Enhancing the Customer Experience with HubSpot

Exceptional customer experience is the biggest business advantage you can garner in any industry. In a world where immediate gratification and multichannel communication is the norm, this has however become an increasingly large challenge for Maltese businesses. Our culture is not very customer-service oriented, making training a very important part of the puzzle.

However, training is not enough.

Even when your employees are genuinely trying to do their best, they might still fail if not provided with the right tools.

In this article, we’re looking at HubSpot free and paid tools that can help Maltese businesses in any industry provide great customer service.

Centralised Customer Service Management with HubSpot CRM

Streamline Customer Data

The first step towards improving your customer service is to streamline your customer data processing. The simpler your processes, the easier and faster it will be for your agents to retrieve information.

Unified Customer Data

By centralising customer service management tools on a platform like HubSpot you can benefit from Unified Customer data – meaning that you can see customer data across the whole organisational process. For example: you can track where a lead contacted you from on your website, who answered it, how long it took to prepare a proposal and fix the first meeting, how much they spent as a client and whether they became a repeat client. You can also see if there were any complaints or issues along the way, who resolved them and how.

CRM Customisation

Properties: Hubspot allows you to create contacts which are connected to various properties such as Companies and Deals. You can also create a group based on these properties.

Views: In HubSpot you can also create custom views that allow you to see your data in your preferred format. This allows you to easily filter the data based on your choice of contacts, companies, deals and support tickets.

Reporting: You can also create custom dashboards so that your reports are always shown in your preferred layout and with the filters you’ve set. You can have up to 3 dashboards with basic reporting on the free account, and upgrade to the paid version for more advanced reporting.

Email Templates and Sequences: HubSpot allows you to create reusable custom email templates and even email sequences that are dynamically customised on the fly. Templates are available on the free plan, whilst email sequences require a paid plan.

Forms and Landing Pages: These can both be customised (of course) and embedded/linked to your website. They connect to your CRM and populate the prospect/customer details when you collect information on first contact. Customising form fields in the contacts section allows you to collect any form information you require to filter your leads/contacts. Landing pages are also highly customisable, with basic features available on the free plan and more advanced features on the paid plans.

Permissions and User Roles: If you want to have basic custom tiered permissions, the free HubSpot CRM will be enough. However, if you want to add advanced tiers and privileges for some staff members you might have to upgrade. You can also find the team feature that lets you organise staff members into teams, on the free plan, however with limited features.

You can do a lot on the HubSpot free plan with the CRM tools available. However (as can be expected) you can do so much more on the paid plans.

Here’s a list of features that you can access with a paid HubSpot subscription:

1. Custom Objects (Operations Hub – Enterprise)
2. Custom Pipelines and Stages (Advanced features on Sales Hub or Service Hub Professional or Enterprise)
3. Custom Dashboards and Reports (Advanced reports require the Reporting Add-on or Sales Hub/Service Hub Professional or Enterprise)
4. Custom Workflows (Advanced automation requires Sales Hub, Service Hub or Marketing Hub on the Professional or Enterprise Plans)
5. Custom Email Sequences (requires Sales Hub on the Professional or Enterprise Plans)
6. Custom Integrations
   • API Access: Basic API access is available, but advanced integrations may require a paid plan.
   • Marketplace Apps: Some apps in the HubSpot Marketplace require a paid subscription.

Creating Customer Service Excellence with HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot’s Service Hub enables small and medium-sized businesses in Malta to have more efficient and effective Customer Support. Here’s how it does that.

Ticketing System
HubSpot’s ticketing system allows agents to create tickets manually as well as creating tickets automatically through touchpoints such as your website live chat.

The chat option can be very powerful and will help you reduce one-touch tickets. The chat automation can be connected to your knowledge base and provide answers to simple queries. This will release your agents and give them more time to deal with more advanced queries.

Improving your Customer Experience

Improving your customer experience takes more than picking the right tool. You must also pick the right training and integration specialists, as well as design a better customer journey.

By designing the customer journey in detail, you can predict how the customer will go from prospect to customer to repeat customer. This will help you design customer support that helps them move faster from one stage to the next and helps them, should be typical or extraordinary, issues arise.

As people move through the journey, you can implement improvements – this is why monitoring and reporting dashboards are so important.

You also need to keep in your omnichannel presence. All your customer touchpoints need to provide the best possible customer support – they are all part of your customer experience.

If you can delight your prospects and customers along this journey, your business will stand out and win!

Want to discuss how HubSpot CRM can help you create a stronger customer experience? Book a commitment-free call with Ale, our CRM expert [link to Ale’s Calendar]