey
- Creation of a workflow trigger to send customer satisfaction surveys
- Use of customer satisfaction surveys in marketing and/or sales process
Onboarding Completion/Transition
Following the completion of your three selected primary goals, your onboarding process is essentially complete. During this period, HubSpot will work with you to determine appropriate future goals to ensure that you are getting the most value out of your Service Hub purchase.
Service Hub Onboarding with a HubSpot Agency Partner
While onboarding with an agency partner will be similar to onboarding with HubSpot as far the end goal is concerned, here are some advantages to the former:
Less Direct Work
As previously mentioned, onboarding with HubSpot is going to involve the company itself doing much of the heavy lifting. If this is not something a company is willing or prepared to do, then a better option would be to onboard through a HubSpot agency partner.
Many partners offer tiered HubSpot onboarding options (e.g. basic, premium) that allow a company to choose how much of the work they want to do themselves. Selecting a premium onboarding plan with a HubSpot agency partner would essentially free up your company from performing all the tasks that would be required of them with an onboarding plan from HubSpot itself.
Customized Plan
The bandwidth, goals, and overall capabilities of each company are different. To make sure that your company gets the most out of the onboarding experience, you need a highly customized setup plan that is tailored to your company; this is only going to happen when you onboard with an agency partner. Bottom line: if you want to feel special, then onboard with an agency partner.
Relationship Building
If you’re considering hiring a marketing agency to work with in the future, then this is the perfect opportunity to build a relationship. Not only would an onboarding process establish rapport and familiarity, but it would also give you a chance to evaluate if this agency would be a good fit for future collaboration.
One to Rule Them All
They say good things come in threes. Let’s see:
- Going with HubSpot as your CRM of choice? Good.
- Choosing to onboard after your purchase of HubSpot’s Service Hub? Good.
- Choosing RevPartners as your HubSpot partner for onboarding? Good.
Why RevPartners? We are implementation specialists who believe in:
- Implementing a CRM that your team actually uses.
- Creating a source of truth for your entire revenue team.
- Receiving tailored training from HubSpot certified trainers
- Integrating your CRM with your entire go-to-market tech stack.
Don’t bet on amateurs. Experience the power of veteran RevOps professionals that specialize in HubSpot.
