Growth was once solely the domain of sales and marketing – no longer. HubSpot’s new customer service product is designed to turn every customer interaction into a growth opportunity.
HubSpot, a leading CRM, marketing, sales and customer service platform, announced today the general availability of Service Hub, the latest product line in the company’s growth platform. Announced at INBOUND 2017, Service Hub is an all-in-one customer service system that changes the way growing businesses approach and deliver customer support. Powered by HubSpot’s free CRM, Service Hub provides companies with a complete record of a customer’s journey, meaning faster resolution times and happier customers, turning these positive interactions into marketing gold – positive word-of-mouth.
“Over the past decade, the acquisition funnel has been considered the most effective model for growth. But as people have become more skeptical of sales and marketing, the funnel has become less effective,” said JD Sherman, president and COO of HubSpot. “Your biggest untapped growth opportunity today is in fact your existing customers. With Service Hub, we’re giving businesses the tools they need to tap into that opportunity. Support products on the market today treat customers as a cost center, focusing on cost reduction. We’re building a system for companies that view service as a growth opportunity.”
When combined with Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, Service Hub integrates customer data with lead and deal data in a way that similar products on the market don’t. This gives marketing, service, and sales teams access to a complete record of a customer’s interactions with the company, allowing them to collaborate together to resolve customer issues better and faster.
The individual products that make up Service Hub are designed with the impatient, convenience-focused customer in mind. Customers can get fast help via their preferred channel, and service teams are armed with the technology needed to efficiently manage it all:
- Conversations – A universal inbox that unites messages across chat, email, and other channels to help team collaborate and enable customers to engage with companies however they want.
- Tickets – A CRM object to track, record, and organize customer needs.
- Automation – Platform-level automation that uses workflows to route Tickets and create a help desk.
- Knowledge Base – A tool that helps you create simple well-structured help articles from templates that automatically index on Google search and a reporting dashboard.
- Customer Feedback – A tool featuring guided survey creation, feedback collection, and audience insights analytics.
- Reporting – A new service dashboard featuring reports on how your team is handling tickets, how customers are sharing feedback, and the efficacy of your Knowledge Base.
“Some clients say that they don’t have the budget for more customer service, but that mindset needs to change. When you add value for customers, you simultaneously grow your own business,” said Steven Loepfe, founder and managing partner of Storylead, a beta user of Service Hub and HubSpot Gold Tier Partner. “As an agency, the majority of our revenue comes from returning customers and their referrals. Service Hub is exactly what we’ve been looking for. Our clients already use HubSpot, so this will be a natural step for them. It’s a huge opportunity, for us and for them.”
Along with the launch of Service Hub, HubSpot also introduced a new inbound service framework and HubSpot Academy lesson to help users create a strategy to turn customers into promoters. The framework was developed by Michael Redbord, who grew HubSpot’s customer support team from 0-250 over the past seven years before stepping into the role of general manager on Service Hub.
Together with Service Hub, the inbound service framework helps businesses:
- Engage more customers in meaningful interactions across different channels with Conversations.
- Stay organized and meet customer expectations with Tickets.
- Guide customers with proactive solutions like Knowledge Base.
- Grow their relationship with customers by listening and understanding their needs with Customer Feedback.
“As the leader of a customer service team, I personally experienced the challenges that stem from not having a unified, scalable system in place. The simplest of tasks were slow and inefficient, and our customers felt that,” said Redbord. “I brought that knowledge to the table when we set out to build Service Hub. The result is a product I wish I had when I was in that customer service role myself. I’m proud of what the team here has accomplished, and can’t wait to see our customers achieve success as well.”
