Understand the key differences between these powerful HubSpot Service Hub features.
It's easy to get these two HubSpot features confused! Here's a breakdown of their differences and why you might choose one, the other, or both:
HubSpot Service Pipelines:
- Focus: Visualizing and managing your entire customer service process. Think of it like a workflow for different types of service requests.
- Function: Organizes tickets into distinct stages with automation to move tickets along, assign tasks, trigger emails, etc. This helps standardize your service delivery.
- Example: You might have separate pipelines for "Bug Reports," "Feature Requests," and "Onboarding" with unique stages and automation for each.
HubSpot Help Desk:
- Focus: The central hub for managing and responding to customer inquiries. It's where tickets land and get worked on.
- Function: Provides tools like a universal inbox, ticketing system, live chat, and a knowledge base to handle customer support requests.
- Example: Customers submit a ticket through a form, email, or chat, and it appears in the help desk for your team to address.
Why choose one, the other, or both?
- Just Service Pipelines: If you have complex service processes with multiple steps or need to differentiate how various service requests are handled.
- Just Help Desk: If you need a basic system to organize and respond to customer inquiries without complex workflows.
- Both: This is the most common scenario. You use the help desk to manage incoming tickets, and service pipelines organize and automate the process of resolving those tickets based on their type or complexity.
Essentially, the help desk is the where of customer service (the central location for tickets), while service pipelines are the how (defining the steps to resolution). Using both together creates a powerful system for efficient and organized customer service in HubSpot.