Marketing tool that can also handle customer service
What do you like best?
I enjoy the ease of plugging in templates for quickly responding to simple and common requests. I also enjoy that HubSpot keeps a record of your stats as a representative. You can know how long it takes you to reply, how many tickets you have answered, etc. They also have a dedicated space to offer new ideas.
What do you dislike?
1) The website is sometimes slow to do simple things (regardless of your internet speed). For instance, tickets are meant to auto change status once you have answered them. They do, but it can sometimes take 15+ seconds.
2) To close out of a ticket and move to the next one, it can take between 10-20 seconds. This is something you are doing 100's of times a day and should only take a second or two.
3) While they do have a dedicated space to offer new ideas, they have been slow to respond to them. Unless the idea revolves around marketing, which to be fair, seems to be HubSpot's niche.
4) The font Hubspot uses is very inconsistent, this is pretty annoying. It will auto change my font going between templates and responses.
5) Changing font is clunky inside of customer responses. The toolbar they have is not very extensive.
6) HubSpot does not recognize returning customers unless they respond to the same email chain. Often times customers will send many inquires in the hope to be helped faster. This is frustrating as they get assigned to many different reps.
7) There is no undo button after you send an email. Gmail has this feature and it is a lifesaver, a simple 2-5 second window to take back your action.
8) Searching through tickets is a pain. In the ticket section of Hubspot, there is a search bar in the upper left-hand corner. Ideally, you would type a customer's name or email, or portion of the conversation and find them. This is not the case. You will almost never find a customer doing this. I have only had success searching the exact subject line of a conversation.
9) HubSpot has a feature where you can Merge tickets together if they are from the same customer. This would be helpful if the search function worked. The search function is however a pain in the butt as described in 8, making merging a huge pain.
10) Often times we will get spam sent to our inbox. HubSpot has a function to help protect you from spam, but in using that feature we found that some customers were being missed. So we turned it off.
11) Because of 10 we need to delete tickets daily. This is not that big of a deal, however, when you delete a ticket in the ticket section of HubSpot it will remove you from your search filters. Generally speaking, you will always have one search filter on, that filter will be "my tickets." Thus, every time you delete a ticket, you must re-apply your filter so that you can go back to answering your tickets. Not the biggest deal, but it is a waste of time.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It is a great service with room to improve. HubSpot is actively trying to become a better and better service. As a customer service rep, however, it has become clear that while HubSpot has a pretty solid customer service interface, its main goal is marketing. HubSpot is a great, usable service, but I think they will be slow to implement updates for the customer service side of things as I mentioned, it is not their focus.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
I use this as an active customer service representative. I have answered over 4000 tickets using HubSpot. There is a whole other side of HubSpot used for marketing, I do not have anything to say about this, as I have not used it.
