How To Set Up and Maximize the Hubspot Ticketing System

Learn the ins and outs of the Hubspot ticketing system. This guide will help you set it up and optimize for better customer service and efficiency.

Sep 26, 2024

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How To Set Up and Maximize the Hubspot Ticketing System

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Customer support can be a tough job. Even in the best of times, help desks can get chaotic. Customers are frustrated, and support agents are overwhelmed. Ticketing systems help create order out of the chaos. Hubspot Help Desk Software has a compelling ticketing system that can improve customer service KPIs.

This post will explore the HubSpot ticketing system, including its features, benefits, AI customer support integration, and how to set it up.

What Is the Hubspot Ticketing System?

The HubSpot ticketing system is a tool for managing customer complaints and inquiries. When a customer seeks help, you create a ticket in HubSpot. Tickets help you organize and track the progress of customer issues until they’re resolved. They can also help you identify trends in customer inquiries so you can improve your products and services.

The HubSpot ticketing system is part of the Service Hub, a customer service software that helps you implement and manage an inbound approach to customer service. It includes a shared inbox and integrates with HubSpot’s CRM platform to help teams:

Collaborate on tickets

Manage customer interactions

Streamline communication

Get a Customer Support Team on the Same Page

Almost every company aims to provide the best customer experience possible. That requires an easy-to-use yet highly functional system. It has to work for a wide variety of stakeholders, giving your support team the ability to do what they do best and giving you the necessary tools to effectively manage customer demand and coach your team using relevant metrics.

Streamline Customer Service with HubSpot Tickets

HubSpot Ticketing tools, part of Service Hub, make tracking and resolving customer issues easy for your customer service representatives (CSRs). With HubSpot Tickets, you won’t have to waste time digging into who talked to whom, when they contacted you, what the issue was, and so on. Instead, you can:

Keep track of your customer service tickets in one system and a shared inbox.

View an up-to-the-moment history of the issue.

Organize the tickets by priority, escalate as needed, and give your customers the desired quick resolution.

Automate the Process for Faster Resolutions

HubSpot Tickets also lets you set rules to assign tickets to someone with the capacity for them rather than letting them wait in limbo. This ensures everyone is on the same page, which is necessary for achieving all business goals, not just excellent customer service.

You can spot service-related trends and see where you need to make adjustments, not only to your customer service but also to your products or other services. The built-in analytics tools within the Ticketing System can keep your finger on the pulse of your business.

Contextual Understanding with HubSpot Tickets

The inbound methodology prioritizes content and context, and the HubSpot Ticketing System provides your service reps with the appropriate context to fully understand what’s happening without constantly contacting the customer with follow-up questions. With the ticketing system, you’ll already have the entire story.

Ticket Deflection

Reduce Support Tickets

Automate Support

Scaling Customer Support

Ticket Analysis

Ticket Queue Management

7 Key Benefits of Using the HubSpot Ticketing System

1. Streamlining Ticket Management with HubSpot’s Integrated Tools

In any organization, it's critical to have a ticketing system to manage customer requests. There are many different software tools for tracking customer tickets and managing interactions. Many of these tools help streamline ticket management, but with HubSpot’s ticketing system, you get tools wholly integrated with your customer and contact database.

This enables seamless tracking of customer activity across the platform, allowing your teams to gather more in-depth information about customers and enhance the customer experience.

2. Improving Customer Support Response Time

Another benefit of HubSpot’s ticketing system is that it helps you improve your support team’s time-to-first-response metric. Using alerts and emails to notify service team members when a support request comes in can minimize the delay between a request being submitted and when it’s addressed.

3. Automatically Assigning Support Requests to the Right Customer Service Reps

In some organizations, it’s necessary to have different service team members specialize in different issues to ensure they can adequately answer customer needs. By pairing the ticketing system with a workflow that sorts incoming requests based on the particulars of that request, you can automate the process of assigning requests to the right customer service teams (or individual reps) who are best equipped to handle those requests.

4. Tracking Ticket Progress and Statistics in Real Time

How is your customer support team performing? Are they meeting their SLA goals or do they need help? HubSpot’s ticketing tools collect data about your tickets and customer interactions that you can use to review your service and support team’s efforts and make adjustments as necessary.

5. Enhancing Customer Communication

Through the tickets index, users can click on a ticket name to review the status and, from that ticket record screen, quickly set up as needed the following:

Emails

Phone calls

Meetings

This helps keep your support team in touch with your customers who have submitted report requests. You can further enhance this by creating workflows that assign call customer tasks to support team members based on customer service SLA due dates.

6. Help Your Team Prioritize Their Workload

Effectively triage incoming tickets with the customer history displayed in the contact timeline, tackling the most pressing tickets first. Assign appropriate owners and stages to your tickets so they never get lost or neglected.

7. Use Ticket Data to Identify Service Trends

Create dashboards in your ticketing system to highlight top customer issues and understand agent performance. Use built-in analytics to assess:

Contact volume

Response time

Other key customer experience metrics

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HR and Sales Use Cases for HubSpot Tickets

Traditionally, you’d expect a tool under the service header of the main HubSpot navigation menu to be only helpful for service teams. There are ways to use tickets for your HR processes. Some examples of HR use cases for HubSpot tickets include:

Streamlining Employee Onboarding

Employee onboarding is crucial for any organization, regardless of industry focus. Taking new employees in and giving them the training and information they require to do the work you need them to do is an indispensable part of new hire onboarding.

Streamline Onboarding with HubSpot Ticketing

HubSpot’s ticketing system can help you improve the onboarding process by allowing you to create tickets for new hires in your organization. For example, you could set up a workflow for new employees that, when a contact is registered in your system as a new hire for a particular department, tickets related to that department’s onboarding process are generated for that employee and whoever is in charge of onboarding them. You could then track the employee’s progress towards completing their onboarding task to see if they’re on schedule to complete the process.

In their onboarding tickets, HR and onboarding managers can initiate conversations with the new hire, helping to enhance collaboration between:

New hires

Managers

Managing Employee Requests and Inquiries

Employees aren’t the only ones who can encounter issues with your brand. Sometimes, an employee might need to submit a support request to HR to solve some issue or answer a question they can’t find in their employee handbook or your company’s internal FAQ resource.

Efficient Internal Support Requests with HubSpot Tickets

HubSpot tickets give your employees a fast and easy way to submit requests for support to other team members, track the progress of their inquiries, and reach out to the HR rep working on them, if necessary. This helps give employees a greater sense of engagement with the HR team and lets them know that their requests and inquiries are being followed up on.

Identifying and Addressing Common HR Inquiries

If HR notices that they’re getting a lot of inquiries about the same topic, they can use that opportunity to create an internal resource for employees to answer. A common choice is to create an FAQ page for the question and share the link with employees. You could even distribute it by creating tickets in HubSpot for employees to check the FAQ if it’s a significant update.

Addressing Employee Feedback and Suggestions

According to Zippia, “66% of employees would leave their jobs if they didn’t feel appreciated. Among millennials, this number jumps to a shocking 76%.” Part of ensuring that employees feel appreciated is listening to employee feedback and suggestions about the workplace and responding to them.

This can mean enacting employee suggestions when they would benefit the workplace or explaining why a particular practice is necessary (or should be avoided). For example, in marketing, Jane Doe wanted to assemble gift baskets for her highest-qualified prospects.

Consider Ethical Implications for Gift-Giving

In a general sales business, this might be a good idea to generate some goodwill. In a medical industry where the prospect is a licensed physician, this idea would need more scrutiny since it risks violating ethical guidelines for the industry outlined in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics.

Demonstrate Appreciation and Drive Employee Engagement

In this case, the HR team might collaborate with legal to assemble a response detailing what would be appropriate for a gift basket and the limitations on such gifts. By acting on employee suggestions, or at least listening to and responding to them, HR can help make employees feel more appreciated. This, in turn, helps to drive employee engagement, improving retention and productivity.

Resolving Employee Complaints and Issues

Sometimes, employees may encounter situations that negatively affect their workplace experience. These events can severely impact their engagement with work and, in some cases, even lead to voluntary turnover. In the case of workplace misconduct, there could be lawsuits against the company.

The High Cost of Workplace Misconduct

Forbes estimates that workplace misconduct costs U.S. businesses $20.2 billion in a year, just the average cost of hiring a new worker to replace the one who leaves. The article notes that “it does not include any legal, compensation or other costs associated with the departure or replacement of employees and is based on a five-year estimate.”

Address Workplace Issues for Improved Engagement

Addressing workplace complaints and issues that negatively impact the employee experience is crucial for maintaining employee engagement. Using the ticketing system to address commonplace problems like a lack of necessary resources to complete work can be helpful.

Create an Anonymous Complaint System for Serious Issues

For more severe complaints like workplace harassment, creating an anonymous complaint system that allows employees to submit their complaints without fear of retaliation is necessary. A University of Massachusetts Amherst report states, “half of discrimination and harassment complaints produce retaliation.” So, this may require a different solution than submitting a ticket in HubSpot.

Sales Use Cases for HubSpot Tickets

Another team you might think would benefit from something other than tickets would be sales. Most of the time, you would expect your sales reps to live in the:

Deal Pipeline

Conversation inbox

Sequence tools, not the tickets tool

Leveraging HubSpot Tickets for Sales Success

There are ways for sales reps to use the ticketing system in HubSpot to enhance their sales efforts and help move prospects along the journey to becoming customers. Here are some potential use cases for the HubSpot ticketing system in a sales team’s operations:

Managing Prospect Inquiries and Requests

What's the best course of action when a customer has a question or a request on a sales call that the sales rep can’t resolve right away? In most cases, the best course of action is for the sales rep to let the customer know that they can’t provide an immediate answer, but that they will:

Research it

Ask a specialist

Take other appropriate action and move on with the call.

Streamline Follow-Up with HubSpot Tickets

Using HubSpot tickets can help the sales rep stay on track and provide the customer with an answer to their question. In the conversations inbox, the rep can generate a ticket from a conversation and use that to assign tasks for other specialists in the organization to answer or to track their progress toward answering the customer’s question. Once the answer is provided, the sales rep can close the ticket, which will be logged into the HubSpot system.

Enhancing Cross-Department Collaboration

Sales team members often need to work closely with other departments to ensure they can consistently hit their sales targets. The most obvious example would be marketing since they help provide sales reps with qualified leads to pursue and craft the marketing messaging that shapes a prospect’s initial opinion of a brand.

Enhanced Collaboration with HubSpot Ticketing

Sales reps need to contact the service team to arrange live demos or answer questions from prospects. Here, the ticketing tools in HubSpot can be useful collaboration channels. For example, sales team members can create tickets in HubSpot for marketing team members to answer questions about current lead generation efforts. Or, a ticket could be made by marketing to help with the marketing-to-sales handoff of qualified prospects, such as:

By passing along key concerns

Requests in ticket form

If an internal communication logged in the conversations inbox warrants it, a sales rep could also create a ticket for other team members in the inbox. For HubSpot users, the sky’s the proverbial limit regarding how the platform's tools can be used.

How Do HubSpot Tickets Work?

HubSpot Tickets work by integrating with your customer support email address. Once you've set up your account, emails sent to your customer support address will automatically convert into tickets and be added to your dashboard. From there, you can:

Assign each ticket to a team member

Add notes and updates

Set a status for each ticket (e.g. open, closed, pending)

The HubSpot ticketing system helps businesses provide better customer support by organizing, prioritizing, and tracking customer issues in a single, central dashboard.

How Automated Ticket Creation Works

When customers contact your business with a problem, they likely want a solution as quickly as possible. The last thing they want to do is fill out a long, tedious form before getting the help they need. With HubSpot Tickets, you can reduce friction for your customers and support team by automatically creating tickets from customer emails. When a customer emails your support address, HubSpot Tickets will create a detailed ticket from the email, allowing your team to resolve the issue without any manual data entry.

Assigning HubSpot Tickets to Team Members

Once a ticket is created, you can assign it to a specific team member responsible for resolving it. This helps eliminate confusion about who is handling the problem and allows for accountability within your customer support team.

Managing HubSpot Tickets

You can view all tickets and their current status from your HubSpot dashboard. You can open a ticket to view details such as:

The conversation history

Any notes added by team members

A ticket will start with a status of “open,” but as your team works to resolve the issue, you can update the status to “pending” if you’re waiting on more information from the customer or need to contact someone else for help. Once the issue is resolved, you can close the ticket.

Ticketing Tools

Service Hub Hubspot

Hubspot Operations Hub

Hubspot Notion Integration

Hubspot Help Desk

Hubspot Tickets

Call Center Ticketing System

Best Ticketing Apps

How to Set up the Hubspot Ticketing System

Customize Ticket Properties to Streamline HubSpot Ticket Management

HubSpot provides a variety of helpful default properties for tickets, but they can’t account for every business’ unique needs and processes. To help streamline your customer support in the HubSpot tool, creating custom ticket properties in HubSpot is wise.

Here’s how to create a custom property for tickets:

Go to the settings menu (click the gear icon in the upper right of the main HubSpot navigation menu).

Go to “Properties” under the “Data Management” header in the left navigation menu of your settings.

In the “Properties” tab, click on “Create Property.”

Click the “Object Type” dropdown and select “Ticket” from the slide-in menu.

Assign a group for the property.

Create a label for the new custom ticket property.

Click “Next” to continue.

Choose a field type from the dropdown menu:

Text input, single checkbox, date picker, number, file, rich text, or HubSpot user: Confirm that the label explains what information is needed from the contact

Multiple checkboxes, dropdown select, or radio select: Create labels and internal values for each option in your multiple-choice, dropdown, or radio select property.

Calculation: Build a calculation in the “Build calculation” tool

Click “Next” or “Create” (varies depending on field type chosen).

If “Next,” choose property visibility and validation rules (choices vary based on field type).

Property visibility rules may include:

Whether to show in forms, pop-ups, and bots

Whether to show in search results

Validation rules may include:

Requiring unique values

Setting minimum or maximum value limits

Limiting character counts or decimal places

Restricting to numerical values

Forbidding special characters

Only allowing the selection of specific dates (future dates only, past dates only, specific date ranges, or any date)

Only date submissions falling on a weekday (Mon-Fri) are allowed.

Click “Create” to finish.

Automate Ticket Creation in the HubSpot Ticketing System

Automating ticket creation is one way to streamline ticket management with the HubSpot ticketing system. You can do this by creating forms that automatically generate new tickets when customers fill them out.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create custom support request forms in HubSpot:

Click on the “Marketing” dropdown in the main HubSpot navigation menu.

Mouse over “Lead Capture” at the bottom of the dropdown.

Click on the “Forms” option from the menu that pops up.

In the forms index, click on “Create form” in the upper right of the index page.

Choose whether to create an embedded form or a standalone page and click “Next.”

Scroll down the left navigation menu, check the “Support” form preset, and click “Next” or start from a blank template.

If creating from a “Support” preset, turn on the option to create tickets from the form and connect them to a conversation inbox or help desk. Otherwise, you’ll get the option to do this when you attempt to add a form field related to a ticket.

In the “Form” tab, start customizing your support form by dragging and dropping fields from the “existing properties” list or creating new properties using the “Create new” option above the existing properties list. While a blank template only has the Email property by default, the default properties of a “Support” form are:

Ticket Name

Ticket Description

One custom field to create for this form could be an “issue type” field with multiple checkboxes that allow users to pick one that best describes their issue in brief—things like “missing instructions” or “report defect” which you could have them explain in more depth using the multi-line text in the Ticket Description field.

Click on a field in the form to do things like renaming the field label, adding help text to provide guidance on what customers should do, and set logic triggers for specific situations—for example, if there’s a product defect, you could have a conditional form field appear asking for the product lot # from the box.

Click on the “Options” tab to set what happens on a form fill, adjust customer lifecycle stages based on form fills (setting them to a “support request” stage, for example), and who to notify when the form is filled out.

Use the “Style & Preview” tab to customize the look of your form and ensure it meshes with your branding guidelines.

Use the Automation tab to create a quick workflow based on the form fill to further automate what happens when a contact submits the form.

Give your form an easy-to-remember and search for name like “Customer support request form.”

15. Click “Publish” or “Update” when finished (the box changes depending on whether you’re making a new form or updating an existing form). Suppose you enabled the automated creation of tickets or set up a ticket creation workflow using the automation tab. In that case, your form will now generate tickets automatically based on form fills as they happen.

6 Tips to Prioritize HubSpot Tickets

1. Determine Company Priorities

To operate an effective ticket management system in HubSpot, you need to have different priority levels defined:

What makes a ticket a high priority?

What makes a ticket medium or low priority?

Those answers can be subjective, so creating some standards that align with your company goals is best. One lens to look at the priority level is business criticality:

What is necessary for a department to function?

What’s required to service a customer properly?

You can also consider factors like:

The scope of the problem

Its impact on revenue

How long the issue will take to solve

Collaborative Priority Level Guidelines

Establishing the guidelines for company-wide priority levels will require the input of not just members of your support team, but also from leadership from every single customer-facing department. Those other team members can also provide insight into the factors that indicate urgency for them and their customers.

2. Establish Pipeline Stages

Ticket pipeline stages represent the status a ticket has in the resolution process. You want to keep your system as concise as possible, while still making it clear what needs to be done with tickets at each stage. For example, a support pipeline could have the stages:

Assigned

In Progress

Waiting on Feedback

Closed

On Hold

Define Ticket Pipeline Stages

Generally, a ticket pipeline works best with five to seven stages. To determine what these stages should be for your organization, talk to your support team about the steps a ticket takes to complete. Then, clear documentation about the definitions of those stages must be created.

3. Create Different Ticket Pipelines

If your company has multiple operations divisions or you want to use your ticket system for multiple purposes, like customer support and customer success, you can create separate pipelines for each team. For each pipeline, you can create different pipeline stages that are specific to that team's needs.

Dividing tickets up among the different pipelines streamlines the triaging process and makes it easier for each team to prioritize the tickets that are meant for them.

4. Use HubSpot Ticket Properties

HubSpot ticket properties help you determine at a glance what’s going on with a ticket. All the ticket properties can be viewed by opening a ticket record, and you can also select the properties that are most important to your team to appear in a sidebar you can view from your ticket pipeline.

In addition to the out-of-the-box ticket properties, you can also create custom properties. For example, you can create a “category” property to indicate where the expertise to support with the ticket needs to come from.

5. Set Tasks Within Tickets

In addition to viewing and editing properties within tickets, you can also add tasks to tickets. Tasks act as reminders for the smaller deliverables that need to be completed before a ticket can be closed. These tasks can be created and marked off within the ticket itself, and you can even jump from one ticket to the next as you progress through different tasks.

6. Leverage Workflows

Workflows have a wide variety of use cases within HubSpot because they can automate just about anything. For ticket management, they’re particularly useful for updating properties, communicating and managing response time.

Ticketing Management System

Ticket Management Tools

Most Popular Ticketing Systems

Hubspot Autoresponder

Smart Ticketing System

Ticketing Automation

Hubspot Ticket Automation

Helpdesk Integrations

Best Help Desk Tools

Automated Ticket Routing

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