The HubHeroes Podcast

[00:00:00] George B. Thomas: those of their employer.
[00:00:03] Max Cohen: man, Dax and Connor are going to be pissed when they find out.
[00:00:07] George B. Thomas: that that'll never go live. No, we'll use the real one. But
for for all the listeners like what, what does that mean? I kind of had to redo my soundboard. And you might have a new humans sound that is a little different than the original. And also I put the wrong
intro in as we got started,
[00:00:28] Liz Moorehead: way to go, George, way to go, George. All anybody needs to keep in mind is that my opinions represent everybody and are explicitly supported. By everyone, that's
[00:00:39] George B. Thomas: my goodness.
Sheesh, I wish I had
[00:00:43] Liz Moorehead: that kind of authority to
wield that
kind of authority. It's a, it's a lot of George. It's very difficult, but I excited. We have very special guest today. We have our very own Chad Hahn and a technologist and super admin for more than four years, four to five years now, at Roofing Business But George and Chad, I want you guys to take it away because there's a very special story about Chad joining us on today's podcast, isn't there?
[00:01:11] George B. Thomas: Yeah, without a doubt. So, so it's funny because first of all, Chad has been a baller in the chat pane for many episodes. Uh, Chris, Salim, Chad, other folks just kind of dropping bombs.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:01:26] Max Cohen: the boys!
[00:01:26] George B. Thomas: audience as more could do. They could, uh, you know, go to the community. You're going to see the event.
You can sign up, then you get notifications. It's a wonderful world. You want to, you do things automagically anyway, moving forward onto the actual reason of why we have chat here. Is he reached out via the community and I love when, when conversations start in the way that Chad started the conversation because he goes, I'm not sure if y'all y'all, by the way, I'm North Carolina.
That's nice and Southern. I'm just going to throw that out there. I'm not sure if y'all are open to it, but I'd come on sometime and discuss. Which is what we're going to discuss today. We'll talk about that in a minute. But, uh, first of all, Chad doesn't know how open I am to new ideas and how open I am to doing almost anything that would educate the people who listened to the hub heroes podcast.
So I was like, I to that part And I saw service hub inbox. And I was like, well, we've done a couple episodes then I saw this word. Or words actually help desk which I responded, uh, email let's get you here we are
[00:02:38] Liz Moorehead: Chad, are you excited to be on? Are you excited to meet the leap from audience to,
to guest?
[00:02:44] Chad Hohn: Yeah. Never. I mean, never done that before. I'm definitely really excited to be here. It's a very happy to be on, on, the you guys. I mean, you guys have so much, uh, you know, breadth of knowledge and experience in HubSpot and, you know, I've been at it for a while and I think the cardinal thing that I've learned so I think George and I have talked about this before is that, you know, the more that I learn and know, the more I know that I don't know.
About HubSpot because a it's growing fast and rapidly, but.
You know, there's always something more to learn and to be able to contribute what I know, but also gather more from more people. I mean, that's the whole point of the hub heroes podcast.
I love it. Oh
[00:03:22] George B. Thomas: yeah.
I love that so much because I feel like I should beg for an amen the chat around the fact of that, uh, man, I've been doing this bad boy for over almost 11 years now, maybe a little over 11 years go. Where'd they move that to? Uh, wait, when did, when did that show up?
Has that always been, I always love when I slack max and go, dude, how long has that feature been in HubSpot? And he's like 17 years. I'm like, Oh, Okay, never mind, I'm going
back to work now.
[00:03:59] Liz Moorehead: That happens to me all the time. I'll like roll up and I'm like, Oh my gosh, check out this new feature. And George will be like, so, so Liz, you just,
so we're not going to tell anybody that you
[00:04:07] Devyn Bellamy: You Columbus this
[00:04:08] Liz Moorehead: We're just going to
leave. That's fine.
It's fine.
[00:04:11] Max Cohen: I remember, I remember being in front of a group of 90 new hires, uh, in front of a projector, how to build something, sudden I click a page and I'm like That's different and I would just always spit it and I'd go
this is one of the best parts of HubSpot guys We're always making it better.
So Let's figure it out together. And yeah, that was fun.
[00:04:34] Devyn Bellamy: we, uh, now. And we were debating whether or not we were going to, uh, do this video. Because we know that parts of the UI are And it, the the world for me was like, we're used to this. Like as long as I've been using HubSpot as many times as I've come in and it's just a completely different HubSpot and it's like going to a bar that got renamed and it's like, Oh, this place is nice. And it just, it's the same, but it's different. And it's like, you know what? I'm just going to find it.
It's part of the experience. I love it. But yeah, it's, it's one of those things that, um, we innovate so quickly. It's like, we don't get a chance to talk about it
[00:05:08] George B. Thomas: Facts. Facts.
[00:05:10] Liz Moorehead: All right. So speaking of innovation, we are going to be digging more deeply into the HubSpot service hub today. We have a couple of topics that we want to hit, but what we're really talking about today at a high level it takes to execute. A really well done customer strategy using Service Hub. And we're going to be talking about help desk, which George, you already touched upon a little bit, but we're going to get to that in a little while. But first I want to start with one of my favorite topics, which is mindsets. So when we think about mindsets, what are the mindsets that we want folks to have when thinking about how to develop that clear customer support strategy so they can truly
[00:05:51] Chad Hohn: Yeah, um, I mean, I, I think the, one of the mindsets that I go into is, um, you know, definitely the, the human experience, right, on, but there's there's two human experiences here that actually, sometimes three, um, you know, and what I would say is when I'm You know, looking at some sort of a help desk type experience HubSpot or not, whether Hub, whether it's Zendesk, whether it's Intercom, if I'm going to build out that process at a high level, I need to know that handoff of information from first level support to if I'm a SaaS product developer level support and how that happens and what kind of tech stack is involved in that, as well as, um, You know how the, the customer experiences that handoff and even know or need to know that transition, you know, that ticket or that issue
[00:06:44] Liz Moorehead: Max,
[00:06:45] Max Cohen: I have some thoughts on mindsets. Yeah. Yeah so, um, I think whenever you're you're You know, you're, you're getting in front of HubSpot for the first time. And you're like, Hey, we've got these whole, you know, these suite of tools, you know, that we can use to set up some kind of, uh, support or service experience, like whatever it is.
you need to think about a couple of things. One, am I making it really, really easy for my customers to find all the different avenues in which they can engage with our support or service team? Right. It's like, so when they come to our website. How how hard is it for them to find what gets them in touch with us, right?
Um, but I think the other thing you should be thinking about too is what are you doing to enable folks to self service, right? Um, you know having to talk to someone should be like a second Uh, layer, if you will, you want to be thinking about, um, how are you creating a heat shield for your service folks so they can really focus on the really tough problems and how are you making it so the majority of the easy problems to solve, right?
Those are your, you're enabling your customers and empowering them to self serve those own issues, right? So that's why things like. Knowledge base is really great, right? Because it makes sure every single person that hits you up asking how to reset their password doesn't take the time of a service rep to do that.
Right. And like, they can go read an article and figure that out. Right. But if they are having, you know, a more fringe issue or something, that's not like a common FAQ or like whatever. You got to make it easy for them to actually get to a human to solve that problem, right? So HubSpot gives you a number of different ways to do it, right?
Whether it's live chatting, filling out a form, right? If it's more like get back to me later, team email, right? They make it super easy for that customer to engage with you the way you want to. And I think we're even doing inbound calling now. I'm pretty sure we're getting close to it. Right? Like, yeah.
Right. So it's like,
right. So it's like, Oh, all of a sudden you have all of these really great ways of, of getting people in touch with you, but you have to balance that with the idea of making sure. The folks that are taking up your reps time are the ones that should be not the ones that shouldn't be right.
So how do you balance that? How do you keep your customers happy? That's like a little bit of a tightrope walk, right? Um, but then past that too, the other mindset should be how am I enabling those humans to help? The customers, right? Am I putting the resources in front of them for them to be able to answer certain questions?
Am I giving them stuff inside the tool that reduces a lot of the manual work and the repetitive work just like we obsess over reducing repetitive work for sales reps? Are you doing that for your service reps? Right? How are you managing? How are you using these tools? Not just to like, you know, make sure we're helping people, but like reducing burnout of your sales teams.
Right. Aren't at your service teams, right? And I don't think we're thinking enough about that. Um, or at least the customers that I talk to you aren't. So I would encourage them to do. I don't want to shut
up because I
can, I can keep that rant going for hours.
[00:09:38] George B. Thomas: no, and I I would double click on your rant and I would listen to it for hours. But here's the thing, I have to double down because as everybody knows, well actually before I go into my thing, by the way. I just want to say hello to Ashley from Hawaii. And also, uh, I saw Shannon from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
So this is amazing. Like the hub heroes, uh, chat is we got some new folks in there. So welcome to the crew. Now, let me go
[00:10:05] Liz Moorehead: And some
[00:10:05] George B. Thomas: my diatribe here. Hey. They're representing, they're representing as they should. So you all know that I love the
humans. And you know that for me, I've talked historically in the podcast about the education side of this, right?
Creating content around the written word, creating content around the video, creating content around audio or podcasting. And so that's the mindset of communicating as an educator to the way that people like to learn. Well, there's a mindset that unfortunately, probably many organizations that are listening to or watching this podcast in the community or on their favorite podcast app have come to believe is okay.
We have a website page. It has a form. They can submit the form and create a ticket. Let's go home and eat bagels and locks for the rest of the evening. This is not actually service or support. This is not actually a help desk. It is a start to it. But the mindset that I want to double down on here is the mindset of.
Communication and understanding that somebody might like to communicate through that form. Somebody might like to communicate through chat. And honestly, I don't give two squats if nobody on your team wants to man a chat. It's not about you. It's about them and how they like to communicate. We need to understand that some people might like to communicate through email.
I freaking hate email. But some people might love email, and then others might want to call and actually talk to a human. Now, here's the thing. If you look at HubSpot, and one of the things that I've loved about HubSpot Is that you could chat, you could email, or you could call and get the support that you needed.
If max, we have reached the level of this knowledge article makes zero sense or there is not one on the internet. And so as you move forward, make sure you're paying attention to do we have all of the channels. By the way, I didn't even mention WhatsApp. I didn't mention the Facebook, uh, Messenger integration to your, your Like, all the channels, in all the ways that the humans could want to communicate with you and say, Hey, my ish is broken.
We should probably have those in
place.
[00:12:28] Devyn Bellamy: I, I just have one
thing, uh, that I think, well I guess technically two, um, uh, the first one is, um, notation. Notation, notation. Um, for those of people like me who hate talking to people, the only thing that I hate
more than talking to people is talking to people more than once and saying the same thing over.
so please document, notate, um, put in thoughts, call conclusions, even if it seems innocuous, anything to make that much. Thank you. transition to another rep if needed, uh, as smooth as possible. Um, but with that being said, uh, train and empower people for first call resolution. NPS scores go down.
The more people that talk to the longer it takes to resolve an issue. so you should be able, you should train and empower people, um, for first call resolution. If you don't, you're, you're definitely doing yourself and your customer disservice.
[00:13:21] Liz Moorehead: That's
[00:13:21] George B. Thomas: I want to throw in one more thing here, Liz, I know that you have to herd us like cats, and I'm fine with that. But I do want to add one other thing in here. I just recently did an interview with Jay Baer, and we were talking about his new book that he has out. And one of the things I would say to support teams and help desks and all of that is the other thing that I would have on a mindset level is rate of speed, meaning the quicker that you can get to letting them know that you know that they have support that they have created a ticket or started a conversation.
Will actually buy you patience and understanding in the long run, but if it takes you six hours or two days to get back to the ticket, trust me, the human that you interact with will be slightly Bye.
[00:14:14] Max Cohen: yeah, dude, I mean, great, great example for like, why something like thank you pages are still important. Right? Like if you have a form that generates ticket, like that thank you page should be sending hella expectations on what that person should expect, right? Because they want to know that they're getting taken care of.
And the step that they just took is going to get them closer to figuring out what their problem was. Right? So if it's something just as simple as like saying, Hey. Thanks for letting us know what's going on. We've created a ticket for you. Our team is going to get on it. We're going to get back to you with an X amount of time.
If it's a real emergency, here's the number, right? That is, that'll take you what? Eight seconds to set up in HubSpot. But it will also like stop all the customers that go through that, you know, experience from being like, wait, are they even going to get this? Like what the hell even happens now? What do I do?
Just wait around? Like. And you know, you want to make sure you're not creating more agitation for that person who's eventually going to have to pick up the phone with them or like answer, right? Because they were left with just ambiguity about what's going to happen with their problem, which makes things 10 times worse.
[00:15:10] Liz Moorehead: A hundred percent, you know, it leads right nicely into my mindset, which is very simple, which is, so before I got into inbound, I actually spent about five or six years working in customer service. There was a time that for a very large company, if you wanted to speak to a supervisor, I. I was that supervisor and I was yelled at a lot.
It was, it was fun. Liz learned a lot, but what I will say is this. One of the things at that time taught me that I think a lot of people forget, particularly if they don't consider what they do to be a traditional product or service that requires customer service. Your mindset is simple. Your customer service is a product.
Your customer service is equally a part of the product. That you are selling, whether that is a good, whether that is a service, whether that is something else, it is not separate. It is part of the entire experience somebody has with your brand and what it is that you do or sell. So if that part is not something you are paying attention to, you have a problem.
You need to be looking at the way you service and support your customers. It can't just be, well, good, we got them to buy the thing. Oh, good. You know what? Whoever's handling the execution of the product. They've got it. They've hit. No, that's not how any of that works. Now, I want to start
digging more
[00:16:24] George B. Thomas: Well, hang on, I want you to, I want you to dig in deeply too, but I got to, I have to call out that Nick from Fargo. First of all, that's a great use of chat name, by the way, uh, says little promises to keep little promises to keep listen, ladies and gentlemen, one of the things that is a business differentiator is if you promise to take care of your customers and you truly do follow through on that promise.
You will win. You will be a winning company just based off that. Also, I love that Nick from Fargo knows us so well that he says Liz has so many friends named Karen. Okay, go
ahead, Liz. Oh,
[00:17:04] Liz Moorehead: Yes. Because literally we are like 20 minutes into this episode and we are on question one guys. So let's move it along. All right. So I want to get into something that I know is very near and dear to Chad's heart. So Chad, I want to come back to you. Let's talk about the unified it.
Conversations inbox explicitly, what are the things that people should be thinking about, whether that's specific aspects, features of that tool when they're developing their support strategy? What are your favorite go to's there?
[00:17:32] Chad Hohn: really, if you go to the, the certification for service hub, right? Uh, the, they sell it all in that first video where they're talking about your customers are now.
Omnichannel.
I mean, we need
the voice, you know, like Omnichannel,
you know,
[00:17:49] Devyn Bellamy: He came ready!
He came ready!
[00:17:54] George B. Thomas: Woo!
[00:17:54] Max Cohen: He's got one.
[00:17:56] Chad Hohn: yeah, saving that,
[00:17:58] George B. Thomas: This is a good day, ladies and gentlemen. This is a good
day.
[00:18:01] Chad Hohn: they're And what that means is there's all of, just like George was talking about, they're coming through so many different avenues now. I mean, like the conversations Is amazing because you have all these things that create help requests and you can manage whether or not that conversation is done. Um, but I think the too, when I get into that omni channel inbox is it's almost got the wrong primary object, right? A conversation being the primary has caused so much confusion for people. So that's something that you really need to consider in your architecture of how that stuff gets handed off.
And that. goes to the other thing that's near and dear to my heart, which is You know, we may talk about this a little more later, the tease of Helpdesk and what it truly means.
[00:18:49] Liz Moorehead: Do we all just need a moment to sit with that?
[00:18:52] George B. Thomas: Well, so it's, it's funny because my brain got stuck and teased at the same time, meaning when, when Chad used the verbiage of, well, first of all, conversations is the wrong object to focus on. I was like, Tell me more, please, please tell me more and and so I was stuck there and then I'll say he's like and we might Talk a little bit about this thing called helpdesk and I'm like, uh, I don't know which way to go
[00:19:24] Chad Hohn: Yeah, it's hard. There's so much to unpack there, right? I mean, when you really get into it, you know, this conversation represents kind of a thread. Um, but a ticket Right. And sometimes the first thing that happens
when a conversation is started is this thread is open, and it's related to a ticket, what do you do if you have more than one inquiry related to the same issue?
That's the problem that conversations inboxes have had. And that's the purpose desk is it's like, you're learning cross object reporting for the first time. Like, Hey, I get into reporting and I love single object reporting and the single object report builder is super dope because it's easy and I'm thinking about deals or I'm thinking about contacts and I report on it and it's a contained nice little box, but like human interactions are so multidimensional.
That this issue needs to be the primary thing. So it's like, if I want to report on revenue, but I leave contacts as my primary object in my report builder, and deal based filters, then I end up with the same deal in my report multiple times, and I think I'm doing way more revenue than I am because there's three contacts associated to the one deal.
Cause that's my primary object, same problem with the conversations in box. Right.
[00:20:40] Max Cohen: So, yeah, so are you talking about, Chad, like, the, the issue is that, like, the conversation and the ticket itself are fundamentally separate things, right? Um, so the issues come from if new conversations open up, how do you associate those back to tickets? And I don't even think I ever, like, tried to play around with that.
Because, I mean, the thing that the But I always kind of like recommended people do is to keep that conversation Open as long as the ticket's still open because you know, I can like close conversations because they did. Um, they they They introduced that channel switching feature a while ago. So like the idea for that for anyone who's watching who doesn't know is like, Hey, someone starts with chat, right?
And you're chatting with them and you're talking and everything. And then they leave. You can switch that to being able to just like turn it into an email and it stays within the same conversations thread. Right? But then like you still run into issues where it's like, Oh. Cool. This is done. Close the conversation.
But then someone opens up the ticket again, like later, because the same issue pops back up. And then you're just like, well, how do I engage with this person here? And then you're back to emailing them off the ticket record. But that's weird if you're used to living and dying out of the conversations inbox.
And it's like, what am I really doing? You know what I mean? Um, and it's also the other thing that's like kind of strange too, is like, you know, conversations. That tool came out when service hub came out. And I think the original idea is that they were going to be very close and tied together. But I think HubSpot realized, Hmm, conversation actually has conversations inbox has use cases across the marketing and sales too, as well.
And they kind of like detached the idea of it just being a service hub tool. But now it feels like with what I've heard from about help desk is that. It's kind of coming home, if you will, right? Um, you know, and there's going to be more of a marriage between kind of what we understand as a ticket and what we understand as a conversation.
But I don't know. I haven't seen it. So I haven't seen
anything in the back end on that.
[00:22:30] Liz Moorehead: Well, okay, we've already teased this a few times, Chad, for the listeners at home. Let's go ahead and unpack this because we've referenced help desk, something that is not currently It's in beta. Is that correct?
[00:22:44] Chad Hohn: yeah, it
is
[00:22:45] Liz Moorehead: Okay. Talk
to us about. Yeah. So explain to people who may not be
familiar with it, what it is, because we're now starting to dive into a much more complex area of this conversation.
And I want to make sure our listeners
stay with
[00:22:56] Chad Hohn: sure, yeah, it's um, it's a beta feature, um, I was grateful and lucky enough to be one of the first alpha, uh, portals to get ungated on it when it was like barely running, um, you kind of have to know somebody and go ask for it, Um, or somebody you're trying to do some service hub stuff and get recommended to the team, but if you, you know, go reach out to Rose over there, she can ungate your portal.
It's quite a ways along, uh, and you can use help desk, but what it is, is instead of going to the conversations inbox, they're making this gargantuan transition. Over to a ticket primary help system, right? Um, I think at the beginning when we were trying to unpack like, Hey, well, the difference between a conversation and a ticket is difficult.
The first thing that you can, you know, if you've tried to build out a help desk or in the conversations inbox, it can be like tricky to the point where you kind of feel like conversations are the enemy. But they're not the enemy. They're just in the wrong hierarchical order. Like a ticket is the primary that could have many conversation threads underneath it, right?
And that, I mean, you would really even want to be able to open up, let's say down the road when there's SMS threads, have an SMS conversation thread. That's open. Uh, you know, natively inside a HubSpot once HubSpot calling advances to that. I'm not even sure if that's on the roadmap, but that's just where my brain goes with it, right?
Is, I would love to see native SMS, that conversation thread can be open or closed, but it's primary under a deal, or under a ticket, or under whatever. That whatever other objects is associated to, but the general idea of help desk is to put tickets back where they belong. Cause this issue has many dimensions that are even externally related to like, maybe I'm going to reach out to Slack and have a conversation thread in Slack that needs to be in the ticket.
Cause that particular part of my company doesn't actually live in HubSpot tickets, but I need to get some information from a team member, but my help team needs to see all that. Right. That's kind of the intent behind it is moving everything into the ticket and being able to see every single ticket in your portal in help desk, but to be able to use filters to get rid of irrelevant tickets, and then hook channels up to help desk that can create tickets. So it's very much like the inbox, but, uh, I mean, it even has a list view now, which is pretty cool. So you can have a list view inside of a inbox style view with private, as well as shared views, which is pretty cool. So there's a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipe and they have a very big vision and I've been, I've really enjoyed working with the help desk team to provide insight.
I mean, advanced SLAs are on the roadmap at some point,
like. You know, check this SLA, check this SLA, check this SLA fallback
SLA, if you want
really cool stuff.
[00:25:50] Liz Moorehead: Chad, there's a quick question from the audience, uh, from Salim. When you say tickets, is that different from service hub tickets?
[00:25:56] Chad Hohn: So it would be all Of the primary, like of the ticket object, you could get all tickets in helpdesk is the idea of in the longterm. It's not quite that way yet, but that's where the longterm goal is, is to bring every ticket in so that you can use your, your view, filtered views to show your helpdesk team or your service team, exactly what they need to see, even if you happen to use tickets for, let's say, um, If I use tickets for, for production related items.
Some people have a service pipeline that's related to producing some sort of goods or services.
Right? After a deal is
sold. So, yeah.
[00:26:34] George B. Thomas: Yeah. Uh, so first of all, Liz,
I've been doing some Googling over
[00:26:39] Liz Moorehead: I was wondering what you were doing. I was wondering what you were doing.
[00:26:43] George B. Thomas: like, Oh my God, like what? And so there will be a couple of knowledge articles that we'll put in the show notes because. There's literally like, uh, there's one where I love it's like manage and respond to customer tickets with helpdesk beta.
And it is one of the most robust beta knowledge documents I think I've ever seen HubSpot put out. But then there's a follow up one that is route tickets in helpdesk based on, listen to this ladies and gentlemen, based on agent skills.
[00:27:13] Chad Hohn: First extension of the user
property.
[00:27:15] George B. Thomas: helpdesk based on agent skills. Oh my,
[00:27:21] Chad Hohn: Yeah,
[00:27:21] George B. Thomas: whoo!
Anyway,
[00:27:22] Chad Hohn: stuff.
[00:27:23] Liz Moorehead: did a dance.
[00:27:23] Max Cohen: hmm. Skills, skills based routing. Here it is. Skills based routing. Super cool. The more exciting part about that is the idea of user properties, like you said, Chad. That user properties is going to fundamentally change the way we think about HubSpot. Right? Because that is the gateway drug to doing things like um, you know, treating your users as if, like, they were, you know, your Like people, you're doing, you do stuff for contacts and HubSpot, right?
You create all these automations and like all these things for them. Right. But like, you know, if you have things like user properties and user workflows, and you can like email users and do stuff to users, like new employee onboarding can be run through HubSpot, right? Like, you know, and also like when you start thinking about like more advanced ways they could use user properties, you got to start thinking about.
Those, uh, the lead rotation objects or rotation objects, right? You know, wouldn't it be great if, um, you know, if my property of out of office is checked to true right on my user Right. What if I could set up a rule in that, you know object rotator to basically say hey Uh, assign it to anyone on this team that's
currently in office, not out of office and skip over all
[00:28:31] Liz Moorehead: Can we talk about Saleem for a moment going off in the chat? Treat your users like an object, Max Cohen
2023.
[00:28:37] Max Cohen: That's what I'm
[00:28:38] Chad Hohn: Well, no more contact type, you
know?
[00:28:42] George B. Thomas: Yeah, what I'll
[00:28:43] Max Cohen: People are
[00:28:44] George B. Thomas: favorite part of that was
the The Max gave it to the, you know, bam, lickety split,
baby.
[00:28:51] Max Cohen: Lickity split lurk. Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:53] Liz Moorehead: So here's what I want to know from you
[00:28:55] Max Cohen: Use your product.
[00:28:56] Liz Moorehead: I want to know from you guys. This we're getting really excited about the tactics and what will become possible with help desk. But what does this say overall for the future of what it means to execute a great service and delight strategy through HubSpot?
[00:29:10] Chad Hohn: I think, uh, you know, if I was gonna take that question, I would say that it's brings The original vision of the service hub, like HubSpot Academy cert into a place where it can become more reality, uh, because the ticket of the issue is primary and however that customer decides they want to interact with you.
It's going to bring it into. The ticket where that main issue is housed and you can start new conversation threads. You can have new channels. They can bring channels in and you'll be able to ultimately relate all those channels to that one issue so that all those communications go where they need to go, which is very difficult to do in just the conversations inbox.
I don't think the conversations inbox needs to go away. However, it really deserves to exist for sales teams for other things where this particular conversation is open or closed. But it's not a service issue. It's not a, it's not a support ticket. Everything that's like related to actually being a
ticket.
Belongs in
helpdesk in the long term.
[00:30:14] George B. Thomas: Now I, I have a question. So first of all, actually, I have a statement that I have a question. Um, and because we're bouncing around this idea that this helps us grow past what people once thought that You could do with the tool and processes. I get excited to think about building a VOC or voice of customer process actually with help desk and what's happening and some of like Devin's notating and storing and getting information to the marketing and sales teams for like better alignment.
And strategery as they move forward. Now, here's my question, Chad, because you've been in the beta and I haven't, however, I'm trying to rectify that in HubSpot chat support right now, as we're uh, doing this interview because I'm like, tell them it's me and tell them
we want to talk about it on the podcast.
I got to have
access to it. Chad sent me!
he said, come on in buddy. But, but here's my question. Um, have you seen in the beta that it's a replacement to customer portal, or can I get excited and start to think about customer portal and help this together and how that might actually revolutionize the way that I'm really, really, really.
Serving my customer base,
[00:31:24] Chad Hohn: the intent is that the every ticket that is interacted with helpdesk will be in customer portal, right? That's the intent. And so I think, and you know, the, of course it's a beta, a lot is still for development. And I mean, if you want to throw your hat in the ring and get your two cents in there, they love like Rose, uh, the PM of the team and some of the other leaders of different segments of it, the user interface team, uh, you know, the SLA team, they love getting user feedback.
That's thoughtful about how would different people put this together. They're amazing. Like I've just loved working with them. And every time they want to ask me about something or run something by me, I'm always happy to spare the time because I want help desk to get better, to serve, not just like a SAS or a B2B market, but B2C markets and, you know, all sorts of different ways that you're able to, to give your customers a better experience.
Because, I mean, here's the real thing that is an. I think one of the cruxes of why conversations became difficult to work with is because integrators do not use HubSpot and so they integrate their apps with tickets because it makes sense to their brain that doesn't do anything in the conversations inbox. Right. And so like for example, HubSpot, um, you know, had a partnership with Aircall. An air call will create tickets with inbound calls, but it just does like jack doodly squat inside the conversations inbox where you want to actually use your help test team, you know, your support team lives, right? And so it's just because the integrators don't actually use the tool, and they don't have experience in it.
That's like where that that breakdown came
from.
[00:33:14] Max Cohen: Yeah. Yeah, this is gonna, I think, this is gonna do a really good service to, um, make it easier, I think, for support teams to adopt this. Because Like there was a whole, there's a whole lot of like mental and conversational gymnastics that I think you need to do in order to justify someone working out of two separate spaces, right?
Like that being the conversations in box and like your tickets view, right? I constantly have to have the conversation with folks saying like. Now, in the background of this, it's creating a ticket, which is a separate object, which you can go to and also
interact with people from there.
[00:33:53] Chad Hohn: you shouldn't
[00:33:53] Max Cohen: Um, you know,
yeah, exactly.
Like, you know, the majority of your conversations, at least asynchronous ones that you're having with people, you do it in here. It's like, well, what if they call? Well, if they call go to the ticket and leave a, leave a, leave a note that they call like, like log a phone call. Right. And it's like, all right, well, I'm jumping in over here.
I'm jumping in over there. I'm jumping over here. And unless they have like a really good command on like how to be creative and really, really use the, like, uh, the filter views and stuff like that, or saved views of object filters, then, you know, that's even just a mess when they go back over to the tickets view.
Right. So, you know, I think. In terms of just even just adoption and make it easier and like truly having one space to work out of kind of like how they're trying to do it with the prospecting space for like BDRs and SDRs and stuff like that. I think it'll, you know, it'll, it'll do wonders for, for getting people just like finally one solid space
I can work out of, you know.
[00:34:47] George B. Thomas: Max, by the way, just so you know, I don't know if you had a chance to check it out, buddy, but there was a million dollar idea in the chat pane. Uh, you need to create a course, uh, around microphone agility while podcasting. Uh, there are people who would pay to have that
course.
[00:35:04] Liz Moorehead: My suggestion also was to, yeah, was just to create a HubSpot certification and be a guest professor from Big Popsicle, but I think there are a lot of different ways we could slice
that.
[00:35:13] Max Cohen: I might be making my own
[00:35:14] Liz Moorehead: Oh
[00:35:14] George B. Thomas: Oh.
[00:35:15] Max Cohen: I may
[00:35:16] Liz Moorehead: Uh
oh.
[00:35:16] George B. Thomas: oh.
[00:35:17] Max Cohen: may have.
been up till 2 in the morning the other day, outlining it, maybe. We'll see.
[00:35:23] Liz Moorehead: happily.
[00:35:23] Max Cohen: I didn't have, uh, I didn't have any, any microphone, uh, you know, agility tactics in there, but I can add that in.
[00:35:30] George B. Thomas: We appreciate it.
[00:35:31] Liz Moorehead: I love it. Okay. So George, I actually want to go to you for a moment because you and I had a very interesting conversation earlier this week that I would love for you to share a bit about. I asked you when we were talking about HubSpot Service Hub, how A lot of times folks might think it's only for companies that have very large service teams.
And you came back with some very interesting thoughts about who HubSpot Service Hub is actually for. And I think given the new releases that HubSpot is talking about here with Help Desk and the conversations we've had around conversations, it might be worth illuminating some of your thoughts here with the class.
[00:36:12] George B. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I can't wait, by the way, to, uh, for YGO HubSpot to be launched to the world. But, but anyway, a little tease there. People are like, wait, what? Um Listen, Liz, kind of, I'll try to, it's been a long week by the way, but I'll recant close to what I said. Um, service of it is actually for every organization.
Um, at least
[00:36:35] Max Cohen: Hell yeah.
[00:36:36] George B. Thomas: if you help humans.
Who might have hurdles with
the products and services that you
[00:36:43] Liz Moorehead: If you help robots,
[00:36:44] George B. Thomas: so the, the the way that I look at this, yeah, if you serve robots, you know, then you don't need it. But if you serve humans with hurdles to your products and services, you'll need this. And here's how I look at service hub is it's not a, if I need it, but what level at which do I need it?
Meaning this is why HubSpot is great. You have starter. You have pro and you have enterprise and dependent upon the size of your team and the size of your organization and the size of your needs that would then dictate which version of this that I would want to get. But at the end of the day, you need to have processes.
Inside your platform that enable you the people, even if you're a company of one solopreneurs, I see you or a company that is a handful of humans. You need those processes that allow you to help the people. That have your products and services in their hands, in their minds to have streamlined communication, you need to have the processes to have.
And I mentioned it before a VOC voice of customer and a deeper understanding of how you can educate and connect with them in the future. You need to have the processes like Max mentioned onboarding for employees. So it's not all willy nilly. And they're not like sitting on the Veranda wondering what they're supposed to do next for their onboarding process.
That's right. That's right. That's a call back to like ages ago with old man words. Anyway, this is like everybody needs that hub, but it always has historically, I won't say always, but thus far, historically, it has kind of been the like, don't need that part. We'll just take marketing and sales. And I'm like, what?
Shut up. Sit down. Bueller, let's go ahead and educate the class for a second of why we need this third hub to be turned on for you to be more successful than you thought you actually might be.
[00:38:40] Max Cohen: Literally every single business could do with a form that says got a problem. Let us know. And when you fill it out, it creates a ticket and notify someone. There is no organization on the face of the planet that does not need
that. none.
[00:38:51] George B. Thomas: Roll
credits. Podcast with No, I'm just kidding.
[00:38:54] Devyn Bellamy: All right, so I'm gonna let you in on a little
secret. Last time I did helpdesk,
um, was when people were actually helped at desks. Uh, this was, uh, the year was 1999. It was a facilities management company in Mountain View, California. Um, so I'm really on to learn today. I can tell you about all my experiences, uh, as someone who has to call in for support, uh, how frustrating it is to be more knowledgeable than the person who is supporting you.
Uh, as a matter of fact, I have turned it off and turned it back on. Uh, thank you for asking again. like I'll never forget the time I called in to a certain company that is very well known for their video doorbells. And I was explaining to her. Um, that water had gotten in my floodlight and must have shorted something in the circuit.
Um, because while we are able to see thumbnails, uh, it is having issues with its JPEG codec. And it's like, well, how come when I use this tool to see it, that it coming in fine? It's like, it's because that's not, uh, putting out or not in JPEG, MPEG. It's not using an MPEG codec that's using something else.
So starting and starting, it won't stop. I need the device replaced. And she just, it was like, well, I need to go through all of these steps first. And it's like, okay, I'll wait. So I'm very good at being frustrated, um, with support. Um, but as far as, uh, creating a, uh, support, um, uh, process and, and tools, I am definitely, uh, the passenger on, and not even in the front seat.
I'm, I'm, I'm in the back of the Uber on this episode.
[00:40:34] Liz Moorehead: You're the kid in
[00:40:35] George B. Thomas: I got it.
[00:40:36] Devyn Bellamy: Legs just swinging in the car
[00:40:38] George B. Thomas: Oh, listen.
I feel like there I feel like there could be a whole episode on like Support teams that we've had to deal with. My family knows I'm getting hype. My family knows if I have to talk to the local cable company, get the Frick out the house, walk away, go get in the car, go get a Dunkin donuts, coffee, go do something.
Because they know that I'm about to go off and be like, I have unplugged it. I have rebooted it. I have hit the reset. I have, I will list off the seven things that are in their freaking support manual of like, and by the way, just in case you didn't know, I am not an idiot. I am not a 90 year old man who does not know what the internet is.
I have done everything I can do. And your crap
is
broken. Okay. Well, sir, can we start by unplugging the modem? Oh my
[00:41:27] Devyn Bellamy: know this is what we're talking about, but I'm going to do you one better. In the late nineties during the dot com boom, these companies had so much money that when you called into support, you weren't even talking to the engineer. You were talking to a customer, a customer facing rep who had the engineer in your other ear.
And the engineer could hear what you were saying. And so the engineer. Would be parroting, uh, the, the, the support person would be parroting the engineer into customer facing speak. I'm like, no, no, you need to stop talking. Just put me on with the guy. Just put, cause this, this is, no, don't, don't ever do this again.
It was horrible.
[00:42:03] George B. Thomas: I know you got a guy put me on with the guy.
[00:42:06] Max Cohen: had to, I had to yell at someone today on the
phone for the first time in a very long
[00:42:11] Liz Moorehead: Oh, what happened?
[00:42:12] George B. Thomas: it about the
deck?
[00:42:13] Max Cohen: it was about
[00:42:14] Liz Moorehead: Oh my God. That's still going on.
[00:42:18] Max Cohen: well,
I It's
[00:42:21] George B. Thomas: Heard cats list. Hers
[00:42:22] Max Cohen: they they wanted they wanted to they wanted to charge charge me full price and then send me a check for 1, 000 for my troubles and I politely told them that they can take that and shove it up their
ass and it was
[00:42:36] George B. Thomas: you beeped out like
[00:42:37] Chad Hohn: About
[00:42:38] Max Cohen: I, I, I I feel so bad I destroyed this person over the phone and, um, still feel bad about it, but if
the dumpster
is still in my driveway and they were trying to charge
[00:42:51] Liz Moorehead: Oh my God.
[00:42:53] Max Cohen: yeah, it's like, it's, it's, this is a never ending nightmare.
I made it
[00:42:57] George B. Thomas: continues.
[00:42:58] Max Cohen: extremely clear to them. We'll say
[00:43:00] Liz Moorehead: Honestly, this leads nicely, George,
[00:43:03] George B. Thomas: crystal? clear.
[00:43:05] Max Cohen: yeah, crystal
[00:43:06] Liz Moorehead: George, this
[00:43:07] Max Cohen: All time low for
[00:43:08] Liz Moorehead: nicely into my last question. These grievances that we are airing on this day of Hub Heroes Festivus. And that is
why is A great customer support experience. So important. That's where I want us to end on today because we've talked a lot about the tools and we talked a lot about the technology, but the pain, the anguish that we have in our voices.
Max, you want to lead us off
here?
[00:43:32] Max Cohen: I want, I want, no, no, I want Devin to talk
about the impact on marketing
[00:43:36] Devyn Bellamy: yeah, no, you definitely asked me to pull out
my soapbox. Listen. All right, here we go.
[00:43:41] Liz Moorehead: Go off,
[00:43:41] Devyn Bellamy: first thing first, I'm going to talk about it from the professional standpoint. And I'm going to talk about it, uh, from, uh, as, as a, uh, or assuming from the customer standpoint, the professional standpoint, from a customer standpoint, I will take your product and burn it and find something less good just for a better customer experience.
I will go with number two. I will take. Wendy's fries over McDonald's fries. If your drive thru makes me upset. I am that person. Yeah, I said it. So here's the thing um from a personal standpoint, um If I call you and I'm still angry when I get off the phone, I'm not calling again. And I'm not using what you got to get like, Oh my gosh, whole nother episode.
Okay. From a marketing standpoint, here's the problem. When you get bad support from marketing standpoint, we as marketers are the ones that have to deal with it. Not, not customer service because they already talked to customer service. They already talked to tech support. Now it's time for them to tell everybody about their experience.
So now we got to mitigate the Google review. Now we got to look at them in the Facebook group. Now we got to look at them in messenger and everybody's, Oh, but it gets better because for some reason. The only VP they can find to talk to for some reason is mine. What, how, how does that even work? My VP ain't got nothing to do with it.
Why? And then, and then they're going to email me the VP and say, Hey, can you find out what's going on over here? I'm like, yeah, sure. The process is broken. That's what's wrong. It's all broken. Like they seriously said, well, I don't know, like I can't help. And then, and now I got to deal with, Oh, I'm so sorry to hear about that.
And what I'll do is be sure to send your information right back into the broken process. And so you can do more of it.
[00:45:36] Max Cohen: This is, This is, we talk about the flywheel.
This is the equivalent of
throwing a stick in the bike
[00:45:41] Devyn Bellamy: just stop
[00:45:42] Liz Moorehead: why you fall down.
[00:45:44] Devyn Bellamy: for some reason, wonderful sale, wonderful marketing experience, wonderful sales
experience, and then the support experience stops, and the service experience stops, and then everything just stops. Why, why is our churn so high?
[00:45:58] Max Cohen: let me, so, so, so the, the reason this is bad for marketing, right? Because what I'm going to do with these people is I'm going to go to Google Yelp house, literally every place that they have a presence that everyone's looking at before they buy services from them. And I'm going to give them a full honest experience breakdown of what happened to me and how they have chosen.
Not to make it right, very deliberately, I'm going to tell them how my family's life was at risk in certain situations. I'm going to tell them everything, right? And that is going to hurt them way more than, you know, what's crazy is that companies like this are going to basically say, Oh. Um, you know, I would rather just get the money from it and then like deal with it later.
Right? But like, what they don't realize is how many people are going to stop dead in their tracks when they read what they did to me. Right? And that's going to be way more expensive than just making it right with me. Right? And you know, it's so it's like when we think of the physics of the flywheel.
Let's look at where, let's look at where Delight connects to Attract, That is getting like snapped in half at this moment and the wheel can't spin well when that's broken, right? Um, so that's why this is important. Like just like, you know, before you start getting serious about your marketing, word of mouth is what keeps your company alive.
It's also what kills you, right? Um, you know, so it's super, super important to figure this stuff out. It's not all about just dumping as much money as you can in
sales and marketing
because it makes money. Right, you gotta, you know, invest
[00:47:24] Devyn Bellamy: talked about the service people in the
[00:47:25] Liz Moorehead: Chad, what about you? What are your thoughts?
[00:47:28] Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah, I was actually just going to chime in with something that our roofing companies do. Some of them will hire somebody specifically after the entire project is complete. And they literally pay somebody to take the warranty they get from the manufacturer, put together a little folder with a nice little picture in there, and go hand deliver it to the house.
And. They deliver that and that person will receive gripes from the customer about they stepped on my rose bushes or there was a nail in my driveway or whatever. And they're really the gatekeeper to that reputation. Um, we actually had one, one customer that decided that that person wasn't a worthwhile investment because all they got was gripes.
And instead of plugging those gripes back into the front end of the process to make sure that the process got ironed out. They just tried to move them to different parts in the process or fired them eventually. And I mean, that's the worst thing you could possibly do. You want to take that feedback at the end.
And again, that's the feedback survey. If you're digital, how'd it go? And if they click happy face, you send them a Google review request. But otherwise you fix it and you get on it like stink. You know, you want to be on it so that you can really make it right. It is so much cheaper to refund half of the cost of the project.
Or whatever, something that is equitable to the pain experienced and the wrong that you did and take ownership for it than it is to go make Devin clean up all those reviews and have the kind of, uh, you know, mental breakdown, right? That he did on the, like, just going through that experience over and over.
It's the worst, right? Having to go clean
that up, right?
[00:49:16] George B. Thomas: Yeah.
[00:49:16] Max Cohen: Awful.
[00:49:17] Liz Moorehead: I love what Nick from Fargo said in the comments, churn and burn cycles fail, learn and earn cycles win. George, talk to us. Take us
[00:49:24] George B. Thomas: love that so much. Yeah. So here's the deal, Max, you want to talk about the physics of the flywheel. I want to talk about the psychology of the people.
And at the end of the day, people, AKA humans, they want to feel special. They want to feel loved. They want to feel taken care of. And if you are sitting there without a customer support experience, a help desk, an inbox, everything that we've talked about, uh, you are leaving a wide open gap for them to not feel special, to not feel loved, to not be getting the experience that they.
Should have, and guys, I know this is going to be crazy the way I'm going to say this, and you've said it in your own little ways. Organizations listening to this podcast are out there spending copious amounts of money to make it rain. They are paying marketing directors to be marketing directors, and designers to be designers, and developers to be developers.
They're paying sales reps to be sales reps, and they are trying to just accumulate cash. And then they wipe that cash or wipe their butt with that cash. And that's gross. That's gross. And you know what else is gross? Not having a customer support experience at your organization. So fix it because you're letting everybody fly out the back door that you're so dang Passionate about getting in the front door and I can tell you that cost you more than having that support team in place To keep everybody happy and have long lasting relationships With humans who become evangelists and talk about you.
And now Austin, you realize because you fixed that gap, that the referral revenue coming into your organization in the last year has doubled, if not tripled the amount that you ever thought you'd get from SEO, social, and just general sales support.
That's it.
[00:51:23] Chad Hohn: Mic
[00:51:23] Liz Moorehead: thank you so much for joining us this week. This has been an incredible conversation. We'll definitely have to have you back and
guys,
do we all need a group hug after this? I know we expressed a lot of feelings today. Did we get to the place of healing about support that we were hoping to get to today?
[00:51:40] Chad Hohn: I thought that was a future
episode.
[00:51:41] Max Cohen: this Yeah, this, this construction company's gonna need f ing trauma therapy when I'm done with
them, dude.
[00:51:47] Liz Moorehead: And on that note to our listeners, we'll talk to you all next week. If you love us, don't forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform and never hesitate to give us a shout if you have an idea for a future episode, but gentlemen, let's go heal and traumatize some customer service reps.
Let's have a good weekend. All right.