We're stoked to have won the HubSpot Impact Award for Service Hub in the APAC region for this innovative solution for new customer onboarding.
Is Service Hub just for Customer Service?
That's the challenge World Solar presented to us when they wanted to know what else they might be able to manage better using Service Hub's ticket management in conjunction with HubSpot's powerful workflow capabilities.
Our answer was simple enough: You can use ticket pipelines to manage pretty much any process you want.
We'd just completed a rapid migration from Salesforce to HubSpot Sales Hub and, once sales was up to speed and enjoying the benefits of the new platform, the Executive Team wanted the same level of automation across the business: To help improve processes for their other teams and the overall customer experience.
From there we started talking in more detail about their pain points beyond the marketing and sales implementations we had already designed and delivered for them. The biggest one seemed to be operational - specifically when it came to managing their new installations.
Why this process was a problem for them
They were using spreadsheets and emails to manage it and it wasn't ideal for several reasons:
- Salespeople who had built a relationship with the customer didn't have clear visibility of the status of the project. Was the timeline being met? What stage was the installation at? Was there anything holding up the project?
- As a key point of contact for their customers, salespeople would often be waylaid if their customer contacted them about the project, and they couldn't easily see its status.
- The project management tool that they did have was more for overseeing ordering of parts and provisioning.
- The amount of admin and manual updating required was laborious and left a large margin for human error.
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"When we were using a spreadsheet to update the status of an installation, it required so much more admin. There was not only a lack of consistency in what was being recorded, there was a lack of trust in the data which meant we had to be constantly double checking." Emma Morrell - Operations Manager |
It was a problem that they couldn't see a way out of – while they were familiar with the capabilities of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub was still new to them, and Service Hub they hadn't even started to use. But, having invested in all that tech, they really didn't have the appetite to invest in more - even though a dedicated project management platform would have been the obvious solution for managing it.
Why solving it was so critical
World Solar talked up their customer service and expertise right on their homepage - and they delivered it in spades. But the reality was that living up to it required a lot of admin work!
The stakeholders of the HubSpot migration also needed to be able to evidence to the board the improvements that had been made to internal operations across the business and customer satisfaction since implementing HubSpot.
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"Salespeople were trying to get project updates from operations because they didn't have any visibility themselves. Previously this meant digging through spreadsheets and emails to find the answers, and customers were sometimes waiting until the next day for a response. Not a great customer experience, and not great for our team who were spending more time than was necessary to keep the customer updated." Jade MacDonald – Administration Coordinator |
How we thought we could solve it
After some thorough process mapping and a deep needs analysis, it didn't seem too much of a stretch to design Service Hub to manage this process.
We are used to making use of it to address customer queries and complaints, but what we now realised, was that there's no reason why we couldn't handle the whole post-sale customer experience – Using the best in breed ticket management, templates and sequences, as well as automation of tasks, deals, and properties, that HubSpot provides.
What we identified is that because of the number of people and the different roles that required oversight, using ticket management was going to give them what they wanted.
What they had before
Disparate processes, spreadsheets, lots of admin to update things manually.
Customers contacting salespeople directly about their installation, salespeople shoulder tapping operations people for updates, operations people double-handling tasks and communications with customers.
This meant lots of admin, confused customers, and stressed out staff:
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"As our sales process is quite long and involved, we build a strong relationship with our customers, so they are always likely to come to us with any questions or requests for updates on the installation. This meant making me requesting an update from operations, and often having to follow up, as finding the right info took time. Time I should be spending on sales!
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What they have now the solution is in place
From the second a deal hits the stage of Closed Won, the whole process is seamless, with an initial workflow that generates the ticket for installation at the first stage of the Operations ticket pipeline:
This enters the Operations ticket pipeline which has 9 simple and well-defined stages, and 8 workflows that automatically add date stamps at each stage:
What a beautiful pipeline.
The tickets take advantage of custom properties to surface essential information such as the scheduled installation date, the assigned installer, purchase order numbers, date the invoice was paid and more. While the fact that each ticket can have its deal attached makes referring back to the specifications of the original sale takes just a click.
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Now I can just surface the customer's ticket in Service Hub and get a status update myself in seconds."
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20 workflows automate the creation of all the key tasks the Operations team must complete to manage an installation form sale to completion, right through to regular post-installation followups to ensure the system is working as expected and to ensure the customer is happy.
If happy, they are of course asked to provide positive feedback using a templated email. And, in fact there are 17 templates that manage all the regular updates for an installation end to end.
What about feedback?
While it's great that the solution made the lives better for World Solar's operations, sales, and customer service teams, it doesn't count for much if it doesn't improve the customer experience.
So closing the loop for World Solar's customers are three C-SAT surveys that are triggered when a deal is won or lost, and 3 months after an installation.
These replaced the one that was previously in place that captured feedback from any and all stages of the process, and didn't give a clear picture of which areas were going well, or not so well.
Before the solution was rolled out on Oct 1st only 58% off our customers were rated as happy:
But for Q4 this year we have a 90% happy rating:
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"We were rapt with the whole process." John & Corrine Read, Happy Customers |
Standout results of the new Operations process
- The client reported that their admin and data entry time for tracking and reporting on installation projects has reduced by 50%
- Positive C-SAT scores have increased by from 58% to 90%
- Time from closed sale to completed installation went from 110 days to 96 days in November:
- And from 96 to 91 days in December:
Where to from here?
Well, actually it's working backwards to take advantage of all Service Hub's out of the box features:
- Setting up a support inbox to centralise all incoming queries and automate the creation of tickets
- A ticket pipeline to manage any of these complaints or queries from customers through
- NPS and Support Surveys to get even more granular about what we're doing well or not so well
- Using all the above to design a knowledge base and chat bot that can answer the most common queries that leads and customers are asking, which will ultimately lighten the load for the Customer Service team.
The impact of Service Hub on World Solar's business
For World Solar – having used Marketing Hub for a couple of years and more recently migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot's Sales Hub – Service Hub was the last piece of the puzzle. Putting it in place has really given them a complete flywheel approach.
Our solution has already closed the loop for them between the processes for sales and operations and, as we continue to build out the Hub, more efficiency and a better customer experience that will make their flywheel really spin.
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"Hype & Dexter have made our lives so much easier by helping us implement Service Hub - we're saving time and resource, as well as giving our customers more consistent and timely comms - our internal engagement and customer satisfaction scores show that it's better for everyone."
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