For businesses seeking ways to streamline their customer service operations, HubSpot’s Service Hub offers an array of support features. From a comprehensive ticketing system and a robust knowledge base to omnichannel messaging, live chat, and VOIP calling, HubSpot has positioned itself as a holistic solution for companies aiming to enhance their customer support experience. Its vast functionalities cater to a diverse range of business needs, making it a preferred choice for many.
However, as companies grow, so do their customer queries, support teams, and ticket management challenges. This all translates to a more complex landscape in which to conduct business. To succeed in this landscape, companies need to improve and streamline their ticket routing strategies to improve first response time (FRT) and customer satisfaction and lift team morale.
Efficient ticket routing is crucial for timely responses and ensuring that customer queries reach the right department or individual. Misrouted tickets can lead to delays, customer dissatisfaction, and business losses in aggregate.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) that efficient, advanced HubSpot ticket routing can support:
The efficiency and accuracy of ticket routing are determining factors in the quality of service customer support teams can provide. However, as businesses grow, they require more advanced ticket routing systems to deal with the increase in queries and to reach their KPI goals. Without advanced strategies, meeting these goals can be a challenge.
FRT is a pivotal metric in customer service that reflects the duration between a customer's initial contact and the support team's first response. An efficient FRT is often synonymous with higher customer satisfaction because customers appreciate prompt acknowledgment and action toward their concerns. As customer expectations rise, optimizing FRT becomes imperative. HubSpot’s advanced ticket routing is a valuable asset in this endeavor.
But FRT is one of several metrics—including overall resolution rate, first contact resolution rate, and average resolution time—that all speak to the larger goal of improving customer experiences. Customer experience has never been more important. 95% of consumers say customer service impacts their brand loyalty, citing easy access and professional agents as important factors.
To improve metrics like first response time, resolution rates, and resolution times, ticket routing plays a critical role. How quickly you can ensure that customer queries are routed to the right support rep ultimately impacts how quick and effective their service is.
And optimized ticket routing often means making considerations for several advanced scenarios, including:
Let’s take a closer look at these factors and why they are so important for FRT.
One of the primary factors affecting FRT is the availability of the support team. An optimized ticket routing system considers the team's availability, ensuring tickets are not assigned to agents on PTO, holidays, or general unavailability. In companies where different reps work different shifts, an optimized system would avoid assigning leads to agents outside their working hours. This preemptive measure is crucial to avoid unnecessary delays in responding to customer queries.
Incorporating team availability into ticket assignment processes is crucial to improving response times. Ensuring that tickets are reliably routed to an available rep helps to avoid disaster scenarios where a customer inquiry might go unanswered overnight or over a weekend until the assigned rep returns, harming their experience.
Additionally, the workload of support representatives is a vital consideration. Overloading agents with tickets can significantly hamper FRT, as overwhelmed reps may struggle to respond promptly. Conversely, under-utilization of reps is also undesirable, representing a missed opportunity to improve FRT and other vital KPIs.
However, balancing assignments is not always as straightforward as total ticket numbers. For instance, some reps may end up with a backlog of complex tickets that take longer to resolve, while others may have a lighter load due to a series of straightforward, quick-to-resolve tickets.
In situations where certain tickets may require more time and effort than others, weighted assignments can help hit support KPI goals.
For example, older and more established support reps may be able to resolve tickets more quickly and juggle more tickets without becoming overloaded. You wouldn't want to assign them the same number of tickets as a brand new rep.
The effort required to solve a ticket matters too. A support rep that is routed the most technical queries should have each ticket assignment weighted differently than your first-touch frontline support reps. 80% of consumers feel more emotionally connected to a brand when customer service solves their problem, so ensuring that technical problems end up with the right reps is critical.
A good starting point for evaluating how to weigh assignments to different reps is the average resolution time. Use that to guide how some tickets should be weighed against others.
The combination of factoring support rep availability and workloads into your rep assignment automation systems can profoundly impact first response times and customer experience. 90% of customers rate an immediate response from a business’ customer support as “important” or “very important” according to a recent study from HubSpot.
But there are still other considerations to facilitate an effective HubSot ticket routing system:
The capability to route tickets based on the customer’s profile is a feature that can significantly improve FRT. Frontline employees spend 10% of their time reconciling disconnected communication systems. Ensuring that tickets are routed to the right individual immediately helps to save everyone on your support team valuable time and helps tickets get answered more quickly.
For instance, tickets from VIP customers or those with high-priority issues can be routed to specialized teams or senior agents who can respond quickly and accurately. Or, highly technical tickets may go to a specific rep or team. Or, support tickets that originate from customers in a specific location may be routed to reps that serve that region. The more granular that you can be in your routing, the better.
This level of smart routing ensures that critical tickets receive immediate attention, contributing to an improved FRT.
Further, unexpected scenarios such as system downtimes or sudden influxes of tickets can adversely affect FRT and other metrics. An optimized routing system can dynamically adjust the ticket distribution during such events, ensuring that the FRT remains within acceptable limits and customer satisfaction is not compromised.
An optimized ticket routing strategy is indispensable for achieving an efficient FRT. Businesses can significantly enhance their FRT by considering factors like agent availability, workload balance, customer profiles, and unexpected scenarios, setting a positive tone for the entire customer service experience. Through HubSpot’s advanced routing features, companies are better positioned to meet and exceed the ever-evolving expectations of their customers, fostering stronger relationships and higher levels of customer satisfaction.
HubSpot's Service Hub offers a robust platform for ticket routing. Still, growing companies may want to adopt the advanced strategies we just covered—but may not have the bandwidth to handle the increase in manual management tasks.
This is where Insycle steps in, providing a complementary solution that enhances HubSpot's capabilities while giving users access to a full suite of data management and rev ops tools that can take HubSpot CRM efficiency to the next level.
While Insycle’s standard data management solutions help you improve data cleanliness and organization, the RevOps Acceleration Apps use that data to drive revenue, streamline operations, and improve customer experiences. Let’s look at some of the ways that Insycle’s Assign app helps companies improve their support ticket routing strategies.
Advanced ticket routing systems require advanced segmentation—the ability to slice and dice your ticket data to identify tickets that meet very specific criteria.
With Insycle, you can quickly segment tickets in advanced ways for routing. For example, if you wanted to ensure that high-priority tickets from your top accounts were assigned to a specific person, you would set up a template like this:
This kind of granular segmentation means that the sky's the limit when it comes to how robust you can make your ticket routing systems.
Insycle offers deep flexibility for rep availability. You can quickly select reps to edit their availability settings individually from a simple dashboard:
You can set working hour availability for reps on an individual basis, including time zone settings:
You can set upcoming out-of-office, paid time off, vacation, and unavailable dates in advance. Then the rep will not receive any assignments on those selected days:
On sick days, or any time a rep cannot receive new ticket assignments, you can quickly toggle the rep unavailable as well:
With full control over which reps receive assignments based on availability, you can immediately improve FRT.
For truly advanced ticket routing, you’ll want to take rep workloads into account. With Insycle, businesses can automate ticket assignment and rep load balancing. Insycle will use the criteria you define to automatically route tickets to the selected reps in your template.
For rep workload balancing, you have four assignment rule options:
The Balanced option also allows you to select the time period for which you would like to balance assignments:
With your ticket routing templates completed, you can bundle them into an Insycle Recipe, and inject them directly into your HubSpot Workflows.
In the example above, your full ticket routing design is implemented on every ticket, immediately after it hits HubSpot and before your first communications go out to the customer.
HubSpot Workflows are only available to subscribers of the Service Hub Professional and Enterprise plans, not the Starter plan. Without Workflows, you can’t create custom automated ticket routing solutions. However, Insycle’s built-in automation makes HubSpot ticket routing automation available to Starter plan users.
With Insycle’s scheduling automation, you can route tickets on a predefined schedule. This way, you can ensure that a customer inquiry never sits in your system for more than one hour before being routed to the appropriate support rep.
Additionally, you can use Insycle to perform a number of general data cleaning tasks to ensure your data is in the best shape to facilitate higher-level ticket routing.
Insycle is much more than just a ticket routing solution. It’s a complete HubSpot data management suite. Some of the general data quality tasks that Insycle can solve include:
HubSpot Ticket Deduplication
Insycle allows for advanced HubSpot ticket deduplication using any record in your database as a potential matching field.
HubSpot Ticket Data Standardization
Insycle also helps with data standardization, which can be useful in ticket routing.
For example, if you routed tickets to support reps based on states, you might have many variations for each individual state, like “New York,” “NY,” “New York State,” or “N.Y.” Then, you’d have to account for all of these variations in your routing rules to ensure the tickets are routed to the correct person or team. But with Insycle, you can easily standardize state names, or any field in your database.
Insycle also helps to standardize HubSpot ticket names using your existing data, to make them more searchable and descriptive. Let’s say, for example, that you wanted your ticket names to follow this format:
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:
The final ticket names would look like this:
Billing Question / Acme Inc. / Rob Johnson / 3-8-2023 / 3
A format like this one ensures that your tickets are more searchable and that reps have some context as soon as they see the ticket.
HubSpot Ticket Association
Insycle also allows you to associate HubSpot tickets to companies, contacts, deals, and other custom objects. This would be useful, for instance, if you wanted tickets from a priority company’s stakeholders to be assigned to a higher-level support team.
Ticket routing efficiency is paramount. Insycle complements HubSpot's Service Hub’s robust platform for customer service management, unlocking more advanced controls for ticket routing. By dynamically adjusting to rep availability, enhancing data quality management, simplifying rule management, and offering advanced segmentation options, Insycle ensures that businesses can optimize their ticket routing strategy and provide unparalleled support to their customers.
But Insycle's prowess doesn't stop at ticket routing. It’s a comprehensive solution for all HubSpot data management needs. From deduplication and standardization to continuous optimization and automation, Insycle is a complete HubSpot data management tool.
We invite you to delve deeper, explore the myriad features Insycle offers for HubSpot, and discover how it can revolutionize your customer experience.