When Mari Luke joined InspectionXpert, the company was using a number of disparate software systems, including Zoho CRM for sales, Zendesk for customer support and ticketing, ActiveCampaign for email marketing, and Helpjuice for its knowledge base.
Mari decided to move marketing to HubSpot and the sales team eventually moved to HubSpot as well, which brought marketing and sales onto the same CRM Platform.
While the move made it easier for marketing and sales to work together, lack of visibility into the customer support team’s operations remained an issue.
“Customer support was using Zendesk, but marketing had no access,” says Mari. “Marketing was using HubSpot and support had access to it, but they never used it.”
At the same time, Mari’s team took a closer look at support tickets—and discovered that 50% of them resulted from people not knowing how to use the product.
Mari and her team knew they could address this knowledge gap—and drive down the number of tickets—by expanding and improving the knowledge base.
However, the knowledge base was on a separate system than ticketing, so they couldn’t use support tickets to identify areas in the knowledge base that needed to be expanded.
“We had no insights,” says Mari. “We didn’t know which customers at which stage were filing which types of tickets. There was a real gap in our understanding.”
These disparate systems also impacted customer service. When a customer’s subscription was up for renewal, for example, the customer service team would sometimes find that their main point of contact had left. They would scramble to find a new contact, not realizing that customer interactions were continuing with other departments.
“While we’re trying to find someone to talk to about renewal, other people in that same company would be asking for training or submitting tickets,” says Mari. “We couldn’t connect those dots.”
At the same time, InspectionXpert struggled to get meaningful customer feedback through surveys. It had tried to set up NPS, CES and CSAT surveys, but they weren’t easy to set up and there was confusion over who owned what.
“There wasn’t anything in Zendesk to natively enable the CES survey,” says Mari. “And we didn’t have the resources to try and figure it out.”
These issues were significant, because InspectionXpert differentiates itself by its excellent customer service.
“When you buy InspectionXpert, you’re not just buying the product, you’re also buying onboarding, training and support,” says Mari. “Our competitors don’t necessarily share that philosophy, so it sets us apart.”
With different support functions residing in different systems, InspectionXpert struggled with inefficient delivery of its customer service. So Mari knew she had to make a change.
The HubSpot CRM Platform is built to align, scale and empower. Mari and her team decided to move customer support onto HubSpot Service Hub, bringing it together with sales and marketing under one ecosystem that can support users, data and processes without slowing them down.
“It just made more sense for everything to be one platform,” says Mari. “The move gives us the visibility we were missing and helps us distribute the work more efficiently among teams.”
The decision to consolidate support functions under Service Hub was made just in time. Shortly thereafter, COVID-19 gripped the world—and InspectionXpert made the bold decision to make its software available for free.
“We invited people to give it a try during that time, so we didn’t sell a dime for more than two months,” says Mari. “We hoped that some of those people would decide to buy if they wanted to continue into June.”
To everyone’s relief, InspectionXpert posted record-breaking sales in June. But Mari wondered if they’d inadvertently create an operational nightmare. Would the company have an explosion of support tickets as it onboarded all these new customers?
Fortunately, InspectionXpert used the time to build out its knowledge base—a process facilitated by having all support functions on Service Hub.
Service Hub also made it easier for different teams and departments to work together collaboratively.
“During the pandemic, our sales team shifted from selling to training,” says Mari. “We shifted them back once the economy opened up and used the new content we created to take the pressure off our support team. HubSpot gave us the flexibility to make these kinds of changes on the fly and navigate everything smoothly.”
Here are some of the Service Hub features that allows InspectionXpert to react with such agility while continuing to provide outstanding customer service:
The Service Hub knowledge base helps InspectionXpert customers help themselves by turning questions and tickets into a robust, search-optimized knowledge base of help articles, videos and documentation.
Mari and her team are using the analytics dashboard to collect feedback on articles and analyze search patterns to improve articles over time.
InspectionXpert is using tickets to collaborate and communicate with customers to resolve issues quickly.
Ticketing has also helped to ensure continuity and connect the dots, even when customers go through staffing changes.
InspectionXpert has successfully implemented customer feedback surveys, including as Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction and Customer Effort Score, to get a quantitative measure of customer satisfaction.
“Our support team had been wanting these surveys for months but setting them up wasn’t their forte,” says Mari. “Once it was in HubSpot, we built it in five minutes.”
The feedback Mari and her team get from these surveys is also more detailed and useful.
“In Zendesk, we only had a thumbs up/thumbs down type of response,” says Mari, “but now we have a customer effort score, which is much richer.”
In addition, the sales team is combining product engagement with CSAT survey data to forecast future deals.
With these new support capabilities, Mari and her team have been getting creative with automation.
“If a customer rates us a seven on the CES, we automatically invite them to review us on Google,” says Mari. “As a result, we’ve seen a positive uptick on Google reviews.”
InspectionXpert is doing something similar with the NPS survey. When it gets a high NPS, it follows up with the customer to see if they will agree to participate in a case study.
With the help of Service Hub, InspectionXpert had a 25% decrease in support tickets.
In addition, InspectionXpert saw a drop in the percentage of support tickets related to the knowledge base, falling from 50% to 20%.
With this decline in tickets and more efficient delivery of customer service, InspectionXpert pivoted its support team to assist other areas of the business.
“We’ve since repurposed colleagues from the support team to create even more meaningful onboarding content,” says Mari.
Having sales, marketing and support on HubSpot gives Mari and her team the customer insights they need. Today, they have a 360-degree view because everyone on InspectionXpert’s go-to-market team is on the same platform.
InspectionXpert’s ability to navigate the COVID-19 crisis, and offer its software for free as an act of goodwill, demonstrates how Hubspot enables seamless interaction and handoffs among InspectionXpert teams.
“We bet big when we decided to give our software away for free,” says Mari. “Fortunately, that bet paid off for us and our customers. And none of it would have been possible if we didn’t have everything on HubSpot.”