Free trial & Upgrade to HubSpot Service Hub Professional

[afolson]

In order for end users to see their open tickets, live chats, etc. in our HubSpot service desk we'll need to upgrade our HubSpot account. We're currently on a free tier that doesn't support this. On the back end we can see a user's tickets and chats but there's no way for them to view these and follow up without emailing us.

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/inbox/set-up-a-customer-portal

Cost: $450/mo (or $5,400/yr) for 5 users, $90/mo/user for additional users.

Upgrading will also get us access to:

• User feedback surveys (can create campaigns for things like alpha/beta, general NPS surveys, and "how was our support?" surveys)
• A knowledgebase so we can post FAQs/things that don't quite fit into the docs but should be documented somewhere. We may or may not want to use this.

[afolson]

I'll start a free trial of this to make sure it meets our needs next week.

[afolson]

cc @aaronsteers @tayloramurphy in case you have thoughts on requirements for this. To me a user should just be able to log in, see a list of live chats/tickets, and follow up with us as needed.

In the future I think we should embed this list in Cloud ui so they don't have to leave our platform to see this info. (there was an issue in the dragon repo about this too but I can't find it now)

Related: https://github.com/meltano/cloud-support/issues/8

[tayloramurphy]

@afolson I think those are the base requirements. I think we'll need a deeper discussion about support as we get deeper into the Alpha and Beta. Some companies have that in-app chat support which is something I don't think we should do, but good to explicitly discuss.

[afolson]

Reached out to Paige Maslar pmaslar@hubspot.com about free trial and startup pricing

[afolson]

Free trial started. This gives us access to a knowledgebase (we may not need this but we'll have to put info on getting help there) and a ticket portal for customers to see their tickets.

[afolson]

If you want to play around:

• Create a contact for yourself in hubspot under a personal email.
• Add this contact to the "AF TEST" list in HubSpot. This should automatically send an invite to the portal to your personal email. Register through the invite link.
• Email support@meltano.com to create a test ticket.
• Log in with your personal email to view or open tickets.

[afolson]

Looks like this will do what we need. Our free trial expires this week and we can reach out to our rep to upgrade whenever we're ready.

[aaronsteers]

@afolson - Thanks very much for getting us singed up and for testing this out.

@magreenbaum, @tayloramurphy, @seth-meltano, and @DouweM - My take is that we probably do need to pay for the additional features here and we should start using this for Alpha/Beta customers when the issue is production-impacting. My preference would probably be to start rolling this out now so we have inhouse experience and practices by the time we start Beta. What do you think?

One risk/caveat to call out: if we find there are additional features we'd like, or a better price elsewhere, we would evaluate then whether its worth migrating to another option. (Likely this won't be necessary, but just calling it out.)

[tayloramurphy]

@afolson will you do a brief demo of this during the DevRel Sync? I agree with aJ that this is worth doing, but just want to make sure i understand it since I haven't been able to work with it myself just yet.

[afolson]

@tayloramurphy Can do!

[DouweM]

They'll disable our custom domain name in 89 days as we haven't upgraded to a paid plan yet.