This newsletter was hand-curated while listening to Canyon Moon by Harry Styles.

Service Blog

October 18, 2021

Hi there,

Catch up on your prescribed dosage of customer service with this week's latest and greatest content on the Service Blog.

Enjoy,

Flori Needle

HubSpot Service Blog

What Is Reputational Risk? [+ Real Life Examples]

Business would be so much easier if every possible negative situation you may be involved in came with significant prior warning. Instead, you may be left dealing with issues so unexpected that you could not have even predicted them as a worst-case scenario. Plus, when the crisis at hand has the potential to significantly (and sometimes permanently) damage your reputation and relationships with your customers, there is only added stress. In this post, we'll outline what these types of unexpected risk scenarios are and explain how, thankfully, it is possible to come out on the other side and maintain your reputation with customers, even if it takes some rebuilding.

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19 Excellent Customer Satisfaction Survey Examples [+ Templates]

Every product or service is made for its customers. It's created to either solve their problems or fulfill their needs. Your product or service revolves around your customers and their experiences, and every single day, you're making significant efforts to provide them with a positive experience. This journey of providing your customers with a positive experience starts from the moment they land on your website and extends beyond the moment they become your customer. Without question, delighting them and encouraging them to become loyal customers is a never-ending commitment. As Derek Sivers from CD Baby puts it, "Customer service is the new marketing." And that couldn't be truer.

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How to Use Customer Success Operations to Run Your CS Team Effectively

As the customer success function has matured, it's become better understood and documented. Nowadays, if you want to build a high-performing customer success team, there are well-proven tools, playbooks, and processes you can use to dramatically increase your odds of success. And today, any organization can hire a few CSMs and at least have a decent idea of how to get them started with combating churn or growing customer accounts. But while it's easier than ever to launch a customer success team, the logical next step is growing that team. That's where things get a little more difficult. How can you build and run an effective customer success team at scale? What happens when you have 10, 20, or even 100 CSMs all working together to increase revenue from existing customer accounts? You probably have high-caliber sales and marketing teams doing well at scale -- can you get your customer success function to the same place?

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How to Manage All Emails and Communications in One App

These days, there's an app for everything. Between social media sites, email providers, live chat, and more, there are thousands of ways your customers can reach your business. As a scaling business, you'll want to connect with your customers on the platforms they're using. After all, each channel presents an opportunity for you to strengthen customer relations, increase brand awareness, provide delightful experiences, and more. However, it can be difficult to consistently keep tabs on all these platforms simultaneously. The way to combat this issue is with a shared inbox where your service team can quickly locate customer inquiries regardless of the channel they're coming from. Now you may be thinking, sounds great but... How do I get all of my emails in one place? Good question. In this post, we'll break down what a shared inbox is and how you can use it to manage all of your customer communications in one app. We'll also review six tools that combine your email accounts for you.

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How COVID-19 Impacted Customers Service & What's Next [Data + Expert Tips]

We all know the importance of customer service for retaining customers and scaling a business — and it's only increasing in value over time. Consider, for instance, what happened when I called CorePower Yoga's customer service team last week to complain about an incorrect charge to my account. What could've been a stressful and frustrating experience turned into me actually upgrading my membership. Unfortunately, the past two years have been anything but easy on customer service teams. While customers' expectations for customer service hit an all-time high, customer service reps simultaneously saw more difficult calls and increased escalations in 2020. HubSpot's Industry Data, for instance, shows a consistent rise in support tickets since the beginning of the pandemic — from 6% in March of 2020 to over 90% as of August 2021: However, as customers' challenges and requests increased exponentially as a result of the pandemic, most service teams were still struggling to adjust to a fully remote setup. (Imagine the stress of a conversation with an unhappy customer from your kitchen table, where you might lack a strong phone connection or easy access to peers for help. Yikes.) All of which is to say: COVID-19 had a strong impact on customer service, and in 2022 and beyond we'll continue to see the ramifications of the pandemic on what customers expect from customer service, and how service reps will need to adjust to handle those new expectations. Here, I spoke with six experts in the customer service industry to gather insights into the future of customer service. Let's dive in.

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Ask a Customer Service Expert!

Every week, we ask HubSpot's support team to answer questions about customer service. Have something you want to ask? Submit it below!

How is product-led growth different from traditional growth approaches?

"The main difference between a product-led approach from traditional ones is that the product guides customers through their whole onboarding process. They play around with it long before making a purchase."

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