The HubHeroes Podcast

George B. Thomas: Yeah, it is uh, three dorks. Three mics, uh,
Max Cohen: Good Lord.
George B. Thomas: the intro on a live, which is beautiful. Um, all right, today gentlemen, we are jumping into a conversation around help desk.
And this is after last week, we kind of did what I'll call a video version. Uh, we were doing a walkthrough. We were trying to help some humans understand, uh, some systems and, and Chad you said, you know, it'd be cool. I said, if we did this for help desk, and uh, I immediately was like, okay, I'll sign up for that.
Because sometimes I wonder if I. Use help desk properly. And I also know that there's a lot of people that have questions about Help Desk. And so today we are diving into HubSpot Help Desk. And Chad, here's where I wanna start, or Max, whoever. It's like if I'm tuning into this episode and I currently don't know what Help Desk is or have heard of Help Desk.
Why, why should I care? Like what, what does help desk either help me do or how is it more amazing than people may be giving it credit? Like just give me your help desk lowdown to get us started.
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Um, I mean, I, I really start to think about help desk when I think about, like, I have customer interactions in really any capacity that I need to manage that are much more than just a single threaded email channel. Like, um, you can kind get away. With using maybe the old school inbox, if it's a few emails here and there and you wanna keep track of whether or not you got some open inquiries, stuff like that.
Uh, sometimes that's even good for like Facebook Messenger sales channels where you have a process where people assign stuff better than, than help desk maybe because help desk. Always requires the ticket to be created and associated with the inbound conversation. So when I start to think about, it's like if I have any kind of even moderately robust support process that I'd like to build, um, man Help desk is great for that.
It is exceptional. Um, I've been working with help desk guy, like if you guys remember. It was the first Hub Heroes episode that I was on as a guest before joining, was talking about help desk in, its like first year of existence, and I've been a huge champion. I've help desk ever since. And man, I mean, it's got like even in the setup flow now, I just hopped into a sandbox and they're starting to say like, oh, what are you currently using?
Are using. This platform or that platform. Do you wanna migrate? Are you using these channels? Like this Setup experience is so much better than it was. They, they got the bones in there and now they're getting the support processes to even migrate your knowledge base, to migrate your existing channels and conversations with native connectors sometimes, um, they got some real good stuff going on.
And so when I think about help desk, I'm really thinking about. Managing with multiple support reps and, and the customer agent. Hopefully if you're, if you're doing that, 'cause customer agent is bad, it's real good. Um, it can really, yeah. You like that? I did that for you, George. Yeah. Normally we're like, Hmm, can somebody take care of that in post,
George B. Thomas: We don't got no posts. We're live.
Chad Hohn: We don't got no posts today. Um, but anyway, yeah, like it's really awesome. Like I, I start to think about Help Desk as just that real managed support process and being able to build it in there really easy. The one thing to keep in mind is that a ticket is always required to be created for any inbound conversation or channel inside a help desk.
So you want to think about your tickets object in association with help Desk as like the workspace that manages your tickets.
Max Cohen: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that's, that's good. Well, that's good historical context to have because like before when I think like the original. Conversations tool came out like when Service Hub, like originally launched. Right. Um, and for the longest time, um, you know, the ideas of like tickets and conversations were like pretty separate.
Right. And with, um, with the launch of Help Desk, it's kind of, they sort of like reset that relationship a little bit and, and built it around. Like, what if conversations and tickets had a baby, right. And ended up building, we've, you know, really the. The centerpiece now of like all of service hub that like all the other new additional platforms are like built off of.
Right. Um, you know, with all the routing stuff, all the capacity stuff, the SLA stuff, all of that's like built off of this now symbiotic relationship that like help desk tickets and like what we kind of colloquially referred to as conversations in HubSpot now have that they're all kind of woven together in this very beautiful way.
George B. Thomas: Well, I
Chad Hohn: it's like if, if you think about it, the conversations are just a backend piece that still needed to exist, and that's like it's behind the scenes, something that's there. But unless you're a developer, you really don't even know that conversations are a thing. You kind of think about 'em as like thread IDs, right?
Max Cohen: yeah. But, but also, I mean, like conversations are still available for like sales teams to manage incoming chat conversations and like all that kind of stuff. But you know, they kind of like. Decoupled help desk, like away from that main sort of like inbox tool to kind of like be its own thing while still having that same concept of conversations underneath it all.
George B. Thomas: Which, which let's unpack a, a couple little things there. One, you still have, uh, tickets that you can just go to tickets and work through tickets, but tickets will also be part of help desk. The inbox, by the way, sometimes has been the bane of my existence. Like, uh, the way that I teach is like if you have a sales a or if you have a support at, and like you have multiple humans that have to manage these.
Like that's how we historically used to kind of talk about that. To be honest with you, I don't even really try to talk about that much anymore. I'm just like, nah, I just set up help desk and set up your team the right way. But also we can't have this conversation and not really lean into the fact of if your help.
People, humans. Ooh, humans. Then, um, knowledge base is huge and customer agent then becomes huge. And so this idea of this trifecta of like help desk, uh, AI help, uh, you know, customer agent or I hate this,
Chad Hohn: Customer assistant.
George B. Thomas: anyway. Uh, assistant. Yeah, sorry. And then, uh, knowledge base is like. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.
So here's, here's my question. So we kind of know the landscape, we know what's there versus what used to be chat. Are there things that you, like if somebody came to you and they're like, sweet dude. Like, let's streamline this conversation. What's the one to three things that I need to know about that are gonna make it a no-brainer that my team should like, use this?
Max Cohen: Well, I'm, I'm also interested in, and, and maybe we can, we'll get into this, right? Um, like I always remembered like, what's the, what was the bare minimum amount of stuff that you would like say to do, to say like, okay, HubSpot is like. Technically set up right? And like back in the day it was you, uh, you get, you, you go, you got your website, it exists, right?
You go and put the HubSpot tracking code on there and then like you replace your forms with HubSpot forms and like you could argue like, okay.
George B. Thomas: We're good.
Max Cohen: it's piped in. It's connected. Let's build off this foundation. I'm, I'm, I'm wondering just 'cause I haven't set up a bunch of help desks before. Right. I've done that other motion a million times, but like never really set up help desks.
What's like the equivalent of that, right? Like where, where do people generally get started of like, here's the baseline of you being set up with customer support before or with the, sorry, with, with the help desk, before you get into things like your agents and your capacities and your rigging, all that kind of stuff.
Like, is it just as simple as, is it just as simple as connecting like a team email and then like you're off to the races? Or like where, like where do, where do people need to go with
George B. Thomas: Chad laughed at
Chad Hohn: some stories about, about team emails, which are funny, like, I mean, how many times have you ever onboarded a client and like as a HubSpot partner and you know, the owner of the company connects their email to the team inbox? 'cause it says connect your email and every email they've ever got creates a conversation.
George B. Thomas: I've had that happen with like CEO, Billy, and I've also hap that happened once with like, uh, HR Henrietta and people were like turning themselves and so like, yeah. By the way, warning, warning, do not hook up your individual business email into an inbox ever. Please do not
Chad Hohn: that. Don't do that. Yeah. So yeah, MVP though, I just wanted to kind of laugh about that 'cause that's happened to all of us as HubSpot partners. And also let it be a warning that like you could totally roast yourself the one to one. It says personal email in your email settings. And I think a lot of people think that that's their, like my.
Max Cohen: Gmail
Chad Hohn: Email I use for myself. It's like, no, that's your one-to-one work email. That's what it is, you know, is so I sometimes I feel like people get confused about that too. But
George B. Thomas: Yeah, it's not, it's not your game, hunter eighty4@gmail.com. That's not what you're putting in there.
Chad Hohn: Well, yeah, let's go ahead and get on out
George B. Thomas: Yeah, there you go. If
Chad Hohn: Alright.
George B. Thomas: know.
Chad Hohn: you know, you know. Yeah. Um, cool. Well, I think the, the things though. Are like, all right, define what your inbound channels are and whether or not they need migrated. Right? So that's part of what the new Help desk Setup Wizard does.
It's actually really great. It asks you like what you're using right now, what, uh, channels you're using right now, and then it'll walk you through setup, config, and migration of all of that. So that's really the MVP is like. Who are my humans that I work with that are gonna be in here? And how are they gonna keep track outside of just new open, you know, reply or like new.
We replied to them. They replied to us and closed, like that's the default ticket statuses basically. And there is some inbox automation that moves that around when it's like email or conversations. Uh, you also gotta think about, are we doing phone support If yes or no, like you can do inbound phone support and even some of the channels can do inbound SMS support with third party providers, which is pretty wild.
HubSpot still doesn't do SMS in terms of their native phone numbers. But you can connect calling, uh, to your help desk now, which is a really, really big improvement over what inbox used to be like. You used to have to make a phone call and leave notes or comments and like, man, don't even get me started on the difference between comments and notes.
Back in the day, that was a whole thing, but basically, what are the channels and are those connected
George B. Thomas: let's back
Chad Hohn: how is your,
George B. Thomas: So like, just so everybody knows channels, uh, 'cause you kind of said channels a couple times and then you started listening. Like phone, SMS email,
Max Cohen: Live chat.
George B. Thomas: li Yeah. WhatsApp, live chat. Like those are channels that can then be, so you gotta like. All rivers run to right?
And that's what I want people to really understand is when we're saying channels, it's like the 3, 5, 7 ways that humans could communicate with you, uh, that humans could communicate with you and make it really messy. Now comes into one river, one,
Chad Hohn: Yes, exactly. Yep. And you can filter your tickets by those inbound channels if you wanted. Like you can have one person who handles all the live chat responsibly. Like there's also, depending on if you have enterprise skill-based routing, you could do skills at the user level. And let's say, you know, Sally has skills in this particular product line, and if we've detected that a certain contact.
Is associated with that product line that all the tickets from that contact go to, you know, Sally or whatever. So that's skill-based routing. That's like the deep stuff. There's like so many cool features like that that can really, really help. But just going back to the thing is like, uh, the, you know, three things, right?
One would be what channels are we using and are they connected? Two is who are my humans that are gonna be using it, and how are they gonna view their workload individually? You basically want it. Set up so that each person has a hopper of stuff to do and tries to get that to zero at the end of every day with the help of customer agent, et cetera.
Um, and then maybe distinguishing what those roles are for those people. So live chat person, you know, uh, you know, all other open tickets when live chats are not work being worked or something like that. Uh, and you can even have like. Routing with con, with live chat conversations like capacity based routing.
One person can only have like two live chats at a time or something, uh, maximum. And oh, last thing would be setting up working hours and SLAs. So what are the hours that we do support? And then what's our, what is our company's expectation that we would like people to be responded to within, depending on the channel.
So each channel can have its own SLA if you want. And there can even be way mega advanced SLAs and do SLAs apply in or outside of business hours. Some of that is reserved for enterprise, but SLAs in general are not. Um, so you can have all that and then you could get like some of the native SLA based reporting to tell you how your team's performing and how many of the tickets the customer agent's able to handle.
And as you make the customer agent smarter, it can handle more and more tickets.
George B. Thomas: So first of all, I think that people, when they're not watching the live or if they're just watching and we've already gone live, I think there's like a rewind point there because Chad, you were just like laying stuff down, like just going for it. And, and as you were saying all this stuff, my brain started screaming as it does sometimes like strategy.
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: and, and I would, I would ask you like, how. Because it's funny 'cause Max goes, well what's the minimal viable to get it rolling? And then all of a sudden I'm going hope.
Max Cohen: More the foundation versus the MVP. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: Okay. Okay. We'll take foundation. Then all of a sudden I'm here going, wow, we got complex real quick and, and so like when you think of strategy and Max, this could be you, Chad, this could be you.
When you think of strategy around like the reps and conversations and all the things you said, like is there a good place to start? Are there two or three things people should be thinking about? Like, where does your guys' brain go for that?
Max Cohen: I mean, for me it's always just like the, the same. Question for anything you're setting up. The HubSpot is like, why are you doing it? Like, what's the, what's the point? Right? Is it because like you get so much volume of inquiries from your customers that you just don't have a good way of handling it and your, your, your services suffering because of that?
Um, or are you like, do you have like a great customer success team, but the, you know, the workload is too crazy, so you're trying to create a bit of a, a heat shield with like customer agent to like, you know, say like, Hey, maybe we don't have to have, you know. Human beings handling every single question about how to reset your password, right?
And like, we can, we can kind of like divert that and, and resolve it without human intervention like a little bit more, right? So like, I think sometimes it's a, you know, we don't, we, we, we either have like limited resources to be able to handle customer success. So we need to like set it up in a way where like one small team has like a lot of leverage because of all these d different things you're setting up.
Or it's like we have a high volume and we have a difficult time handling it, or we're dealing with like burnout. I think like depending on the, your reason to wanna do it, you're gonna do different stuff, you know? And so I think it always kind of comes down to like, why are you even looking at it and like what kind of problem you're trying to, like what is the big glaring issues that you could at the beginning.
With that MVP thing, like slap a bandaid on it bef because you're not gonna nail it the first time, dude. Like, like, this stuff is so complex with everything that you can do from your SLAs to your, your, your, your different chat bots, to your customer agents, to your. Available times and like all, all the different channels it supports and all the custom channel stuff you can do.
There's so many different things you can do. Like to think that you're gonna nail it the first time is asinine. Right? It's gonna be something that evolves true, right? But it's gonna be something that evolves over time. But people generally step into it because they have some kind of big, glaring problem with their, you know, customer success.
Like customer success stuff. Like, I don't think people are just getting onto this. Doing all of this work to say like, oh, well everything else is on HubSpots. We might as well get all this on hubs. I don't think people do that these days. Right. Um, you know, and especially with something, maybe some, right, but like typically you have some kind of specific problem and I think.
It's a combination of figuring out what that sort of base layer kind of level, not MVP, but like that foundation you needed to set right, but also whatever the quick fix is to that issue, so you see some immediate value out of it. And that's important not just to make sure you retain as a HubSpot customer.
That's important to make sure that when your team. Gets into this new tool and goes through change, which not a lot of people like, they can sit down and in it and feel some kind of immediate relief from it instead of, oh, everything's changing at once. Right. And I don't, I like, I'm unsure how many people take that route.
Like just knowing you're not gonna nail it perfectly at the beginning and like, just go for some small quick wins and then set yourself on a path for success in the future. But
George B. Thomas: I talk about this all the time. One brick at a time, one brick at a time. One brick at a time. Builds the building. Chad, let me position this in a different way and directly to you, and I'm gonna totally put you on the spot here. Uh, the phone rings, you pick up the phone and there's a guy or a gal ringing
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: and they're like, chat.
How are you doing buddy? And you're like, I'm doing good. How are you doing?
Chad Hohn: Oh, hey. What up? Yeah.
George B. Thomas: What up? And they say, Chad, I found $5,000 under the cushions of my couch last night, and I wanna have you come out and I want you to do a workshop on help desk. Chad, what's the immediate outline of the things that you would want to cover for that day to give them a workshop?
Max Cohen: I'm calling the FBI, if anyone
George B. Thomas: Nah.
Max Cohen: that, says that's a.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely gonna be, um, you know, what are your goals with help desk, right? Because you have to understand what people want to do. Like as max is, is talking, you know, uh, my brain immediately starts to go to, um, less is more right in the beginning and like. Just because you do something a certain way with like spreadsheets and you know, sticky notes.
Or whatever other platform doesn't mean that it has to be rebuilt the exact same way. Sometimes people get pipeline paralysis and they're like, I need a new pipeline for every ticket. Like, do you really, or do you just need like a product line to separate your tickets out? But they all go through the similar support process.
You know what I'm saying? So like the things that I'm gonna focus on is efficiency as much as possible and, and not rebuilding always the same thing that we're doing, but thinking about how can we operationalize and increase efficiency with this new platform. So I'm really going to be getting people's wheels turning as much as to the plat, what the platform has to offer to say, how can we mold what we're doing into this tool set.
George B. Thomas: Okay, I, I gotta pull the thread on there because there's two things that I heard. One, uh, part of your strategy for that day of workshop would be getting the humans who are going to be using the eventual system to actually have conversations about the good, the bad, and the ugly of what's currently happening.
And then build something that is actually for the Trumans moving forward in the process. And, and HubSpot just happens to be the platform. The second thing that came to my mind is Max. If we turned, uh, this into a drinking game, every time we've said on the Hub Heroes Podcast, stop trying to build your historical platform into HubSpot.
We probably would have not been able to record this episode,
Max Cohen: Yeah, we'd, we'd have different, we'd have different weekly meetings we'd be attending. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: oh my gosh. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Chad Hohn: Different.
Max Cohen: I think you know, the, there, there's something said about it is that like, yes, there, like much, like many other things in HubSpot, um, you know, it is, when you're migrating to a tool like this, there is always a great opportunity to not just do exactly what you had before, but like reimagine it.
That doesn't mean you can't do stuff that wa wasn't, that was working well. Like you can recreate what works well for you and, and, and there's like a little bit of like a strategic, um, you know, way of thinking about it in that again, like people, people tend to resist change. Right. And like when you can create something that's new but familiar, sometimes that's really helpful from an adoption standpoint, right?
It's like, oh, maybe a new interface and a new place. I log in to see my tickets and deal with my customers, but the process feels similar. I can find stuff in the same way that it could before that worked for me. Um, but these things that were painful, we changed up and got rid of, right? Um, you know, 'cause again, new environment, new process.
Sucks, right? Like new environment, new process, same problems is terrible. Right? Or it, it makes the same problems even worse,
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Because it's all new user interface. Everyone feels slower. It's more painful, it's more agonizing 'cause you're in a new ui.
Max Cohen: yeah. New, new environment, familiar process, removal of old problems feels better than that, right? Um, you know, so like. You gotta take that into consideration.
Like you could have come up with the, the best ticket stages in the world and the greatest, uh, the greatest, um, you know, SLA system and like a sick ticket routing, uh, you know, automation or capacity, whatever. But like, none of that's gonna matter when your people are coming into the tool feeling like lost as hell.
'cause they're in a new environment. Right. That they don't quite know the quirks of navigating yet, like they did your old system. Right. And so it's like there's this, all this like other stuff getting in the way that like, I feel like you need to like let people ease onto it, right. And ease into it. And this is, I feel like this is a situation where like you're probably gonna be straddling tools for a little bit.
Right. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's like, hey, we've got, like, you know, and, and Chad tell me if you think this is wrong here, but like, it could be a situation where the way that you sort of like, you know how you take a, when you get fish, right, and you have fish and they're in the bag and you put 'em in the aquarium,
George B. Thomas: Oh, okay.
Max Cohen: 'em in the aquarium, in the
George B. Thomas: eating fish,
Max Cohen: not eating. No, don't eat your fish. Don't eat your goldfish. But like you take, you
Chad Hohn: you gotta
Max Cohen: you have it in the water, in the bag, and you put it in the other water in the tank. Right? Like, you know, an equivalent that ever help desk is like, maybe you just first just set up, set up your, your, connect your inbox, right?
So your team can go in there and be like, oh, okay. We're still using our old system to like, 'cause that's what we're comfortable doing right now, but this is what it looks like when emails start to come in and, and, you know, tell your, tell your reps that are, are, you know, the handle change a little bit better.
Hey guys, why don't you go like, just go and respond to a ticket from HubSpot or something. See how it feels. Like, give us feedback on like how we could adjust this before we try to lift and shift everyone into it. Right? I feel like
Chad Hohn: You to get your champions going in there.
Max Cohen: Help desk is probably the worst place where you can do like a switch it on, switch it off, like at the same time, sort of like transition to Right.
Um,
George B. Thomas: here because part of me agrees with you, but then part of me is like, oh, gee, like I don't
Max Cohen: making you go.
George B. Thomas: like. The, the, and again, the idea of like, hey,
Chad Hohn: worst. 'cause if you start having tickets coming
George B. Thomas: yeah. Zoho and HubSpot for the next 90 days or 60 days. Like, because it's funny because when I hear what you guys are saying, it's like, um, what's worse than, you know?
Like bad systems, two systems, uh, what, what, what's worse than like, just, uh, b burnout, uh, burnout and not understanding. Like,
Max Cohen: Sure. I, I can tell you what's worse. Flipping over before you're ready and crash and burning the entire thing. Like that is without a doubt worse. Right? And like when I say straddling two systems, I'm not saying like you're doing work in two places, right? You're getting that input from the customer showing up in HubSpot so they can see what it's gonna look like, where the messages show up, all that kind of stuff.
You can still work outta your other system, but you'll see those emails coming in like, like that kind of stuff, right?
George B. Thomas: visibility and training.
Max Cohen: Yes, and getting feedback from the people who are gonna spend the most time in that thing, seeing it and involving them as you build it out, because you could build out help desk in a thousand different ways.
With all the different channels and automations you can build behind it and the stages and the record customization and like all this stuff, you can do a million different things, right? But like the people that matter the most when you're getting the feedback and shaping this thing are the people that are gonna be spending every single ounce of their day inside of it.
Right? Um, and if you don't involve them in the process and you don't show them, hey. You know those tickets that you're working, either, this is what it looks like when it's inside of this system. What are you missing my dude? Like, what is missing from here? What can we do to make it feel familiar? What macros do you need set up?
Like all these kind of things
Chad Hohn: Which they have now?
Max Cohen: that it's just, it's too complex of a thing to like, just feel like you can build it all and then just like hard switch it. It's just, you can't,
George B. Thomas: So, Chad, Chad, um, so what I just heard is understanding the data model
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: is important
Chad Hohn: Is there,
George B. Thomas: the help desk.
Max Cohen: The da, not so much the data model, just like what
George B. Thomas: Max is like on
Max Cohen: hold on. It's just like, what does it look like and feel like when your customers are communicating with you through it, right? And, and, and then going like, cool, if I was gonna sit here to answer this ticket. What, what the, am I missing here that I
George B. Thomas: Oh,
Max Cohen: in my
Chad Hohn: I have everything I need?
Max Cohen: kind of stuff. Right. Like that And that's,
George B. Thomas: But that's data model, by the way. What do you
Chad Hohn: to an admin, that's
George B. Thomas: be data points
Max Cohen: model, is it ergonomics of how the conversation looks? I'm not a hundred percent sure. Right. Um, but again, it sometimes, dude, the, I don't think a HubSpot admin is gonna have that same perspective as a seasoned support person.
George B. Thomas: Okay, so now hold up. Time out. So time out there it is. That's what I'm looking for, Chad. The importance of data model.
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: Super admin and a human that owns help desk talk to me. In some cases, that's one human. But talk to me of the importance of that relationship for the success and buy-in of the teams moving forward.
Chad Hohn: Yeah. I mean, um, years ago I worked at, uh, uh, construction management software company, and I both was the super admin as well as the dude answering tickets and doing customer success. Uh, so, you know, customer success and customer support are a little bit near and dear to my heart because of that, and that's why I like this platform so much is because I.
Wanted to grow with it to fit needs that our team was gonna need to, to handle. Um, so obviously operationally you need the right information to answer the questions that you want to answer for any customer reporting that doesn't work outside the box. Things like product line segmentation and you know, making sure you're routing your customers for the customer user experience.
But as an admin, you are also dealing with. Your use, your internal user's user experience, you're serving two customers as an admin, right? Um, and so. As you're working on that, that relationship, you really want to be working with those customer support reps that are going to be cranking through tickets as they come in inbound.
What is the experience of their notification of a new inbound ticket? Is it just the HubSpot notification? Is it. Other things that they wanna know about when certain things occur so that they can be super proactive. Like how do you segmentate, uh, or segment your priority? Is this a high priority, medium priority, low priority, uh, ticket, uh, for your customer?
Like what is the customer's needs so that your reps can respond appropriately? And that's all like data model, but also needs to be considered as far as the user experiences of. This is like my cascading priority list of this view should always be empty before this view should always be empty before that view.
Something like that. And one of the things that I liked in Zendesk, and uh, if I'm, to be completely honest, I don't know if HubSpot has built it out yet, is in a table view, being able to have a, uh, sort in addition to a grouping. So, does that make sense? Like I have sorted by reply or like old, you know, last replied is oldest and grouped by priority, where high, medium and low or urgent, high, medium, low are urgents are always at the top and I can work out a one view that gives me all those things.
They may have actually added that because I'm not actually currently administrating a help desk, um, at my current company. So maybe that's in there.
Max Cohen: That's like an index page that's like filtered by a thing. I don't know if you've done that
George B. Thomas: Yeah. I don't know if it's, I don't know if you have those two. Yeah, I don't know if you have two. 'cause my brain immediately went to, well, it'd be a view for X, Y, Z, and that view would be sorted by B. But that's not what you're saying. You're saying I wanna have two sort filters. In
Chad Hohn: all open tickets sorted by this, but grouped by that, so within each group of this, uh, maybe an Enum property, right? It's sorted within each of those groups, and you kind of crank through the grouped, sort each of them in, in a row,
Max Cohen: I wonder if they just assume you're gonna build your own like views for that, right. Instead of
George B. Thomas: so view
Chad Hohn: That would be a custom view, most, most likely. But you would have multiple views. So your reps are having to bounce between multiple views for that. But anyway, all that to say like, you know, you wanna think about how operationally are they going to work their way through that data and what's their expectation?
Max Cohen: Yeah. I guess in theory if you do the, if you do the, the, the ham? No, the, what is it? The, the board style help desk thing that it, it's kind of inherently grouped by like a stage, right?
Chad Hohn: by a stage. Sure.
Max Cohen: But like I, I know what you mean. Like looking at the classic help desk view where it's like the three column thing and I have all my open tickets.
It would be sick if I could group 'em by something.
George B. Thomas: Mm. Now we, we even got a wishlist item in here, unless we go and research it, and it's actually there. By the way, if you're watching this live or after it's live and you're like, Doug, guys, it's right here. Leave a comment in the freaking YouTubes. Let us know that it's right here, or we will research it and we'll talk about it.
On another episode, so believe it or not, guys, we have like crested the time of this episode. I wanna end this way. Um, let's go back. Well, no, let's just do this. What's the one thing if you could only tell somebody one thing about help desk positive or negative. What's the one thing that you would wanna share with them?
And when I say negative, I mean like a, a possible. Gotcha. Uh, it's almost leaning back into Chad. My original question that we never got to is like, what's the nerdy stuff of help desk that people should care about? But what's, what's the one thing Chad Max,
Max Cohen: I, yeah, I would say if, if you, if you, um, evaluated Service Hub a year or so or more ago, it's time to do it again. Like it, like the amount of stuff that they've added, even just the past year and like all the stuff that've built. On top of Help desk now is just, it's a totally different tool than it was like a year and a half ago.
Right. And so, um, you
Chad Hohn: Oh, it's insane.
Max Cohen: a good time to revisit that conversation.
Chad Hohn: Yeah. And, and I would say too, just to like piggyback on that before my one thing, 'cause I wanted a one and a half like George usually gets,
George B. Thomas: There you go.
Chad Hohn: is the, it, it felt very fragmented before, but it's been significantly unified since you probably last looked at it like, and. But with the HubSpot Chrome extension handling, like calling remote so you don't have to have that stupid dangler window open all the time.
That's been a game changer for people, uh, for doing anything with calling. Now for mine, I would say like go, like if you're curious as to all the settings and config that are open in help desk, go take a look at the help desk page in settings. And see the customized, uh, settings. Pain that they built for you to see at a glance all of the configs that are available between macros and you know, all of the SLAs and all of the users and skills and availability and the channels and chat and.
You know, uh, like if you want a IVR for your inbound phone tree, if you do phone support, AI settings, views, like they have even a thing called spaces. If you have multiple teams that work in help desk, there's so much in there. If you're an admin, go take a peek at that and let your little imagination get inspired by what you could do with it.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, so mine is gonna be another version of Take a peek. Uh, you should go to the right hand side panel, go to product updates, and you should just, uh, search help desk under the all tab. Because since, by the way, max, I'm kind of leaning into your thing if you haven't done it in the last year, and I jokingly said the last month.
Uh, if I just start with February of 2026 to now, there's literally 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 updates. In those seven updates, there's three betas. Um, and so you should know things like team email, signature visibility and placement in inbox, uh, prevent non-service users from sending from help desk, email addresses, updates
Chad Hohn: they added additional tokens too.
George B. Thomas: conversations.
What.
Chad Hohn: They added additional tokens to the emails, so like you can have more, these only have like three user tokens now. You have several more?
George B. Thomas: Yep. Uh, snooze. Tickets in help desk. And by the way, Chad, Chad, Chad, Chad, Chad, Chad. You mentioned comments earlier. Major update that you can create and view notes in help desk. And in brackets it says replacing comments. Okay. And
Chad Hohn: been in beta for like a hundred years, but
George B. Thomas: yeah, yeah. Not in beta anymore. It's literally live now.
Chad Hohn: It's
George B. Thomas: Uh, send an email to create a ticket in help desk.
And the last one, assigned teams are now editable in help desk. So, so again, it's always changing, HubSpot's always making it better. And so my one thing is like, go take a peek at the settings. Like Chad said, go take a peek at the updates, like I'm saying. And as Max said so eloquently, uh, if you think, you know.
You probably don't know, so go look at it again, plain and simple.