The Most Baller HubSpot Service Hub Deep-Dive of All-Time With Adriti Gulati

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack, Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub Heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.

Welcome back to another episode of the Hub Heroes. As always, I am your hub hero wrangler, Liz Murphy and resident content strategist, joined as always by Mark, Devin, and George. We do have a special guest.

Wait, hold on. Sorry.

Guess who.

Who the hell is Mark?

Who's Mark?

Mark.

I said Matt.

You didn't.

Marky, Mark and the Funky Bunch.

Oh, I'll be that guy. I want that body. Just bring it over here right now.

Who did that? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me ask you this. Who did I subconsciously vote off the island?

Yeah. Yeah.

Mark.

Oh, my God. That's so funny. Because, Max, you were on my good list last time. Did you do something last week while I was gone? Is there something I'm not aware of? Probably that happened in my absence?

Probably. But I've already forgotten about last week because I'm living in the now as Mark.

Yeah, there you go. Marks always live in the day.

So wait, let me get this straight. Hold on. So nothing happened this week that I should be concerned about George or Devin? Is there a broken lamp somewhere?

We'll just have to wait and find out. Really? I like to think if something's broken, it's only truly broken if it derails everything else, so.

Or if it gets found. Yeah, if somebody finds it, then it's broke. If not, it wasn't.

You know what? You're just instilling so much confidence in me that nothing happened when I wasn't here last week. So that's great. I'm excited. We're just going to move on because ignorance is bliss. And Mark, I look forward to what you bring to the Proceedings today.

Oh, God.

Apparently, apparently we have two guests today. We have Mark, but we also have Adrianna.

Let's go. That's what I'm talking about.

Yes. Another female. Hi. Thank God you're here.

Hello.

Tell us about yourself. How are you?

1. I'm great. I have been at HubSpot for seven years now. I'm on the HubSpot Academy team. I focus on all things customer service. I love it. We have a lot of fun. Not as much fun as you guys seem to be having, but I'm going to take some of this culture. But yeah, I'm so happy to be here.

I'm actually also so closeted. I am a super big customer service nerd because I was telling George this earlier this week when we were talking about this. So I actually got my start working on customer service teams. I've done the call center. I've been the supervisor you asked for. I've done it all. I've seen it all. It was a lot. And that is why I'm so excited. One, that you're here. And number two, we are doing a deep dive into the HubSpot service hub.

Yeah. Yeah.

And if you've been listening to this podcast since the beginning, you are not hallucinating. This is the third episode we have dedicated to the service hub or customer service. We talked to Eric Brenner about why HubSpot Service Hub is so important, particularly for those of you on the fence about investing in the hub. We've also had Christina Garrett on the amazing, iconic Christina Garrett to talk about customer delight and who's responsible for it and why it's so freaking important. But we are back. We are back again today with another delight and service filled episode because there is so many. I know. George, do you want to take a.

Moment to say it's the best hub? Let's be honest, Mark.

I didn't ask you, Mark.

Yeah, I asked George. Mark, Mark, Mark. Settle down.

Mark.

Settle down. Mark.

Just kidding. I love you, Mark.

In a corner.

So here's the thing. I love fresh perspectives. I also love experts in their field. And I have watched a treaty do HubSpot Academy service videos for years now and I knew there would be a day where like, we're going to get her on the podcast. We're going to jam out and so. And the value that the listeners are going to get and be able to actually implement from a deep dive of like, the tools and the mindsets. It's just going to be so good.

I know. And that's see Personally, for me, what I'm really excited about is, is that service is like the key difference in your business. Right. Like how you treat and service serve the humans that you say you were born to serve is going to be everything. Like it was already true before the pandemic, but it's even more so true now that customers are willing to abandon you in a heartbeat if they feel like you are not there supporting them.

Yeah.

If you are not keeping your promises or if for some reason a promise has gotten broken, you're not there to make it right.

Preach, preacher. It's all about the humans.

Oh, there we go. So remember George, we talked about this in previous episodes. The ones that you do in the first 10 minutes don't count because you're just trying to check. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank goodness we have a treaty here to restore order. So let's, let's dig in. I want to start with one of my favorite questions about this because we've touched on this before, but I want to dig deep. Is HubSpot server service up only for service teams?

So I feel like you might want me to say no, but I'm going to say that you're probably going to buy Service Hub for your service. And that incorporates a lot though, right? Like service incorporates customer support. So those reactive like customer tickets implementation, customer success. So one like that's, that's a lot of folks. So it's definitely for all those people. And then if you look at the tools within Service Hub, like feedback that is useful for sales and marketing initiatives as well. But I think when it comes down to it, when your service team uses Service Hub, your sales and marketing team are going to see the benefits. So for instance, I know a really common use case is for marketing folks to find like who the best customers are. Who am I gonna write case studies about having all that information in the same hub that's so easy for them. And then for sales, like the list just goes on and on. Right. For the sales to customer success handoff, incorporating deals with tickets like an automation for when a deal closes, opens and all the notes are already there. Even upsell opportunities like making sure that everything is like a tick of a button and then a notification goes to the sales rep at the heart of it. I think Service Hub is for service folks. But the benefits when you are truly deep in Service Hub are going to. You're going to see them for your marketing, your entire go to market folks.

Yeah. So it's funny, I love by the way, that answer because the way and by the way, I love that you're like. I feel like you want me to say and, but no, yeah, you, you.

Can say I don't ask leading questions. That's rude.

Not at all.

That's rude.

But. But here's the thing. Love your answer because if you think about this, right, and. And Liz, it's probably because I'm just on a Dominic Toretto kick right now. I mean, the new fast X movie. Come on, let's go. But marketing and sales hubs. Marketing and sales hubs are the engine. But I really do feel like you're talking about Edready that the service hub is the NAS that you're actually putting into your engine that can make it go so much faster, so much better as a team. Because now you're just firing on all cylinders, racing down as like the trifecta. Sales, marketing and service. Crushing it with all the tools that anybody can start to use when they need to use them.

Right? Bringing everybody in because it's all about family.

Family.

Yeah, family.

It's family.

Did that hurt, Debbie?

Oh, you have no idea. I need to take a shower after this.

Your misery sustains me. Which is why I'm going to ask you this next question. Actually, you know what? I'm going to throw it out to the whole group. Throw it out to the whole group. So if we're talking about service and we're really focusing on this team, is the nexus this, this inflection point around this hub. What are the mindsets that you think service pros need to have or adopt before they even think about touching the software? Because we've talked about this with HubSpot before, right, guys? Like HubSpot is only as effective as the mindsets and the strategic strategy that you put into. It's not the right strategic strategy. It's not a hyphenate.

Oh my God, the card. Go Devon.

Yes, but he's saying it like a swear, which is why, because it is. Devin, hush. Mindsets.

I'm sorry, go ahead.

You. You opened it. Yeah. You opened up to everybody. So let some other folks go. Oh my gosh. Hang on, hang on. Flag in the ground. From this point on a minute, I guess. Well, 10 minutes and 31 pre edited. From this day forward, Mark will be known as Max.

Why do you have to pee in my fun cereal? Max, Go ahead.

So there's three. Three sort of like mindsets that I'm thinking about here. One. And I already forgot one of them, so. So one. Think about how it's actually going to connect back to your marketing. Right? And a lot of that is thinking about how are we using, you know, things like surveys and stuff to find people that are like literally saying that they would gladly be promoters for you. Right? So like one, think about how you're going to like tie the, tie the flywheel together, like with this sort of service motion and service up, Right. Two, think about the heat shield, right? So when I say heat shield, I'm thinking about things like your knowledge base, right? What are the questions that your service teams and like folks like that are getting constantly, every single day that someone could just easily self solve on. So you could really kind of focus on, on letting those service folks handle the harder problems. Right. So like, what are you doing to make their lives a little bit easier? And then the third one I forgot. So we'll come back when I remember it a little bit later. But there's like one other sort of like big thing that I tend to kind of think about. No, edit this out because I screwed that piece up. But yeah, there's. There's two big ones.

Circle back.

Hey, Noah. Leave Mark's crap in.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I thought his name was Max. I thought heretofore, heads forth and all those things, he was Max.

Well, Max did a great job, but Mark jacked it up.

Yeah, Mark.

He fumbled the.

Mark fumbled the bag.

I forgot my name. And so I also forgot the third thing I was going to say say.

Thank goodness I'm back, aren't we? Isn't that right, guys?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, so here's the thing, and I definitely want to hear what Adri and Devon have to say on this, but for me, especially where we're headed, because I feel like in a world that is so saturated with artificial intelligence, AI this generative that, you know, the, the easy way to get like, ba, ba, ba. And we're coming to an inflection point where it is all about being human. Human businesses doing hu. Like human things. And so that if I think about the mindset of a service team, success team, somebody's gonna go into this tool. The most human thing you can do is have a dang conversation. And to have a conversation, you have to be able to hear both voices. And so I would beg anybody that's using HubSpot and turns on the service hub that one of the initial mindsets that you have is how can I have a voice of customer mindset? How can I be doing everything to have a conversation, not one way with my, you know, my megaphone as the marketing side, but the ear, the ear to the ground as the service side with feedback and everything else that you can do. Because, by the way, ear to the ground also means that you're paying attention to how many people are coming to what knowledge articles, meaning they're having what problems with the actual thing that you're doing. Anyway, listen to your customers. Be human. Anyway. That's my thoughts.

Yeah. And sometimes I will say listening to your customers is hard because they are all over the place. They are like, they're going to fill out a survey and then they're going to chat in and then they're going to call in and do X, Y and Z and they have the same question on all platforms. And I think if one of your big issues is streamlining communication, that's where Service Hub especially can help you solve.

Those issues for me. And I know it's been a few episodes since I've said this, but don't try to make Service Hub supplement your existing process. Evaluate your existing process as holistically as part of the customer journey and look at how your customer, your customer service experience success, whatever you want to call your team, how that fits into your overall flywheel in reducing friction. And if there are friction points in your existing process, getting Service Hub isn't going to mitigate that. If anything, it's just going to give you a greater capacity to exacerbate it. So what you should be doing is looking at your process and how you can make sure that not only is your customer journey solid and smooth and as frictionless as possible, but also that your customer team is not an afterthought. Stop putting them in. In corner back basement offices.

Or.

Or just somewhere. Yeah. With Mark or. Or having them share a room with accounting where there's six people and no air conditioning because, you know, Pam from accounting doesn't wear deodorant. So. So stop that. Stop that right now.

This doesn't feel colored by actual experience at all.

Oh, my God.

Everything's fine.

So can we just take a moment to just be like, ding, ding, ding. That might be the 27th Scrabble word that Devin has used on the podcast.

What? What would. What.

How. How many letters is that? How many points do I get for whatever word that was.

You said deodorant.

Exacerbate. Yeah.

No, not deodorant, Devin.

What was the word?

Exacerbate. I do enjoy my holy words. On the.

On the.

I feel like it's 54 points. It's 54 point anyway, Liz. Sorry, sorry. Let's get back to.

I remember my third one finally. And it's. It's the one I harp on a lot. Harp on a lot is. And I don't know if it's so much of like a mindset versus just like a mindset you don't want to be in is that Service Hub is not just for like your run of the mill support team at a software company. Right. Any business or organization or school or nonprofit or like whatever you want to think of has people that do things for their customers, their members, their whoever it is that they serve. Right. And you got to think about how can Service Hub assist your team with whatever that you know, service or happiness creating or. Or successfulness inducing action is. Right. And wrap it around that or reimagine it as Devin would say.

Yeah, okay. You can be Max again until you screw up next time. So I want to start digging into different parts of the hub. I have four different areas I want to dig into. Tickets, feedback, surveys, knowledge base and customer portal. We're going to start with tickets. So throwing it out to the group. What do you think most people get wrong or know, not understand about what tickets are or how they actually work?

Oh, let's go. Ladies first. Adri. Adri. What? What's your answer to that? I want to know kind of what.

Mark or Max or whoever we're calling him was saying. It's that tickets like it's not like Service Hub isn't just for SaaS companies. It's not just if you have like a traditional customer support team, but you can use tickets for sa. So many different types of things now. The ones are yeah, like open tickets. Customer has a problem and it's closed, but you can use it for implementation. I saw a really cool use case for like customer health pipeline. So there's so many other ways. And I really also what Devin was saying, like encourage you before you even start on Service Hub, like understand your customer journey, understand your pain points and then like kind of mix and match and see how you can a round thing in a square hole or something. Could someone help me out there?

What was that?

Round peg scramble. Because it is very customizable so it doesn't necessarily just fit like one mold.

Yeah. You can always think of a ticket as just like a way for you to keep track of how you deliver on some kind of service. Whether it's a literal service and you're using it to like project manager or the service of solving a problem for someone which is more the traditional ticket route. I've seen, I've seen customers use it to like, manage their lost and found at like a softball camp. Right. Like when they, someone lost a glove, they created a ticket for, like, people can use it in all these different ways. It's just a way to make sure, like, you can collaborate on problems you're solving or services you're delivering or something in that spectrum. Right. You have a place to kind of work on it with other people and it doesn't fall through the cracks. And you can automate and report around it. Right. So you can do a lot with that.

Yeah, you can get creative with tickets once you step away from that. Like we were saying that SaaS customer service mindset, and you treat it as an object within your CRM, then you can do all kinds of nutty things with it. Like, I've, I know of a trucking company that uses tickets to dispatch trucks. And they were, I think they were an Impact award winner. An agency that helped come up with this novel solution where they're using tickets to, to basically send out information to their external dispatching service. And it's, it was a novel idea, just really out of the box. I loved it.

So I'm going to.

Oh, go ahead, George.

So I'm going to upvote everything that y' all said, but I feel like I have to throw in one other thing in here because the service hub is the one place where I hear the, a minimal amount of conversation around automation. And so the fact that the question was, what, what are people getting wrong, man? They are not automating to the full potential that they could with the, Go into your settings, look at what you can do with ticket pipelines, look at a couple switches you can turn on to like, do some pretty dope stuff with automation, team handoffs, all of that stuff, and not just look at it like it's a dumb camban board that you're like dragging and dropping across the screen that happens to be be in a SaaS software best ever, by the way, called HubSpot. That's not the life you should be living. Automate some stuff, make your life easier. Okay, I'll calm down. I'm, I, I, I need a minute.

You're never calm, and that's okay. But that's why we love you. See, it's all right.

Absolutely, Audrey.

You know, it's, it's like you're a mind reader because literally my next question was, Adri, what is some of the coolest stuff you've seen people do with ticketing.

This is. I'm gonna make an Academy video just on this because it's so cool. So you can use automation to. So someone sends like you a negative feedback. Or maybe they have X amount of tickets this month so that you think they might be like in the red. You can automatically create tickets for them. As you know, in red, we need these people might churn. And then you can use tickets basically as a way to understand like how long it takes someone to either get back into the green or actually churn turn in this way. Because it's in tickets, you can tag in other folks, you can assign tasks out. It's not just like one person's problem anymore, but when you use tickets to actually see help customers who are in the red, I think that one, it turns into everyone's problem. And two, you can see past histories of like, oh, someone else had a problem similar to this. How did that ticket resolve? And then with ticket reporting, you have that information of like, oh, we did this, this, this, and that yielded a churn, or that didn't yield a churn, whatever it is. So you have that reporting in it too. Isn't that so unique? I love it.

Love it. I'm. I'm listening to you talk, Andre. And, and I'm like, oh, she's literally giving us that button that they reach over in the movies and like Defcon 4, like it's now all sudden the whole committee is like trying to save the earth instead of it being like this one lone dude, like running or dudette running through like the scene. So I, I love that. It's like the amplific problem. Let's all fix it based on automation. That is amazing.

I love that. Let's stick into feedback surveys.

Oh, I'm on mute. I just realized I was on mute. Sorry. Wait, can I do one, One thing before we go kind of on the.

Mark, what are you doing, buddy?

What are you doing?

Mark's a wild card today. Okay, listen.

So Mark, you got the.

I think there's also like some really cute, cool use cases that transfer over to the sales hub too, as well, right? When you think about tickets. So you know, if we do look at like a traditional SaaS use case or any like, you know, maybe any, any sort of like tech, right? It's, it's common that people bring in like sales engineers, solutions engineers, some kind of like pre sales consultant, right? And a cool thing that like a lot of people don't do is associate deals to tickets, right? Or tickets to deals for specific reasons. It could be saying, like, hey, here's like, where our support team and stepped in during, like, a trial and, like, helped solve an issue during, like, the deal. Right. Or maybe we're using a ticket pipeline to manage how our solutions engineering team will come in and, like, work a deal and kind of track what they're doing against it as well and, like, manage that process. So, like, just because tickets kind of sits in the service hub, it doesn't mean it can't have any interaction with some of these other tools and processes that you're building in, like the sales hub or marketing hub, for that matter. Mark out.

All right.

Tickets don't have to be an afterthought, like, your success.

All right. Yeah, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Devin, do you need a hug?

One of the two.

I feel like he needs a hug.

All right, all right, let's go into surveys. What are most people getting wrong about surveys?

That you need them.

They're not using them.

Yeah, that's. That's it. Like, people aren't. Like, they, oh, we don't have enough customers or we don't have enough people to pull. And it's like, you, You. So. So how are you even gauging the sentiment of your. Your customers or people who interact with your brand? Are you guessing? Are you asking your mom how. How are you finding out how people actually feel about what it is that you're doing? How are you finding these pain points?

I want to know. Hold on, George. I see a treaty. Like, it, like, nodding. I want to know what she has to say.

Well, I do, too, but first of all, bro, moms know. Moms know, bro. I don't even know how that even came out in this podcast, but. Adridi, go ahead.

Yeah, I think that people are not sending the surveys out, and if they do, they, like, don't get any responses, so then they just quit. So I think sending it is the easiest part, but getting the responses, following up and making those improvements is super hard and super time consuming. I think that's like, there's a big barrier of entry and, like, also the fear, like, oh, what if everyone hates me? Do I actually want to know what people think of me? I think there's a lot. There's a lot to unpack with feedback surveys.

I got another three things, and I'll remember them. I'll remember them this time. So first. First one is to do something with the feedback. Right? That's the first one. Right. A lot of people get it, and then they do nothing with it. Okay, cool. Why even do it in the first place? But the second thing is, just because you get one piece of feedback doesn't mean that you're going to kind of jump and, like, change everything, right? So build reporting around the feedback so you can see over time how, like, are there actually trends with, like, how things are going. Analyze responses over time, like, have a way to be able to actually see, you know, what's actually going wrong at, like, a larger scale. Right. The third thing, like, not enough people are doing this is like, tying it back together with the marketing side. It's like, yo, if you're gonna do some kind of, like, referral program or you're gonna, like, ask for people to give reviews, how about isolating the people that literally say they're likely to do that with an NPS survey? Right? A lot of people don't know what NPS surveys are. They think it's like a 1 to 10, how satisfied are you measurement? Right? And a lot of people don't understand that the scale goes from negative 100 to positive 100 because they don't understand what it's like actually asking. Net promoter score surveys always ask the same question. How likely are you to recommend X, Y or Z to a friend or family member, Right. Or a colleague or like, whatever it is, it's always worded, how likely are you to recommend? That is not a gauge of satisfaction. That's not like, how happy are you 1 to 10? It's how likely are you to tell someone that our stuff is dope? So those are the folks that you could easily just create lists of when they literally say that they're a promoter, right? And isolate them to do those things like referring a friend or doing some kind of, like, review on a review site. And not enough people are connecting the dots of what NPS actually means and building like, you know, active segmentation and, or proactive or whatever useful segmentation and automation around it. Right? Connect the dots, people.

Hey, you know, a dot we could connect is, we need a hub heroes nps. Because refer us to your friends, people. We need more listeners. Leave us a review. Oh, Liz will cover that at the end. Anyway, I digress, George.

I always appreciate that when you help us out with that. I do what I do, and yes, people tell me I'm pretty. Tell me I'm pretty often. But specifically in podcast reviews, that would be extremely helpful. So let's talk about surveys a little bit more deeply. We've started talking about some of the different types of surveys. The fact that Maybe people should just be doing surveys to begin with. But Adridi, can you tell me a little bit more about where people could be insisting inserting surveys, whether that's in service, sales or market? What are some ways that people might not even be thinking about how to use the surveys feature?

I'm going to give you an annoying answer and then I'll just answer your question. But I I appreciate your candor thing that I would do when you're trying to determine what feedback to ask when in the customer journey to ask. And going back to Devin's point earlier, it's make a customer journey map and highlight your the milestones that a customer goes through in your entire marketing, sales and service journey. The first time they land on your website, the first time they fill out a form, the first time they talk to sales, etc. Make these milestones and at every milestone ask yourself what is my customer doing? What is my customer thinking? And if you can't answer those questions, you probably need to stick a survey there so you understand the customer sentiment at that milestone. So that is my first piece of advice. If you have some time to think thoroughly about surveys, if you just want to put them in, I would like the easiest places I think are just after a chat, after chat bots or a live chat, stick a survey and that's one of the easiest places after customer support interaction. That's going to tell you a lot. And then as Max Mark was saying, NPS and bonus enps. So employee satisfaction. NPS is a great tool for internal use as well. And send that like every six months.

Yeah, I was literally going to jump on that train. One of my favorite uses of surveys is what we do internally here at HubSpot. We are big on enps and we do it not only for for HubSpot in general and how we feel and we get pretty granular. Like we talk about the tools and how do you feel about the tools. We talk about data and how we're handling our reporting, but we also talk about our managers. You I literally just did my manager's enps today and my favorite question was the last one. How likely are you to recommend some Katie Lambert to be somebody's manager? And I slide that bo bad boy all the way to 11 cuz Katie's dope. Best manager in the world, period. I stand on that statement 10 toes down. Fight me about it.

Hashtag Rays.

Shout out to Peter here.

Here's a funny thing. It's funny because you guys are barking up a tree that I did want to hit upon. So we're going to. I'm just going to say it. When I was doing an interview with Nate Brown about voice of customer, he alluded to what you're talking about and that is also a parallel side of this. A voice of employee or like the internal listening.

Right.

And I think that you know there's places in HubSpot where I literally go like the email tool. Okay, don't send like your team an email like as a test email because it'll jack up your analytics. But like surveys are definitely the place where I'd say and send your people surveys so that they can actually fill it out. Because I think if you start to understand that the piss poor sentiment of the employees that you get back is directly correlated to why your customers might be pissed. I'm just gonna leave that hang for a second. Anyway. Yeah. Employee voice of employee and voice of customer using the feedback surveys.

Can I say something provocative about surveys now that I don't work at HubSpot?

Provocative.

Adri so the forms tool predates both of our time at HubSpot. Right? That existed right before we got there.

Right.

How did the surveys tool figure out multi step survey pages like multi page surveys before the form tool? I'm not holding you today.

I am just welcome to Mark After Dark.

Yeah, Mark After Dark is just calling out the forums. PM saying where is it? And while you're at it, let's get some dynamic thank you pages for those, those submit buttons too. Because we can do it with fire me now. We can do it when we're going to a payments page, but we can't do it when we just go into a different thank you. Anyway, I, I digress.

You know, you know the good thing, I do want to treat you to dive into that though. But the good thing is if you have a dope developer, you can actually do that second part of what you're trying to do as far as dynamic thank you PA on something selected in a property. But I digress.

Dope developer and a bag in the bank.

There are so few times people are like wow, I wish Marketing Hub was more like Service Hub. Like Service Hub sometimes kind of gets pushed to the side. But this is one thing where yeah, Service Hub's got it going on w Service Hub. Yeah, yeah. And then I will so going back to surveys, another thing I think people get wrong is that they're not sharing the results with everyone. They are only like it's only going to leadership. It's only going to the CEO but as I'm sure we all know here, improving the customer experience is everyone's job. And if I can't tell you, like, oh, I don't know what people think about HubSpot, then I'm not that great of an employee and I'm probably not going to do a lot to improve the customer experience, know what people think about us. So I would say once you get that feedback, it is so important to make sure everybody knows about it and not just the people at the top.

Especially if someone's crushing it, right? If someone gets like a really positive survey response, go into the workflows and set up like a notification that goes to the whole team, right? Like use it as an opportunity to celebrate. Get everybody gassed up on a Friday. Insert some Mark energy in there. You know what I mean?

Mark after dark. Now, Mark after dark. I want to pivot the conversation here a little bit. I want to dig into the knowledge base.

Yeah.

And I want to get into the broad questions like what do people get wrong? What cool things they are doing? But I have a very specific question I want to lead off with here, which is to SEO or to not SEO when it comes to creating your knowledge based articles. What do we got?

Can I just celebrate something about knowledge based articles real quick and then we can talk about SEO? You know what nobody else is Multiple knowledge bases. Finally. Sorry, I had to get it out there.

I was expecting an evil laugh after that. Like.

Just like you could do multiple blogs now is like the best thing ever. Like we had happily, we just kind of migrated everything over to the new knowledge base and then we're gonna build a totally separate ones. That's not a plug.

No, that's not a plug. I'm waiting for the plug.

I've been talking about Timer man this entire time and I haven't done that. Yeah, go install Timer man if you want to do SLAs on tickets. Anyway, listen, it's just super dope, like the fact that you can do multiple knowledge bases and have different ones set up. Especially if you're a company using business units, right. And you have multiple brands working out of HubSpot, right. Being able to do multiple. What are you giving me a palm to the face, Liz?

You'll find out. Keep going, Mark.

Anyway, I'm just saying now if you have multiple brands and you're managing multiple websites, it's awesome that you can have different knowledge bases for all those business units. It's great.

So you know, my favorite thing about this episode has been I Ask a specific question and then somebody says, I know you asked that question, and said, we're going to get to the other one. I want to answer later, but I'm going to do it now.

Did you have that in the outline? All I knew is just when we got to knowledge baseball, I had to express my gratitude to the Service Hub product team for finally doing multiple knowledge bases.

Anyway, honestly, I'm always here for gratitude. I'm always here for gratitude. So I'm cool with that. I'm a gratitude kind of gal. But let's talk about it. SEO versus not SEO. What do we do?

So let me, let me give my quick SEO speech that I like to give. So back in the day, there was a time where hacking SEO was all about having the keywords in there, regardless of whether or not what you were doing mattered. Because before you were writing almost exclusively for the robots. Speaking of, shout out to the kid that figured out how to hack HR and get hired by putting keywords in his resume by making them white and then having the just everything in there in white. And so he would get picked up by everywhere he applied to and they ended up hiring him anyway. That's the way it used to be. You would write for the robots and then as time progressed, you would write for the robots, but keep the humans in mind because then they started thinking about referral links and things of that nature. And then what happened is that you had to write for the humans but keep the robots in mind. And so you're thinking about where your H1 and H2 and make sure that we repurpose the opening statement within the second paragraph and all that fun stuff.

Stuff.

Now we are in the time where you write for humans and it doesn't matter what the robots think, because the robots already know everything thanks to Google Chrome and being able to track everyone's everything. Google already knows what impactful content is and it knows whether or not people's questions are being answered not by just clicks, not by just referral links, but how people are interacting with your content. So what you want to do is not so much focus on the keywords you're trying to qualify for or the long tail keywords. Those are important. But what you want to focus on is quality content. Content that keeps people engaged, keeps people scrolling, keeps people clicking around your site, because that is what's important for search engine rankings. Now that's how you get your first page serp. That's how, that's how it works. Now you, you have to have good content you can't just write something that you'll try and hack the algorithm with. So to answer the original question, SEO 100, yes. But do it by being a good human being, writing things that people actually want to know.

George, now you can say humans, and it counts.

Well, maybe in a minute, maybe in a bit. I really like was I was pausing to see if Adri was going to jump in there because there's two things that actually hit my brain. And I agree with everything Devin said, by the way. But as a. A person who over the last decade has spent, oh, I don't know, a large portion of my life with HubSpot knowledge articles and realizing that anytime I would search a problem and scroll down about 1 or 2, there's a knowledge article, I know that they're optimized. I know that Google's picking them up. So the answer for search engine optimization SEO is an emphatic yes. Like, I've even had clients where one of their most visited pages was a knowledge article. Okay, that. Which blew his mind. But I was like, it doesn't really surprise me. Now what I will do is I will also throw in another SEO in here and I would say simply, executable optimized. Meaning I read it and I understand what in God's name I'm supposed to execute after reading the knowledge article you have created in a way that says simplify the complex and I get past the hurdle and can just keep chugging along. Right? So it's not only about search engine optimized, but it's making it simple, making executable, and optimizing it for the user, as Devin would say. Now, here's the thing. I'm going to go on a side tangent for a second. I want to know, and I know nobody here probably knows the answer to this. I want to know the moment in time when HubSpot knowledge articles actually drive more traffic than HubSpot blogs do. Because there's gonna come a day when you have like a bazillion users that there's gonna be like, oh, like 79 of our traffic this month came from knowledge articles. Then you're gonna have to start to think or actually fend off marketers who want to come market on your knowledge articles. Those days are coming. I just want to know when we hit that point.

So HubSpot knowledge base working with a.

Long time ago, they're already there. Like, in some spaces, it's already happening. A client that I worked with about a year or so ago, they had like their knowledge Base articles. They weren't HubSpot users, but their knowledge base or based articles for their customers were getting so much traffic that the marketers were like, hey, can we get in on some of that? Have we considered potentially an embedded CTA or perhaps a couple special links maybe?

Oh, maybe I get fired up real quick.

Oh, God, I'm sorry. I just wanted to jump in on George's point that he brought up earlier. I can't stress enough the importance of that second SEO that he brought up, because part of how Google knows the problem that you're, that you're presenting a solution for, you've solved for and get you higher ranked is that Google's going to know if you've looked at that, if your customer has looked at your solution and then keeps looking for other solutions to solve the problem. So they're going to know, like, if you've ever in Chrome typed something that you've searched before and the first thing it says is continue your journey. That's because Google knows that you're still trying to solve this problem. And so it's going to continue to give more suggestions. But if you're typing in, like, how to, I don't know, fix a hard drive that keeps clicking and they end up on your knowledge base article and then they don't search anymore, then Google knows that your knowledge base article solved the problem and that gets you ranked higher.

My take on the SEO stuff is like, yeah, it's, it's pretty important kind of like for two reasons. One, you know, when people are doing like a lot of their research, especially if they're in the decision stage and they're looking at all these different companies to help them like solve a certain problem. Like, it's good if they come across your knowledge base and see how like, deep and helpful it is, right? Like, that's a good sign for folks. Like, I think plenty of people buy HubSpot because they come across the knowledge base, you know, somewhat, probably unintentionally, and then poke around in there and like, realize, wow, there's like a ton of really great info in here. Seems like, you know, it's really easy to learn if I ever need to have, like, need to come and ask a question, right? I'll always have that knowledge at my fingertips. That's a really big reason for people to buy like a software product, right. I think the other thing is too, is making it really easy for people to find the content in there, right? Like, you don't want people to have to take the steps of going to your website, finding the tab that says support, clicking on it, clicking on Knowledge Base, and then clicking on the search bar in there to like find like an answer. Right? You want them to be able to type like the name of your product space question and then have it come up like that's, that's how HubSpot does it, right? You can type in HubSpot and then anything you want to know. And you're going to get a knowledge based article 100% right. And you want to make it that accessible and easy to find for your, your customers because that's an easier thing for them to do like just googling something than it is to like go get on the phone and like bug a support person with a problem that could easily be answered by a knowledge base article. Right. So you know from a. Making it easy for people to find. Great. And also making it so people discover it during the sales process and it's just another reason for them to want to buy from you because they know they're going to be well supported. Another great reason why SEO is super important.

You know, Adri, I want us you to take us home with the knowledge base because I want to make sure we have time to talk about the Customer portal. But Adridi, I want to hear from you. If there is only one thing that somebody gets or understands about the knowledge base that you think is the, the most important thing about it, what is it and why?

Set up a knowledge base, a good knowledge base and watch your ticket count decrease. I feel like not many people are using knowledge base and I don't understand why it's like the easiest thing to reduce ticket count.

Creating content is hard.

No, but here's the thing, right? Like to exactly what you said. Would you like your customers to call in with fewer questions? Maybe just maybe proactively address them?

Yes.

All right.

Self solved, baby.

We're gonna keep it with the treaty. Let's talk about Customer Portal. What is it? What in the Dominic Toretto's name is the Customer Portal and why is it important?

No, you technically use the same as wearing there for a minute.

I think he'd respect it. I think he'd understand. We're family. But anyway, gentlemen, your name is not a dream. Anyone?

Do you guys use Customer Portal?

Talk to me about the customer portal for your customers.

Does anyone use it?

Okay, some yes. Some.

Yeah. Customer Portal.

Oh wow.

Okay, this is interesting, but. But I'll shut up.

Okay. We can like cut things and we don't have to post it for Everyone, Right?

Okay.

No, no, I'm not going anywhere.

Listen very carefully.

No, Customer Portal started off like, just between us, Customer Portal started off with so much like, we now have self serving offerings. Not just a knowledge base. We have self service. Right. But the product team's just not working on it anymore, so it's on the back burner. But I mean.

All right, well, let's just skip the whole Customer portal.

It works though, right?

No, no, no. All right, all right, guys, let me wrangle it back in because we don't have much time left.

Okay?

So Adridi Customer Portal. Talk to me about what people actually need to know. Okay?

How many times do you guys see customers coming in and being like, hey, are you working on my ticket? Or like, what's. What's the status of this ticket?

Right.

And then they just submit another ticket and another ticket. Customer Portal is the answer to that. Basically. It's a. It's a home behind a login where a customer can click the button and see all of their tickets, see. See the status of it, and be like, oh, this one I need to respond to. This one I'm still waiting on the company for. So it's just a way to kind of synthesize all of your tickets into one portal.

Yeah.

And. And it's interesting that we're going down this because. Liz, I'll just throw in here too, with that question. We always look at it as kind of a lightweight solution to get somebody visibility, but we know that if they're going to need something deeper than that with like some and rich, robust functionality, that we're probably going to end up building something or even sharing that other partners have built things.

Right.

So I think of like Digicat and they've built a couple things around, like, partner portal themes, I think about Impulse Creative and like the, you know, PRM system that they created. So. So just know at least from a Hub heroes or this guy's perspective, you, if it's simple and visibility, Customer Portal, if it's rich and robust, maybe we're going in a different direction.

Are you forgetting someone, George? Oh, Apple literally has an app called Customer Portal.

Oh, do they, Max?

Yeah, Big. Sorry, I had to, man. If you were calling out the other ones.

Chill. Chilling away. Chilling.

Calm down, Mark.

Okay.

Calm down.

Calm.

I'm just kidding. Is there anything else that you guys love about Customer Portal?

Oh, yeah. By the way, Happily has. Happily has a customer portal too. I forgot that one.

Yes.

Yes, you did. Oh, before we continue, Mark disapproves happily has a customer portal. Just wanted to throw that out there.

Got it. Yeah, I was actually at least at this point I was gonna go into a full screen share demo of the customer portal app. Wait, wait. Can I say one thing that I really love about customer portal? And this is good when you have like, this is like a kind of a nuanced one. What's really neat is there is, there's a setting in there that allows you to see tickets either just that you've created or tickets from anyone in your organization. Right. So if there's any companies like selling services to like selling like it services to people. Right. A pretty common thing that like you know the, the IT customer on the other end of that like managed service would want to do is see tickets that other people in their org have put into your organization to help with stuff. Right. So it's cool. We, I love customer service portal but basically it just gives visibility of people's tickets they've created to the end user so they can go and update them, they can see the status of them, all that kind of stuff. So you can stop communicating all that by email every time something happens. Right. Just it makes it easy.

Pro tip.

I was just gonna quickly say put your customer portal login link in your ticket kickback email.

Smart.

Spicy. I like it. I like it. All right, so I'm gonna be honest a Judy this may be putting you on the spot. Like Inbound is around the corner and like we've been talking about it and like I know it Inbound, it can be like Inbound Christmas because they tell us a bunch of cool things that are coming. Can, can can we get excited about anything for service hub, even abstractly from Inbound Santa this year?

Oh, I love Inbound Santa by the way.

Are you guys Inbound Santa's best?

Are you guys using content.

Experimenting with it? Yeah, it's pretty cool.

So I know that's in beta or alpha, you have to sign up first but I think it's going to be more widespread by Inbound. Probably there's going to be like imagine how easy to write knowledge based articles is with that or imagine like to respond to angry customers. Like it's gonna be, I think it's gonna, it's gonna change the game. But I'm, I think there's gonna be a lot around AI and then WhatsApp. I know we didn't talk about that, but I'm very excited about WhatsApp and I think they're gonna be some updates.

To, to that tool you know, that's what's interesting. Oh, my. Oh, my God. Like, we didn't talk About Unified Inbox, WhatsApp. Like all the things SLAs.

Yeah.

Hashtag another episode, ladies and gentlemen. That's all.

Another. Another service episode. I hate it. I'm so upset about that. I'm gonna go cry.

No, we need.

I know, I know.

So I passed the tissues.

I know. Okay. Is there any final words that we want to have to say though, in this episode? One thing you feel like you didn't get to say. One thing that excites you, ignites you. Whatever it is. What do we got? Before I take us out, don't sleep.

On the service hub. It's not all about marketing and sales. You gotta. You gotta complete sleep suite. You gotta close the loop. Use it.

Yeah, don't sleep on your service team either. All right.

Devin, are you okay?

I'm trying to put my soapbox away and it just won't go.

Pay your service people commission. That's what I'll say.

O.

Mark after dark, back again.

I have to. I have to continue to like beat this drum because I think it's something that as a marketer, for years and years and years I had my eyes closed and it. I feel dumb about it. But then I had again that interview with Nate Brown. I have to go back to. How do you use all the tools? And. And by the way, this is a crazy like, oh my God, we didn't talk about all the conversations tools. Voice of customer, voice of customer, voice of employee. Use all the tools that you get access to with the service hub to fill both of those things in your organization and then flood them through the rest of the sales and marketing team members to garnish that information that you're gaining. Because it will be truly, truly enlightening once you actually can have a bi directional conversation, even if it's digitally of it.

Well, Adri, thank you so much for joining us. This has been amazing. Do you want to leave us with any party words of wisdom?

Did I already say to self service?

I know. Do you want to just say once more with you?

Actually, we didn't talk about AI as much as I'd like to, so I do have to come back. But I was reading this article that said I think a lot of customer support folks specifically are kind of scared of AI taking their jobs. But what I read and what I really resonate with is AI isn't taking. Taking customer support jobs. People who use AI will take the jobs of people who don't use AI.

Yes.

And I know that's.

Yep.

By the way, that doesn't stop at service. That's. That's. I think anybody.

And I know that's kind of random, but next time, we'll talk about AI and customer support or service.

Let's go. We got to do a post. Inbound Update. Service hub.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

Another service update episode. But with that. Ladies and gentlemen, Adrianna, thank you so much for joining us this week. As George and I both said earlier, if you think we're amazing, delightful, wonderful humans, please let us know via review. We would love to hear from you. And with that, we will talk to you next week when I believe we have another guest. Lots of guests.

Lots of guests.

That's all I got. Lots of guests.

You know what's amazing? We made it out of this jam without a haiku. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out. In the next episode, make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Hero Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend, leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag Hub Heroes Podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.