To get a full understanding of the experiences your team creates for your customers, you need a firm grasp on the activities your reps are performing on a daily basis: the calls they’re making, the one-to-one emails they’re sending, the live chat conversations they’re having, the meetings they’re booking, and all the rest.
When digging into activity data, understanding the high-level metrics is the first step. How many calls did each rep make? How many live chat sessions were opened? How many meetings were booked?
But the top-level metrics leave out important insights.
To get the whole story, you need to peel back the onion and analyze a layer deeper. How many calls went to voicemail? How long did live chat conversations last? How long did it take sales reps to reply to emails?
The good news: All that next-level data lives in HubSpot. The not so good news: You can’t access it from your HubSpot reports. Until now.
In March 2019, activity properties arrived in your custom reports. In this article, we’ll walk through four custom reports you can build using your newly accessible activity data.
How do custom reports work in HubSpot?
Before diving into specific examples, let's cover the basics of custom reports in HubSpot.
When you want to answer specific questions about your team's process and progress through data, you use the custom report builder. You can easily share your custom reports with your team by adding them to a dashboard and setting up a recurring . Alternatively, your reports can live independently.
Custom reports in HubSpot are built on datasets like contacts, companies, and deals. Datasets have properties. For example, contacts have email address, phone number, and persona. Each custom report you build in HubSpot breaks down one or more datasets by one or more of their properties. You can create a single dataset report (e.g., break down deals by their stage) or — and this is where it gets really powerful — a cross-dataset report (e.g., break down conversation volume by company industry).
Activities in HubSpot — calls, conversations, sales emails, feedback submissions, meetings, notes, and tasks — are a dataset, too. They have properties that provide more detail on their execution, like conversation duration (for live chat sessions), meeting source (for meetings booked), and sentiment (for feedback provided).
With the recent updates, you can now build custom reports around all these activities types and their associated properties.
Can you walk me through the builder?
Sure thing. Building a report takes six easy steps:
Curious to get a deeper look at the custom report builder? Check out the HubSpot Academy lesson:
4 Next-Level Activity Reports
On to the good stuff. Below, find five sample activity reports to get started.
1. Feedback by Support Rep
In Service Hub, you can collect feedback from your customers about any part of their experience with your brand using the customer feedback tool.
Here's one example of a feedback mechanism: Whenever a ticket is closed, send the customer a "customer effort survey" (CES) asking something like, "You recently interacted with us. To what extent do you agree with the the statement 'Support Rep X' made it easy to handle my issue?" The answers range from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).
With the reporting tool, you can break down these feedback responses by the owner of the corresponding ticket to see which of your support reps are creating the most frictionless experiences for customers. Here's the setup:Data set: Tickets and Activities
Properties: Ticket owner (ticket), feedback rating (activity)
Filters: Feedback survey type is "CES" and Ticket Owner is known
Visualization:
2. Sales team activity on target accounts.
If your sales team works on an account-based model, you likely have a set of target accounts that you care the most about. Your sales managers need to know how much your reps are engaging those target accounts — and in what ways. With an activity report, you can track the number and type of activities aimed at target accounts.
Note: As a part of this setup, we've created a custom property called "Target account" to demarcate our ideal list of companies.
Data set: Companies and Activities
Properties: Target Account, Name (Company), Activity type (Activity)
Filters: Target Account is known and Activity type is any of Call, Conversation Session, Meeting, or Email Sent to Contact
Visualization:
3. Conversation response metrics
Today’s buyers want information — and they want it now. Live chat is a great way to meet your customers where they're at and to create a frictionless experience for them.
If you're like HubSpot, you have multiple agents manning your live chat lines for support and sales inquiries from your website and in your app. To ensure every interaction is a good one, it's helpful to track response metrics for each of your reps. How long does it take them to respond to messages? How long are their full chat sessions? How many messages does it take them, on average, to get their customers the answers they're looking for? Use this report to find out.
Data set: Activities
Properties: Agent response time, Agent messages, Session duration, Activity assigned to
Filters: Activity date is this quarter so far, Activity type is conversation session, Activity assigned to is known
Visualization:
4. Recent BDR Notes
If you're a sales manager, the most valuable insights sometimes come from the simplest reports. With activity reporting, one of the newly accessible properties is "Note body." That means, for the first time, you can run a report that displays notes from any of your records.
One example: Create a report that shows last week's deal notes from each of your account execs so that you can quickly understand their activity and more effectively coach them.
Data set: Contacts and Activities
Properties: Email (Contacts), Note body (Activity)
Filters: Note body is known and create date is this month (Activity), Contact Owner is ____ (Contact)
Visualization:
And one more thing...
Building reports with activity properties is only half the fun. With this update, you can now export all your activity reports, too. That means that, for the first time ever, you can now get deal notes, sales emails, call notes, and more from HubSpot into Excel with one click. How awesome is that?
Activity reporting — including the ability to report on your activity properties — is now live to all Professional, Enterprise, and Reporting Add-on accounts.
Ready to try out these new reports?
Want to connect with others on HubSpot tips, tricks, and updates? Head over to the HubSpot Community to join a conversation or start one of your own.
