How to Create Tickets in HubSpot to Improve Your Processes

Whether you're handling customer support, technical requests or internal creative tasks, HubSpot’s ticketing system is a versatile tool that can streamline your processes. One of the primary advantages of HubSpot tickets is their integration with your CRM, allowing you to connect tickets to associated contacts, companies and deals. This provides a comprehensive view of customer interactions across marketing, sales and service channels.

Unlike more robust systems, HubSpot’s ticketing function is user-friendly and doesn’t require extensive development resources, making it ideal for marketing and account management teams. HubSpot tickets are incredibly versatile too—you don't have to only keep them siloed to customer support!

• Customer Support: Manage and resolve customer queries and issues efficiently.
• Internal IT Requests: Track and prioritize technical issues and requests from employees.
• Marketing Requests: Organize and prioritize incoming requests for collateral, social posts or copy from internal teams.

What Are HubSpot Tickets?

Tickets in HubSpot serve as a centralized point for capturing and tracking any type of inquiry or issue that requires resolution. This could range from customer and technical support tickets to internal requests from other departments or even clients. The ticketing feature is available for free, regardless of whether you’ve purchased the Service Hub, making it accessible to all HubSpot users. There are three ways to create a ticket in HubSpot:

1. Manual Creation: Ideal for requests received over the phone or in person. You can create tickets from the Tickets page or directly from a contact’s record.
2. Connected Inbox: By connecting a generic support email address to your HubSpot inbox, any incoming emails will automatically create tickets. This ensures no requests are lost, even if team members are on vacation.
3. Forms: Allow customers to create their own tickets via forms. This method ensures you gather all necessary information upfront, streamlining the resolution process.

Anatomy of a HubSpot Ticket

Understanding the structure of a HubSpot ticket is crucial for effective management. Here’s a breakdown:

1. Ticket Dashboard: Similar to the Sales Hub, the ticket dashboard allows you to view tickets in a list or board format. You can sort and filter tickets by various criteria such as date, stage, owner and priority.
2. Ticket Record: Each ticket record displays key information in the left-hand sidebar, which is customizable. The middle column logs activities, and the right-hand column highlights ticket associations.
3. Custom Properties: You can create custom properties for tickets, ensuring that users provide necessary information through dropdown fields or other inputs.

Creating Ticket Pipelines

Ticket pipelines in HubSpot function similarly to deal pipelines in the Sales Hub but are designed to track the back-and-forth movement of tickets. Free and Starter Service Hub users get one pipeline, while Pro and Enterprise users can create multiple pipelines to handle different types of requests.

Standard ticket stages include:

• New
• Waiting on Contact
• Waiting on Us
• Closed

You can customize these stages and add additional statuses if your ticketing process requires it. For instance, you might add an approval step or require specific documentation before progressing a ticket.

Progressing and Closing Tickets

Tickets can be manually progressed by dragging and dropping them through stages in the ticket dashboard or updating their status directly in the ticket record. To close a ticket, simply populate the required resolution field.

Automation can significantly enhance your ticket management efficiency. By creating workflows or enabling automation, ticket statuses can automatically update based on email interactions between you and the contact. This helps keep track of which tickets need attention and which are waiting for further information.

You might consider creating automatic progression for things like:

• Automatically creating/progressing/closing a ticket based on a property using a workflow
• Automatically creating/progressing/closing a ticket when an email is sent in the conversations inbox
• Automatically creating/progressing/closing a ticket when a form is submitted

Reporting on Tickets

HubSpot offers robust reporting features to help you analyze your ticketing process. The Service Analytics dashboard provides insights into ticket volume and time in pipeline over specified date ranges. Additionally, the Reports tab offers out-of-the-box reports and the option to create custom reports to measure your performance.

Consider a few questions when building your reports:

• What metrics are important to you: resolution time? Number of resolved tickets? How many tickets each team member resolves?
• How does your ticket relate to other items: for example, if you use tickets to request content items from your internal marketing team, how might you compare your ticket metrics to your key marketing metrics?
• What other ways would you want to compare tickets: do you want to see how quickly tickets are resolved for evangelist customers vs. your average customer? Priority levels?