Complete Success. Sales and Customer Service Integration in Service Hub
Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2024 8:58 am
The customer comes into contact with many people in the company during cooperation. During the contact, what matters to him is the quality of service, not how responsibility for individual tasks is divided within the organization. Therefore, the flow of information between different teams is crucial to provide the right level of service. In this article, I will show how Service Hub can help integrate sales and customer service activities to achieve the highest quality of experience for customers.
Many times I have heard unfavorable opinions about the cooperation between sales and customer service, such as: "the salesperson sold, and then the contact broke off" or "everything was great until the contract was signed , and then we collided with reality."
This is a fairly common problem in organizations where one department is responsible for sales , and another for customer service (or , as it sounds better , “ success ” ). Sometimes, there is still a division into different sales teams : from generating new business and from working with existing customers , or so-called Account Managers . From the very beginning of their journey, the customer meets at least a few people in them , so, like in the old game of telephone , if we do not ensure the proper flow of information, a problem is guaranteed. In English, this process has been called “customer handoff” . It has been described many times , so why does it still cause so many problems in companies?
There may be several reasons , e.g. lower involvement of people spain business email list from the Success department than salespeople; insufficient number of employees in this department, poorly written process, etc. However, a not uncommon problem described in studies is the lack of communication between sales and customer service .
This lack of communication often results from working on different data sources – different systems. It works both ways , because Success may receive fragmentary information and not know what the history of negotiations with the client was , and thus come across a problem that it could not have foreseen , but also sales , if they want to upsell something or extend the service with new functions , may come across something unpleasant. In the middle of this is the customer, who, when they realize that there is no communication between the service provider's employees , can be very irritated or, in extreme cases, resign from cooperation.
A solution that can help in such a situation is to work on a single data source , as is done in HubSpot . Thanks to this , each salesperson will automatically see what the customer onboarding looks like , and the Success employee , what the sales processes looked like.
But that's not all , because in Hubspot we can add an unlimited number of people from other departments for free, e.g. legal department, accounting department, technical staff: fitters , servicemen , etc. Thanks to this, we can create a more advanced process in the form of a ticket , e.g. customer onboarding or advanced technical problem. This way, in one place we can have such information as: whether the courier was sent, whether the serviceman went to the customer, whether the invoice was issued, whether the legal department made the corrections that it was supposed to add, etc.
Sometimes, the salesperson is the only person to whom the customer has a mobile phone number saved, or the only person who shares the mobile number. Then the customer calls and asks for all this information. Thanks to the centralization of data, the salesperson can provide it without having to contact other departments, only checking it in HubSpot.
In tickets we can also create a pipeline with different statuses , such as "new request", "in progress", "waiting for feedback", "closed" , etc. Pipelines can be prepared for different problems: e.g. invoices, assembly, technical department. This provides a lot of order in the data.
1 screen service
Another useful feature is to create your own knowledge base in Service Hub and connect it to an appropriate sequence interspersed with phone calls, e-mails or surveys.
For example, we create a database of articles in HubSpot , these are tutorials on how to log in, basic information on how to use the system or product, they can be in the form of both video and text. When a potential lead becomes our customer , we run the following sequence:
Phone call from Success department with welcome , introduction, etc.
Automatic e - mail with links to the knowledge base and login to the customer portal.
After a few days you will receive an email with a reminder and a satisfaction survey.
After 2 weeks , an invitation to an online training or articles with tips on how to best use the product.
Many times I have heard unfavorable opinions about the cooperation between sales and customer service, such as: "the salesperson sold, and then the contact broke off" or "everything was great until the contract was signed , and then we collided with reality."
This is a fairly common problem in organizations where one department is responsible for sales , and another for customer service (or , as it sounds better , “ success ” ). Sometimes, there is still a division into different sales teams : from generating new business and from working with existing customers , or so-called Account Managers . From the very beginning of their journey, the customer meets at least a few people in them , so, like in the old game of telephone , if we do not ensure the proper flow of information, a problem is guaranteed. In English, this process has been called “customer handoff” . It has been described many times , so why does it still cause so many problems in companies?
There may be several reasons , e.g. lower involvement of people spain business email list from the Success department than salespeople; insufficient number of employees in this department, poorly written process, etc. However, a not uncommon problem described in studies is the lack of communication between sales and customer service .
This lack of communication often results from working on different data sources – different systems. It works both ways , because Success may receive fragmentary information and not know what the history of negotiations with the client was , and thus come across a problem that it could not have foreseen , but also sales , if they want to upsell something or extend the service with new functions , may come across something unpleasant. In the middle of this is the customer, who, when they realize that there is no communication between the service provider's employees , can be very irritated or, in extreme cases, resign from cooperation.
A solution that can help in such a situation is to work on a single data source , as is done in HubSpot . Thanks to this , each salesperson will automatically see what the customer onboarding looks like , and the Success employee , what the sales processes looked like.
But that's not all , because in Hubspot we can add an unlimited number of people from other departments for free, e.g. legal department, accounting department, technical staff: fitters , servicemen , etc. Thanks to this, we can create a more advanced process in the form of a ticket , e.g. customer onboarding or advanced technical problem. This way, in one place we can have such information as: whether the courier was sent, whether the serviceman went to the customer, whether the invoice was issued, whether the legal department made the corrections that it was supposed to add, etc.
Sometimes, the salesperson is the only person to whom the customer has a mobile phone number saved, or the only person who shares the mobile number. Then the customer calls and asks for all this information. Thanks to the centralization of data, the salesperson can provide it without having to contact other departments, only checking it in HubSpot.
In tickets we can also create a pipeline with different statuses , such as "new request", "in progress", "waiting for feedback", "closed" , etc. Pipelines can be prepared for different problems: e.g. invoices, assembly, technical department. This provides a lot of order in the data.
1 screen service
Another useful feature is to create your own knowledge base in Service Hub and connect it to an appropriate sequence interspersed with phone calls, e-mails or surveys.
For example, we create a database of articles in HubSpot , these are tutorials on how to log in, basic information on how to use the system or product, they can be in the form of both video and text. When a potential lead becomes our customer , we run the following sequence:
Phone call from Success department with welcome , introduction, etc.
Automatic e - mail with links to the knowledge base and login to the customer portal.
After a few days you will receive an email with a reminder and a satisfaction survey.
After 2 weeks , an invitation to an online training or articles with tips on how to best use the product.