Founded in 1941, MMLJ makes industrial blast tanks, including the Dustless Blasting machine that put them into the spotlight as an innovator in their industry.
But their machines aren’t the only thing that
With an MMLJ machine, a customer can contract a wide variety of work like restoring cars, removing graffiti, cleaning up concrete, and more. A machine is just the start, and MMLJ knows that there’s a lot to building a business. Their goal is to provide resources that help guide their customers to success.
That’s why when Michael Mashlan and Molly Metzger heard about HubSpot’s knowledge base, they were excited to try it, not just as a way to scale their team, but as a powerhouse for customer education too. They’ve also created an internal restricted knowledge base that keeps everyone in the business aligned.
Read on to learn more about how MMLJ found success with HubSpot’s knowledge base, as well as how you can implement their lessons in your own business.
A Focused ToolkitBefore Michael joined the team, the technology tools at MMLJ were disconnected and disorganized. They had a CRM for sales, another platform to send emails, and another one to host the website, as well as several others.
Moving to HubSpot’s all-in-one growth suite created a more efficient, one-stop-shop for all the tools Michael needed. It also meant that sales, marketing, and service could all work together seamlessly, creating a flywheel, an important element in any business that wants to provide an outstanding customer experience.
Given their selling price and customer base, cross-functional alignment is especially crucial at MMLJ. Having everyone in the same tool made collaboration easier. When Molly started researching new tools for knowledge management, the team wasn’t sure there was a HubSpot solution, which meant they’d yet again have use multiple tools to meet all their needs. But, HubSpot released Service Hub and knowledge base in the nick of time. Michael appreciates how perfect the timing was.
“We were ready for it. I’m so glad we didn’t have to build this out ourselves.”
Consolidating Knowledge
Molly had initially started looking for a knowledge management tool because, as the business grew, the tech support team was getting more and more calls from people who had basic questions. The team knew this wasn’t scalable. Instead of providing one-off answers to the same questions over and over, they wanted to build a system that could serve more customers, faster.
They had a few simple help documents and blog posts that they could send out upon request, but no searchable, customer-facing system.
The question on their minds was, “How can we solve this by getting these resources out of our heads and on the website or somewhere accessible?”
After finding HubSpot’s knowledge base and building out a robust library of content, the team can now do more with less effort, ultimately leading to a better employee and customer experience.
“It’s much easier for our support team now,” says Michael. “Tech support would have to take phone call after phone call and explain the same thing to somebody. Now they can just send a link. It’s so much more efficient to make that repeatable and consistent.”
HubSpot Makes it Happen
Using the insights dashboard in
“I definitely made some articles based on stuff that people have searched for that I wouldn’t have thought to make otherwise. Seeing the search terms that didn’t have results was really helpful to supplement what we have already.”
“Whenever somebody calls in, our tech support creates a ticket so we can track issues. If we see a lot of people having the same problem, that would be a red flag to us, and maybe we need to make an article about that,” Michael shared.
In building the knowledge base, Molly also made sure to take advantage of the multiple content types that HubSpot supports. In particular, MMLJ finds that videos are particularly effective in helping customers understand technical concepts.
Michael is in strong support of the video content, too. “Video is king when it comes to content. Somebody is more likely to watch a video than read a long article to get the information they need.”
An example knowledge base article with video content
Forward-thinking as they are, the team is also using a support bot to help customers find answers.
“I love the idea of bots. It was a no-brainer on the support side,” Michael recounted.
Customers can ask the bot a question to get a recommended answer from the knowledge base. If that doesn’t meet the customer’s needs, then they can easily submit a ticket to be answered by the MMLJ team.
An example bot conversation to search the knowledge base
