To help businesses navigate the many different ways to use HubSpot, Ross Slogrove, UK and Ireland country manager at Ringover shares his top five tips.

Not too dissimilar from tying a tie, there are endless ways a business can use HubSpot to improve customer service, keep better track of team productivity and make life easier for sales agents. Here are just some of the ways a business can ensure they’re getting the most out of the popular CRM software.

1. Integrating it with your phone system

As businesses become more modular, more mobile and more global, employers and employees are no longer tethered to their desks. As businesses expand remotely, traditional telecommunications systems can no longer fulfil their needs. Enter Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Using an internet connection to replace landlines and other telephony hardware is immensely beneficial to any company. Sending and receiving documents, hosting virtual meetings, placing international calls and more can all be done from one device. Employees aren’t even tied down by one phone number per device anymore and can use the same number on a laptop, desktop, smartphone and tablet.

Consolidating all of these communication needs onto one platform is an essential step towards futureproofing both external and internal business communications. However, this can be taken a step further by integrating your CRM system with your VoIP phone system. Doing so unites the superpowers of both systems to streamline every step of the prospecting, customer relations and conversion processes.

Users can, for example, have all contact information instantly displayed via HubSpot whenever a customer calls. Teams will no longer need to trawl their system for contact details, as they can make calls directly from the CRM. Furthermore, all calls, texts, voicemail messages and call recordings are automatically logged in each contact's HubSpot card. 

2. Task management

Considering the fast-paced environment of many businesses and contact centres, HubSpot’s task management tool allows you to manage your to-do lists as well as share tasks with other team members.

The tool can stop your agents from feeling overwhelmed by their workload and targets by letting them set priorities, automated various task statuses, as well as set task deadlines and auto-task creation options.

3. Email productivity and marketing

According to Statista, the number of email users worldwide is expected to reach 4.59 million by 2025. With HubSpot, you can send automated follow-up emails to thank website visitors who have signed up or downloaded something from your website, and test whether you have received their genuine email addresses.

Filtering out unusable contacts will also provide you with a more accurate representation of your performance metrics in regard to your business’ email marketing. Furthermore, you are making life easier for call centre employees who can spend less time seeking out genuine prospects.

4. Lead scoring

Speaking of prospecting, it is important to keep track of and qualify sales leads, which can be overwhelming for call centre agents who interact with countless people every day. With the HubSpot lead scoring tool, you can assign points to each lead based on their behaviour and your interaction with them. In doing so, agents can efficiently prioritise highest quality leads to hopefully convert them to customers.

5. Live chat and chatbot

According to HubSpot’s own Annual State of Service in 2022 report, live chat is the customer service channel that experienced the most significant increase in usage in 2021, with 44% of customer service departments using it. However, some customer questions and requests can be automatically answered without needing human input.

HubSpot enables users to set up chatbots capable of providing the answers to frequently asked questions with the option to connect to an agent if their enquiry has not been handled.

You probably won’t master the 177,000 ways to tie a tie in your lifetime, unless you’ve a lot of spare time. In a busy contact centre, getting to grips with every feature and benefit of your CRM system may also be challenging. Uniting it with your VoIP phone system is key to unlocking most benefits, and it’s vital the two systems aren’t left in silo.