Episode 99: Business growth via Customer Service focus, more Google My Business tips & a productivity tip

Welcome to Episode 99 of HubShots!

Welcome to HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers who use HubSpot hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

In this episode, we chat about HubSpot's latest research piece that highlights the strong link between business growth and customer service, HubSpot's new bot filtering setting (you should turn it on), Google My Business's new features, tips for managing deals, plus a handy productivity tip.

Listen to the episode here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/099-business-growth-via-customer-service-focus-more-google-my-business-tips

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Recorded: Wednesday 16 August 2017 | Published: Saturday 26 August 2017

Shot 1: Inbound Thought of the Week

The connection between business growth and customer service:

https://research.hubspot.com/reports/customer-success

Growing companies put more focus, time and money into providing excellent customer service.

Customer service = Looking after customers

It’s a virtuous cycle: Business growth is linked to customer service

Growing companies:

• Are more likely to prioritise customer success
• Favour efficiency and serving their customers
• Invest in their customer service programs
• Prioritise training their support representatives
• Focus on retaining their customer support representative (eg many CSRs leave due to it being unglamourous, not viewed as a priority by company, stressful and requires patience, is considered entry level)

Takeaways: there’s value in making customer service a priority instead of an after-thought

Some personal notes: My goal is to never have a ticketing system in our agency - at least not in the current format that support ticket systems work.

Shot 2: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Make sure you have Bot Filtering enabled!

Note: If you created your HubSpot account on or after April 1st, 2017, this feature will be on by default.  So do this for older accounts!

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/reports/can-i-stop-bots-from-skewing-my-website-analytics-data-in-hubspot

Shot 3: Marketing Tip of the Week

Adding posts to your Google My Business account:

http://searchengineland.com/google-posts-now-live-google-business-users-277710

Allows you to add a simple 300 word post, with a CTA button. Just to be META Craig added a post about how to optimise GMB, as the post on the XEN GMB listing:

Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Using filters to find Deals with an Owner who is no longer with the company:

https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/managing-deals-in-your-crm

Tip #1 walks you through creating a filter:

• Owner Assigned Date IS known
• Owner is not any of [list of current users]

Shot 5: Opinion of the Week

Should you guarantee success?

Answer: in digital marketing, the answer is probably no.

https://medium.com/@irinatsumarava/behind-the-scenes-of-software-marketing-guarantees-math-and-educated-guess-e3f0f882df0d

Shot 6: Productivity Tip of the Week

Send people reminders about things they’ve said they will do.

Typical scenario: you’re chatting with someone and they mention they’ll send you something when they get back to the office… often they’ll have the best of intentions but completely forget

So, make it easier on them, and send them a reminder email - but tell them you’ll be sending it to them, so they (1) don’t have to remember it (2) won’t get annoyed when they get your reminder email

Here’s a script to use (eg set this up as a Canned Response in Gmail or a template in HubSpot Sales):

Hi [name]

As per our chat today, here’s the reminder email I promised I’d send you - thanks for [enter details about what they said they’d do]

Cheers,

[your name]

Shot 7: Podcast of the Week

A great insight and look into the way we value and move money.  Walter explores Bitcoin and the long evolution of currency with guests Neha Narula, Don Tapscott, Felix Martin and Max Levchin.

https://overcast.fm/+Iip-hioWU

Shot 8: Resource of the Week

Dark social is traffic that appears as Direct in Google analytics, but likely comes from social sources eg links in Messenger. SME has an article that attempts to give some insight into it - but is mostly useful in highlighting how hard it is to track:

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-track-dark-social-traffic-in-google-analytics/

But one good tip is about adding in sharing buttons for the usual dark social suspects including social sharing links for Messenger, WhatsApp, etc

An interesting aside in the article: use links to Messenger bot replies eg instead of sending to an FAQ page, send to a Messenger thread with a bot reply that contains the FAQ content. It adds people to your contact list so you can potentially communicate with them again in the future

Shot 9: Quote of the Week

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

~ Jeff Bezos

Shot 10: Bonus Links of the Week

Other stuff we’ve been reading and recommend, but had to cut from the show:

https://databox.com/facebook-ad-roi-secrets-revealed

HubSpot discuss the ‘learnings’ from their recent blog email subscription overhaul:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/hubspot-marketing-blog-email-subscription-overhaul

If you’ve been confused about those noreferrer links in WordPress, then this article explains why they were added:

https://blog.templatetoaster.com/rel-noreferrer-noopener-seo/

Tool to investigate:

Some of Craig’s reading:

https://getpocket.com/@craigbailey

Please rate and leave us some feedback as this helps us.