Today, customer expectations are sky-high, and the agility of customer support teams is more critical than ever. This urgency is amplified by HubSpot's Customer Support Hub, a vital tool for businesses, streamlining the receipt, service, and assignment of customer support tickets. And fast response times have a big impact on how your customers feel about your company.
According to Forrester, 66% of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service.
But to offer quick and fulfilling first responses, you need to consider how much individual support reps have on their plate.
Overloaded support reps are a bottleneck in the flow of efficient customer service. An excessive workload not only hampers the quick resolution of customer queries but also risks compromising the quality of the service provided.
However, balancing support workloads is often more complex than it seems. It's a common misconception that balancing workloads is as simple as assigning an equal number of tickets to each rep. While that is helpful compared to not balancing at all, not every customer support ticket is created equal. This hardline approach overlooks the nuances of ticket complexity and the individual capabilities of reps.
To truly balance support workloads, you need a more sophisticated approach, where workloads are distributed over specific timeframes and weighted according to the complexity and urgency of the tickets. The objective is not merely to distribute tickets—but to optimize the entire support process.
The repercussions of unbalanced workloads manifest in several ways for employees, customers, and the organization:
Stress and Burnout: When workloads are not evenly distributed, some reps face an overwhelming number of tickets, leading to heightened stress levels. This constant pressure can culminate in burnout, characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy.
Reduced Efficiency and Productivity: An imbalanced distribution of workloads can significantly hinder the efficiency and productivity of the support team. Overburdened reps may struggle to maintain the quality of their responses, while underutilized reps might lose the opportunity to fully engage and develop their skills.
Impact on Employee Morale: Continuous exposure to unbalanced workloads can take a toll on employee morale and job satisfaction. Employees consistently facing excessive workloads may feel undervalued and overworked, while those with fewer tickets might feel underutilized or less important.
Negative Customer Experiences: Long wait times and poor resolution quality, stemming from unbalanced workloads, culminate in negative customer experiences. These experiences can leave lasting impressions, shaping customers' overall perception of the brand.
Impact on Customer Loyalty: Consistent, high-quality customer service is a cornerstone of customer loyalty. Inefficient handling of support tickets can lead to customer attrition, as clients may seek services elsewhere.
These consequences of unbalanced workloads not only affect the well-being and performance of the support reps but also have a broader impact on the quality of customer service and the reputation of the organization. Addressing these issues is crucial for maintaining a healthy, productive work environment and ensuring high-quality customer support.
Let’s examine how balancing support rep workloads works in HubSpot.
HubSpot offers several key features that give organizations control over how support ticket owners are assigned.
HubSpot tickets can be manually assigned by navigating to the ticket record page, and selecting the owner in the ticket fields on the left side of the page.
While this is useful, manually assigning tickets significantly slows down the process, is error-prone, and results in worse customer experiences.
Additionally, you can rotate HubSpot tickets among a pre-defined list of owners or teams in custom Workflows.
This is an example of a basic assignment rotation workflow. But you can take it a step further and create branches to make assignments based on certain criteria—such as routing tickets by complexity, priority level, or expertise required. These setups requires a deep understanding of the team's capabilities and the nature of incoming tickets. However, maintaining these workflows can be demanding, as they need regular updates to reflect team changes like new hires or departures. Additionally, when reps are out sick or are otherwise unavailable for new assignments,
HubSpot also allows you to balance workloads and assignments using ticket pipelines. While pipelines are an excellent option for balancing tickets across teams, to balance across individual support reps pipelines must be continuously monitoring and adjusted to ensure tickets are evenly distributed. This requires constant oversight to maintain balance, taking into account the changing nature of tickets and rep workload.
While all of these features are effective tools in the toolchest of workload balancing, none of them are able to completely solve it out of the box, ensuring that all support reps have equality of assignments based on a variety of factors.
Insycle’s Assign app streamlines the complex process of balancing support rep workloads in HubSpot. It brings a range of features to the table that give HubSpot companies unparalelled control over their assignment rotations and HubSpot support workload balancing.
Let’s dive into how Insycle can help:
Insycle’s Assign app allows you to segment incoming leads in advanced ways. You can use any ticket field as a variable in your ticket routing.
Once you've decided which tickets to route, you must determine where to route them. That starts with determining which reps are available for new assignments.
Over-assigning tickets to a particular rep slows your whole support organization down and can lead to lackluster customer experiences. But with Insycle, you can automate ticket assignment and balance across all support reps in your organization—considering a wide range of factors through filters and balancing settings.
For ticket routing, you have several balancing and assignment rule options:
The balanced rule also gives you more control over the time period Insycle considers when balancing leads across your selected representatives.
This provides unmatched control over workload distribution.
Insycle allows for ticket routing and balancing templates in the Assign app to be executed automatically, on a set schedule, running hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your needs.
After building HubSpot ticket routing templates, you can bundle them into an Insycle Recipe and inject them into their HubSpot Workflows, so that tickets are automatically analyzed and routed to the correct support rep after they hit the database—and before you send them your first communications.
Using Insycle’s Workflows integration, there's almost no lag between a new lead and its routing to the correct owner.
Insycle stands out as a game-changer in the realm of support ticket balancing for companies using HubSpot. By automating the complex and time-consuming aspects of ticket assignment, it ensures that workloads are evenly distributed based on factors like rep availability, workload, and time zones.
But Insycle's capabilities extend far beyond just ticket balancing. It serves as a comprehensive HubSpot Data Management system, offering advanced segmentation, automated data cleaning, data quality auditing and analysis features.
For those intrigued by the potential of Insycle to revolutionize their customer support and data management strategies, the opportunity to delve deeper is just a click away. Click here to learn more about how Insycle can help streamline your support operations in HubSpot.