HubSpot’s ticketing system allows companies to keep track of service requests and manage everything from one shared team inbox.
When companies handle customer support and service requests in HubSpot, they can connect all of their marketing, sales, and support data within the CRM. The customer records your sales team updates throughout negotiations are the same records support reps will reference months later, when they help the customer with a problem.
This sort of easy access across your organization trickles down into better experiences for customers. And the customer experience has never been more important. In fact, two-thirds of companies now compete primarily based on customer experience.
But how you manage your support tickets is a critical factor in the customer experience you provide. Your ticket management influences response time, determines whether a ticket is appropriately routed within HubSpot CRM, and has the potential to save both your team and the customers time while providing quick and accurate answers to their questions.
Effective HubSpot ticket management ensures that support team members have the information they need on each customer when they need it, without having to dig through multiple records or disconnected systems to find it.
HubSpot tickets are a critical piece of the puzzle for delivering excellent customer experiences. Contacting support is the most direct way customers communicate with your brand at all customer journey points. To provide excellent service, you need to manage your tickets well and have a defined process for how they move through your internal systems.
For many companies, customer support plays a role in the entire customer lifecycle. Before buying a product, customers are likely to ask questions of support. During the sales process, they may clarify points and questions with support reps. If, for example, you offered a free trial, customer support could be a critical tool for helping them get the most out of that trial period. Once they become customers, your support team will likely be the department they are in contact with most often.
So managing HubSpot tickets is a critical component of data management and customer lifecycle management. But often, this is more complex than it would seem.
There are many ways in which managing HubSpot tickets is more complex than an outsider might think:
Let’s take a closer look at these friction points.
Duplicate HubSpot tickets can be a big problem—and can be created in multiple ways.
When you connect HubSpot Inbox with tickets and instruct HubSpot to create new tickets for all inbound conversations, you can end up with a steady stream of consistent duplicates. Any time a customer opens a new email thread rather than responding by replying to an existing email thread, HubSpot will create a new ticket. Additionally, spam and promotional emails can trigger new ticket creation in the system, causing clutter.
Toggling automatic ticket creation on or off in HubSpot
If you integrate with third-party help desk apps or similar software, there can also be situations where those integrations are not as seamless as you would have liked, creating duplicates.
Additionally, a customer might manually open multiple tickets. Maybe they didn’t get an expedient response and are hoping that creating another request will lead to action. Or maybe a customer misunderstands their problem and believes they are asking two separate questions when the answers are actually related.
But that creates confusing situations where two reps may be assigned to different tickets, helping the same customer with the same problem. It’s easy to get your wires crossed or deliver conflicting information to the customer if you lack visibility into the interactions they have had with other support reps.
Further, duplicate tickets hurt the usability of your system as a whole. When your team wants to dig into an account's interactions with your brand, duplicate tickets make it difficult to find that information. This leads to situations where your team is missing critical context.
Deduplicating HubSpot tickets helps improve experiences for customers and your teams.
When your tickets are not appropriately tied to related contact and company records, it impacts your ability to analyze and report on your operations. This leads to fractured customer experiences and misinformed decisions.
In certain situations, tickets are more likely to be created and not properly associated with contacts and companies.
If you have HubSpot set to create a ticket automatically when a customer emails you, you can end up with unassociated tickets. Whenever a customer emails you from an email that does not match their contact record, HubSpot will create a new unassociated ticket. To further the problem, if you have automatic contact creation enabled, HubSpot will also create a duplicate contact when a customer emails you from a different email, such as their personal email.
Then, further, if you have automatic company creation turned on, if the email domain does not match HubSpot’s internal company database, a new company record will be created. This means that you could create duplicate tickets, contacts, and companies that are all errantly associated with each other from a single customer email.
Unassociated tickets can also result when your team creates tickets by hand. It is up to your support rep to properly associate the record with other related records in HubSpot. But they won’t remember to do so each time.
Associating contacts and companies to tickets in HubSpot
When a ticket is not associated with a contact or company, then there is no additional context to accompany the ticket. This means that any rep that is assigned the ticket will be working without any relevant information about past interactions with your team. It’s easy to see how this could result in suboptimal experiences for customers.
And without those associations in place, your teams miss out on valuable insights and may make decisions based on inaccurate reporting.
Ticket names are often not descriptive enough, which makes them difficult to search for in HubSpot.
When a rep manually creates a ticket, they need to fill in a lot of information, including the ticket name. While you can develop naming conventions for your tickets, you ultimately rely on your support reps to follow the convention. And as many companies learn, reps often do not follow the convention in the long term.
An example of HubSpot tickets without helpful naming conventions
While you can alter the required fields in the ticket submission form to make the process more streamlined for your reps, that comes with the tradeoff of collecting less information about each ticket. Further, information that you don’t collect can’t be injected into ticket names to make them more searchable, which is a common strategy for improving ticket usability in HubSpot.
When creating new tickets automatically from conversations, the ticket name will default to the email subject line. This can be helpful. But you are still relying on customers to use a subject that is descriptive enough to search in your HubSpot CRM. Often, customers may use similar subject lines, such as “Billing Question,” which can make it difficult to search for particular tickets. HubSpot also pulls the email body to use in the ticket description, which is sometimes helpful for ticket searches.
Additionally, tickets that come in through forms all receive the default name “New Ticket Created Through Form Submission,” which makes them impossible to search or tell apart without diving into the actual contents of each ticket.
If your ticket is automatically created from the Facebook Messenger integration, you have few options for naming conventions. HubSpot defaults to using dates for the names of tickets that come in through Facebook Messenger. So any tickets received on a specific day will all have similar, nondescript names. You could inject the Messenger Chat ID or the Thread ID into the ticket names, making each ticket name unique—but that wouldn’t make them particularly searchable since every ticket name would be a random string of numbers.
All of these issues contribute to a single problem—difficulty searching your tickets to find relevant or specific conversations or segment them for reporting and analysis. This impedes the ability of your organization to gather information on specific contacts and accounts and results in interactions that are less informed than they should be.
There are many default properties for HubSpot Tickets.
These, combined with any custom field you create for tickets, give you many opportunities to collect information on customers that come to you with questions or problems.
But the vast majority of companies only use a fraction of the fields available within tickets. Many only collect the required fields and any fields that are populated when HubSpot automatically creates ticket records.
When a support rep creates a ticket manually, they are expected to fill in all of the relevant fields by hand.
Creating a ticket in HubSpot
However, many of them won’t.
And while you can make more fields required before reps can create a new support ticket, you may find that you receive pushback. Reps would rather be helping customers than doing additional manual data entry.
Tickets that are created through HubSpot Inbox conversations will only have the auto-populated fields, name, description, and any identified associated records.
But every field you don’t collect data for represents missing context that could be used to engage with those customers. The more you know, the better you can serve your customers.
HubSpot offers solutions for ticket routing and assignment within HubSpot CRM.
You can automatically assign conversations to reps based on your rules, allowing new conversations to be assigned to specific teams and users automatically. You can assign tickets to teams based on the HubSpot pipeline that the team is assigned to. So a ticket in your sales pipeline can automatically go to your sales reps, while a ticket in your support pipeline goes to the support team.
You can also automatically assign tickets to individual reps based on the pipeline the ticket belongs to. Perhaps you have an “Enterprise Sales” pipeline that will direct a ticket to a specific sales rep that deals with those accounts.
Automatically assign conversations in HubSpot
But using that feature, you can only automatically assign tickets to currently listed owners on the contact property. And while this might be enough for many companies, those that want more control over where and how tickets are routed will need to use Workflows.
Using Workflows’ built-in features, you can route tickets and assign owners to them based on the ticket status.
Manage and route HubSpot tickets in Workflows
Or you can create your own custom Workflow and even go a bit deeper with advanced assignments based on other fields in your database.
For example, say you wanted to reassign tickets to a specific person once a new deal was created. You could do that using Workflows.
When associated contacts have a new deal created, assign them to a specific ticket owner
Or, maybe you want customers that reside in a specific geographic area to be assigned to a specific person or team. Or maybe tickets that have been marked “High Priority” should be elevated to a manager.
In the end, your ability to get truly creative and build in-depth processes that streamline your operations is only as good as your data. If you don’t collect data or collect large amounts of unstructured garbage data in fields, you simply can’t build the systems you need to.
And all of these issues can be further complicated if you have other support or help desk integrations to consider.
Often, your HubSpot tickets will integrate directly with a third-party help desk app that is a bit more robust than the support feature set offered by HubSpot. Sometimes companies have legacy help desk systems but still want to run their ticketing through HubSpot itself.
But every system will have its own wrinkles to consider—and questions you need answered—to fully understand how these integrations might impact your ticket management processes in HubSpot.
Having a third-party help desk integration, or any integration that creates and interfaces with your tickets in HubSpot, adds new complications to an already complex situation.
Insycle is a comprehensive solution, helping companies plug holes in their ticket management in HubSpot, solve ticketing issues, and streamline their support operations.
Insycle can help to alleviate many of the issues associated with ticket management in Hubspot by:
Let’s take a closer look.
Duplicate tickets in HubSpot can create many problems. Duplicates can cause sales reps to step on each other's toes when helping customers or create a situation where a customer receives conflicting information from different reps.
Insycle allows you to match duplicate tickets using any field in your HubSpot database. This includes all fields for the ticket object and any custom fields for the object. So, for example, you could deduplicate tickets using an ID from an integrated help desk system.
Deduplicate HubSpot tickets using any field to match in Insycle
You also have complete control over how data is retained and the resulting master record after the merge. For instance, in tickets synced to a third-party help desk solution, you can keep the sync intact by using Insycle to ensure that the master record for the merge is the synced record.
Setting the master record to be the ticket record with a HelpScout ID to keep the sync intact
Insycle offers unparalleled control over duplicate identification. You decide which fields to use to identify duplicate tickets—and what should happen when the merge takes place to retain your most important data across duplicate tickets.
Tickets can only be used to their full potential when they are accurately associated with the companies they belong to, their personal contact record, and deal records.
Not only do these associations offer the context that your team needs to provide great service, but they also impact reporting and decision-making based on that reporting.
Using Insycle, you can ensure these associations are reliably in place. For example, you could associate the ticket to the company based on a custom phone number field for the ticket and match it to the phone number field on the contact record.
Associating HubSpot tickets to contacts, companies, or deals in Insycle
In the Advanced tab, 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
For associating 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. With Insycle, you can take control of your ticket associations to help your reps gain valuable context when using tickets, and report on support activities more clearly.
Ticket names are a big pain point for companies. You rely heavily on your support reps to follow instructions when naming tickets—but they don’t always do so. You may have features that create and name tickets automatically, but those ticket names are often not unique, making them difficult to search for.
Insycle can help you standardize naming conventions by injecting data from any field in HubSpot CRM into your ticket name.
For example, you could inject things like the company name, the ticket creator, ticket open dates, and the number of times they’ve contacted support.
Then, you could use slashes or something similar to separate the injected data. So in this example, a ticket name template might look like:
“ticket name / company name / ticket created by / ticket open date / number of times contacted support.”
Here’s what the template would look like in Insycle:
Rewriting HubSpot ticket names using data from other ticket fields
The resulting ticket names would look like this:
Billing Question / Acme Inc. / Rob Johnson / 3-8-2023 / 3
Rewriting existing and future ticket names with a standardized convention ensures that your tickets are more searchable and that reps have more context as soon as they see the ticket.
Specific HubSpot fields probably play a role in your defined processes or reporting. When tickets are missing those fields, your processes could be thrown off and your reporting could be inaccurate.
Insycle makes it easy to identify records that are missing specific fields with the Cleanse Data module.
Select the field you would like to analyze. Then, Insycle will surface all tickets that have that field missing.
Evaluating HubSpot tickets that are missing critical data fields in Insycle
This will help you to identify issues in your processes and reporting. Then, you can enrich those fields with the necessary data to improve operations and reporting, eliminating inefficiencies due to missing data.
In larger companies, ticket routing and assignment logic can get complicated. Maybe you have many different products or geographical regions you service. Or maybe you want to route leads based on previous interactions with your company.
While these types of solutions are possible using HubSpot Workflows, you must have a professional version of HubSpot to gain access to Workflows. Without it, you cannot create more in-depth load-balancing systems for support tickets.
But Insycle makes load balancing easy.
First, you can quickly evaluate your tickets to get a bird’s-eye view on which tickets have been assigned to whom. You can filter the results using any field in your database.
Analyzing current ticket assignments in Insycle
Then, you can re-assign tickets based on your findings.
Updating HubSpot ticket owners for load balancing in Insycle
That will help you to fix a ticket load imbalance in the present. But what if you want to automate ticket assignments in the future?
With Insycle, you can create rules around automatic ticket assignments to ensure that every ticket ends up in the hands of the right person.
For example, if you wanted to assign tickets in a specific pipeline to a specific rep, you could do something like this:
Creating ticket routing rules in Insycle
Finally, you can automate templates to ensure that you are enforcing your ticket assignment rules on an ongoing basis. You can schedule these templates to run hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.
Automating HubSpot ticket routing on a set schedule
Or, you can inject them straight into your HubSpot Workflows to properly route your tickets immediately after entering HubSpot CRM.
Routing tickets in HubSpot Workflows with Insycle
Using Insycle's HubSpot Workflow integration, you can automate ticket management tasks like ticket routing, data cleaning, associations, or deduplication, ensuring that they happen immediately after the ticket is created and before your support agent begins to engage with the customer.
Insycle provides HubSpot businesses with the resources they need to properly manage HubSpot tickets and to overcome common HubSpot ticket management obstacles. With Insycle, you can effectively deduplicate, associate, route, and rename tickets to improve processes and reporting on tickets across your organization. Further, Insycle can help you to deal with common third-party help desk integration issues that plague tickets.
But regulating tickets in HubSpot is not the only data management task Insycle can help with.
Insycle is a complete customer data management platform that helps with data analysis, updating, cleaning, operations, and collaboration for all of your HubSpot data. It empowers operations teams to fix HubSpot data quality issues in bulk and automate your most important data tasks.
Without Insycle, data quality is a major challenge for organizations. With Insycle, you gain visibility into your data quality issues and can fix them while creating documented processes for your organization. Learn more about how Insycle can help you manage customer data in HubSpot.