HubSpot tickets are an essential component of the HubSpot Service Hub, designed to streamline customer support by helping businesses manage, track, and resolve customer inquiries and requests.
Naturally, you want HubSpot tickets to be tied to other records in your database through associations. When they are properly associated, you know who each ticket came from. Then you can dive deeper into the relevant company or contact records to find more information.
For example, a contact in your HubSpot CRM might submit a support ticket, and you want to ensure that the new ticket that is created is accurately associated to a contact and company, as there may be additional context within those records that can help you to better service the customer.
However, maintaining accurate ticket associations can sometimes present challenges. And problems with ticket associations can lead to:
These issues can negatively impact your business through customer dissatisfaction, reduced productivity, and increased costs.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into how exactly HubSpot ticket association issues impact your business.
HubSpot ticket association issues can negatively impact your business, affecting your customer support processes, customer experience, overall business performance, and brand reputation.
There are a number of potential issues that can crop up when your tickets are improperly associated—or unassociated.
Less personalization: When ticket associations are not set up correctly, support agents may lack access to vital customer information, leading to misunderstandings and an inability to provide personalized support. This can result in delays in resolving issues and reduced customer satisfaction. But when tickets are linked to specific contacts and companies, support agents can quickly access the customer's history and preferences. Then they will be able to provide personalized assistance tailored to each customer's needs.
Slower ticket resolution: Issues with ticket associations can create confusion and miscommunication within your support team. Your team will work inefficiently and won’t be able to address customer concerns quickly. Ticket resolution times may lengthen. On the other hand, associating tickets with relevant deals or other tickets helps support teams understand the broader context of the issue, leading to quicker identification of root causes and more efficient resolution of problems.
Missed opportunities for collaboration: Missing ticket associations can hinder collaboration between departments such as sales, marketing, and support, as relevant information may not be readily available. This can lead to inconsistencies in communication and disjointed customer experiences across different touchpoints. When tickets are associated with the right contacts, companies, and deals, support teams can easily collaborate with other departments to provide a seamless customer experience throughout the customer journey.
Missing single account view: When ticket associations are inaccurate, companies don’t have a single account view, meaning they can not derive all required context from a single record. When records are not linked, they must perform multiple searches to identify relevant contacts and companies for more information. Support agents may contradict each other, and the customer experience suffers. Conversely, accurate ticket associations ensure that all customer interactions are documented and easily accessible, even when multiple team members are involved in resolving the issue. A single account view gives everyone who engages with the record confidence that they are working with a complete picture.
Worse customer experiences: Poorly managed ticket associations can lead to a subpar customer experience that will erode trust and loyalty. Customers who feel that their concerns are not being addressed will be more likely to switch to a competitor. But businesses that leverage ticket associations to offer timely and personalized support can enhance customer satisfaction and foster long-lasting relationships.
Inability to report effectively: If ticket associations are not properly managed, it can be challenging to track and analyze the effectiveness of your customer support efforts. This makes it difficult to identify areas for improvement and allocate resources effectively.
To mitigate these negative impacts, it's crucial to address any ticket association issues and optimize your HubSpot ticket management strategy. In doing so, you can ensure your support team has access to the necessary information to provide exceptional customer service and improve customer satisfaction, and impacts revenue as a result.
There are many nuances and specific issues surrounding HubSpot ticket associations with contact and company records. Let’s dive in.
The automatic ticket creation feature is a major culprit behind the influx of duplicate tickets and association accuracy issues in HubSpot. Enabling this feature for HubSpot Inbox—the shared inbox for customer support teams—results in the automatic creation of new tickets each time a new message is sent to your organization's support email.
Toggling automatic ticket creation on or off in HubSpot
If a customer submits multiple emails regarding the same issue, it can result in the creation of multiple duplicate tickets in your system. The duplicate tickets may or may not be associated to the correct company, depending on whether or not HubSpot is able to identify the correct records. These errant associations can lead to the tickets being assigned to different customer support representatives, causing confusion and hampering the resolution process.
In addition to automatic ticket creation, HubSpot also has an automatic contact creation feature. When an email is received, the system cross-checks the customer's email address with existing HubSpot contacts. If a matching contact is found, the ticket is associated with the correct contact. However, if no match is found, a new contact is created and associated with the ticket. In situations where a customer emails from a new email address, both a duplicate ticket and a duplicate contact may be generated and associated with one another. These duplicates can be difficult to identify and may impede the support process.
The issues stemming from automatic record creation settings can also affect companies. If the automatic contact association and automatic company creation settings are enabled, HubSpot will cross-check customer email domains with existing company email domains. In cases where no matching company domain is found, a new company record is generated and populated with information from HubSpot's internal company database.
In most cases, this would be considered a positive feature. However, it can lead to the creation of duplicate companies in HubSpot when there is a discrepancy between the company email in your HubSpot database and the one listed in HubSpot's internal company database. For instance, if your database lists the company domain as "Microsoft.co.uk," but HubSpot's database shows it as "Microsoft.com," HubSpot may generate a new company record that is linked to the duplicate contact—and possibly a duplicate ticket as well.
This results in a complicated situation where distinguishing between duplicate and unique records becomes arduous, even with manual inspection. Only once you have identified the duplicate records can you discern which associations are accurate. Until you are able to do that, the errantly associated duplicate records will cause customer experience problems and confusion whenever reps deal with those records.
Unassociated tickets can also arise when support team members manually create tickets. It falls on the support representative to ensure that the record they create is accurately associated with other related records in HubSpot, but reps may not do this consistently. Further, if you have duplicate contact and company records in HubSpot, manually associated records may be linked to the incorrect duplicate company or contact accidentally.
Associating contacts and companies to tickets in HubSpot
If a ticket is not associated to a contact or company, it lacks essential context. As a consequence, representatives handling the ticket will lack pertinent information regarding past interactions that the customer or account has had with your team. This can lead to suboptimal customer experiences that impact how individual customers or entire accounts feel about your brand.
HubSpot's Workflow automation feature, available with the "Professional" subscription, can automate various aspects of your operations. However, it is important to note that you cannot automatically associate HubSpot records in Workflows.
This means that, if you want to link a ticket with a contact or company, you will need to do so manually. While this may seem like a minor inconvenience, it can be a time-consuming task for larger teams or companies with high ticket volumes. And if you want to fix historical association issues, the task can become quite large and complex.
One of the biggest challenges with HubSpot's ticketing system is the lack of data fields available to establish reliable associations between tickets, contacts, and companies. While HubSpot offers a range of default data fields for contacts and companies, the same cannot be said for tickets. In fact, there is only a limited number of fields available for tickets.
This gives us a limited number of fields to use to match the ticket to a company or contact. And because making an association requires identifying data—such as a phone number, company name, address, or website—you may have a hard time finding a suitable field to match the records.
This restriction can lead to several issues. For instance, a new record will be created if a customer sends an email to your support team from a new email address, and there is no associated contact or company record in your HubSpot database. However, because of the limited number of fields available for tickets, it can be challenging to ensure that the new record is accurately associated with the correct contact or company.
We asked Carlos Martinez, Insycle Agency Partner at Binomial, about his thoughts on the impact that HubSpot ticket association issues can have on businesses:
To overcome this issue, HubSpot users have turned to custom fields and third-party tools to enhance their ticketing systems. By creating custom fields, such as a unique identifier or phone number field that can be matched with contact and company records, you can establish more reliable associations.
Tickets can only be used to their full potential when they are accurately associated with a personal contact record and the relevant company and deal records.
These associations offer the context that your team needs to provide great service. They also ensure the accuracy of your reporting and the effectiveness of decision-making based on that reporting.
Insycle lets you establish associations between tickets, contacts, and companies in a consistent manner in the Bulk Operations module. For instance, you can link a ticket to a company by using a custom phone number field for the ticket and matching it with the phone number field on the contact record. This ensures that the ticket is accurately associated with the correct company and allows your team to access relevant information and provide better support to customers.
Associating HubSpot tickets to contacts, companies, or deals in Insycle
In the Advanced tab of the module, you could also compare the ticket’s phone number field to both the phone number and mobile phone number field for contacts to catch more missing associations.
Using multiple related matching fields to make ticket associations in Insycle
With a template created to associate tickets to contacts, then you could create a second template to associate HubSpot tickets to companies. You could use the ticket’s primary associated company field and match that with the company name on the company record.
The same applies to deals. You can use any field in your database to match and create the associations in bulk.
Once you have built your ticket association templates, you can automate them to run on a set schedule.
Automating ticket association templates to run on a defined schedule in Insycle
Or, you can inject Insycle association templates directly into HubSpot Workflows. This ensures that tickets are associated immediately after they enter HubSpot CRM, and before the ticket is assigned to a member of your team.
Associating tickets automatically in HubSpot Workflows
If you use advanced association labeling for tickets, you can also add, remove, or replace multiple labels in one Insycle operation, helping to improve ticket organization, segmentation, and reporting.
Managing multiple ticket association labels using Insycle
In summary, Insycle simplifies HubSpot ticket associations, providing complete control over how your ticket associations are matched by allowing you to use any record in your database as a matching record. By enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of ticket associations, Insycle empowers businesses to optimize their customer support processes and deliver a superior customer experience.
Insycle equips HubSpot users with the necessary tools to streamline HubSpot ticket associations and tackle common association hurdles. By harnessing Insycle's capabilities, you can seamlessly associate, deduplicate, and rename tickets, boosting your support team's efficiency in handling customer inquiries and refining ticket-related analytics throughout your company. Better ticket management results in better support operations, customer experiences, reporting, and decision-making.
Beyond enhancing HubSpot ticket associations, Insycle offers a robust customer data management platform encompassing data analysis, updating, cleansing, operations, and teamwork. It enables operations teams to systematically address bulk HubSpot data quality issues and automate essential data tasks.
Without Insycle, maintaining optimal data quality can be a daunting challenge for organizations. By leveraging Insycle, you gain insight into your data quality concerns and can rectify them while creating documented processes tailored to your organization. Explore how Insycle can support your data management strategy and improve your HubSpot ticket associations, ultimately elevating customer support effectiveness and the overall customer experience.