As a company that has manufactured durable machine tools for metalworking for over 120 years, Dake wants to provide an excellent level of customer service to match the quality of its products.
But when Ellyse Lazarock joined the team as customer service supervisor, she realized the old system for customer service was holding the team back, making it very difficult for them to provide a level of excellence that truly met their standards.
Soon after starting her new role, Ellyse found HubSpot. Read on to learn how she used Service Hub to build a better system to make Dake’s customer service match the quality of its products.
Make no mistake, Dake tools are truly long-lasting. The service team sometimes receives calls from customers who inherited decades-old tools from their grandparents, still fully functioning just as they did when they were first purchased.
That’s why it was so important to Ellyse to have an equally high level of service. Her team serves two types of customers, both industry distributors and end users of the tools, and they support a wide variety of requests. There’s no task too large or too small.
“We’re in charge of anything the customer asks us. That could be anything from a new quote, tracking on a current order, putting in a new order, and technical services as well. If someone has a machine that’s broken, they’ll call us. We’re responsible for everything.”
End users primarily contact Ellyse’s team over the phone, and they expect quick answers.
“When someone has an issue with a machine, they’re probably out on a production floor or a shop. Using a machine is very hands-on: they don't necessarily have time to go to a computer, type up an email, and wait for us to reply how to fix it. They want to fix it right now.”
Distributors also contact the team through a mix of phone and email, often getting in touch to request more information on the machines or to make a purchase. These high-value conversations need to be handled with extra care.
The Dake service team volunteering at Toys for Tots.
When Ellyse joined, her goal was to treat each customer conversation with the care it deserved, but she was limited by their existing system. Her team had phones and Outlook for customer emails but they weren’t recording any data about those interactions. There was no way to sort or categorize inquiries, so the team was color coordinating the team’s emails, adding unnecessary work to their already busy day.
Without proper categorization or reporting, the team had no way to understand what portion of their contact volume was related to certain topics. Secondly, without an idea of volume and individual output, it was hard for Ellyse to make a case for extra support, like a new hire, to help deliver the quality of service they were determined to.
“We felt like we were so busy,” Ellyse explained, “but when asked to prove it, I really couldn't give an answer, because I didn't have any way to track customer conversations.”
However, reporting results to management wasn’t their only issue. From a management perspective, Ellyse didn’t have clarity on how her team was spending their day-to-day. When it came time for performance reviews, both Ellyse and her team were in the dark on individual productivity and where they could improve. Without a shared inbox, she had limited visibility into customer conversations, team performance, and how to best allocate work.
“As far as managing my team was concerned, it was really difficult to actually see who was doing what at any time.”
In terms of the customer experience, the team had no way of keeping a record of information for each individual contact. So, if a customer called in more than once, there was often confusion when they were matched with someone they hadn’t spoken to before and who didn’t know their history.
“If you called in and said ‘I just spoke to Scott and he quoted me on his part, but I don't remember what the part number is...' we wouldn't know. We’d either have to ask Scott or we’d have to start over. We had no way of actually keeping the record of information unless by some miracle we wrote it down on a sticky note.”
This lack of visibility and transparency was especially detrimental for customers with highly sensitive or complex issues. All of the back-and-forth created a lot of wasted time and frustration. Ultimately, the team lost trust, credibility, and customers.
“Their discomfort was justified because we had no way to know what was already done and what was going on.”
Early in Ellyse’s time at Dake, a colleague who uses HubSpot for sales and marketing mentioned she just heard about the new HubSpot product line built for service teams, Service Hub, and that she should try it out. Ellyse recognized quickly that it could be the solution to the team’s frustrations.
Because they were moving from very little process to a tool that could handle everything, Ellyse wanted to ease in gradually.
She began with a soft start, combining all her team’s email inboxes into the shared team email inbox so everyone had a single view of the customer’s previous questions. She first focused on creating a system, then used automation to eliminate manual steps and increase productivity.
After establishing a solid baseline with the shared email inbox, the team moved on to focusing on their phone support, specifically creating tickets and logging calls. Over the course of a month, Ellyse gradually ramped up expectations for the team: first 25% of calls logged, then 50%, and eventually their team was expected to log every call in the system as a ticket for full accountability.
With the new system in place, the team was able to fully take advantage of all the benefits.
They could more effectively report on the data coming from forms on their website that customers submitted. When a distributor fills out a machine quote form, it creates a ticket. When someone fills out the Contact Us form, it creates a ticket.
“It was awesome because it let me set things like ticket properties right away. When my CSR jumps into it, they have all the information they need. They can provide the quote really quickly and close the ticket within a matter of minutes.” HubSpot’s shared inbox gave the team an unprecedented ability to collaborate, and the HubSpot CRM provided context they’d never had before. Now, any employee could see the history of a conversation, including who the customer had worked with before, as well as information about the customer’s company.
The help desk reporting in their service dashboard shows her tickets by source and by category.
“What I really love about HubSpot is it's so easy to categorize every interaction we do, so I can actually see how many quotes we've done for the year, how many of those were for our machine tools or parts or whatever it might be, how many technical service calls we filled and things like that.”
Having this information helped Ellyse demonstrate the benefit of bringing on another hire. Sam White started just a few months later and, with the analytics built into HubSpot, Ellyse has been able to monitor their performance and growth right from day one.
The team also uses a customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) to get a pulse on customer sentiment. This level of insight wasn’t available to Ellyse before, and she now follows up on each piece of feedback to ensure a complete resolution of every conversation.
Sam White started in March at Dake
By replacing the old system with Service Hub, Ellyse and her team have made a huge impact on customer satisfaction. When they first started measuring this critical customer score, they were around 74%. Since implementing Service Hub, they’ve improved 13 points, up to 87%. They’re also constantly improving that number by asking for customer feedback and using the data to make positive adjustments.
In a recent customer survey, over 75% of their customers said that the level of customer service they received in the buying process was “very important,” which has given the company even more fuel to perfect the customer experience.
“Our goal is to be #1 in customer satisfaction. We think it’ll help us win in our market. This should differentiate us from our competitors, and HubSpot makes this so much easier.”
“Our goal is to be #1 in customer satisfaction. We think it’ll help us win in our market. This should differentiate us from our competitors, and HubSpot makes this so much easier.”
To learn more about how you can use Service Hub to upgrade your customer service, get a demo today.