Ask Us Anything! HubSpot Customer Success Leaders Answer Your Service Hub Questions

[#1]

We know how important your customers are to your business,  so, to celebrate Customer Appreciation Week leaders from HubSpot's own Customer Success Team will be answering your questions next week on how to enage, guide and grow better customers. Some topics of interest include:

• How to provide exceptional customer service
• Why creating a great customer experience matters
• Key customer satisfaction metrics to track your customers' loyalty
• How to scale your customer success teams as your business grows
  
  

This AMA will start on Wednesday, May 9th at 7:00 AM EST. David, Emily, Colleen and Eva will be answering questions between 7am - 5pm EST. Feel free to start adding questions now, and the team willl begin answering them on Wednesday.

                                                                 

David Hunt (@davidjosephhunt)                                  Emily Haahr (@ehaahr)
Director, Global Frontline Support                              VP, Global Support & Freemium Services

                                                                     
Colleen O'Sullivan (@ColleenOSul)                              Eva Klein (@evaklein)
Director, EMEA Customer Success                               VP, Customer Success

[#2]

This AMA will start on Wednesday, May 9th at 7:00 AM EST.

[#3]

I've heard rumors about adding more company-centric features to HubSpot, such as the ability to create lists of companies. Is there any truth to this and what can you tell us about it?

[#4]

I love the fact that surveys are incorporated directly into the system. With the customer experience survey aspect still coming soon, I have a couple of questions on that.

• Do you expect this feature to have recipes similar to the workflow function?
• Can the customer experience surveys be integrated with a workflow?
• Do you expect to have more reporting built in on these similar to third party survey platforms?

Thanks!

[#5]

Which currently-supported integrations will be available for Service Hub once it's live? 

[#6]

What is the feature you are each most excited about in the new service hub to help agencies guide their clients in creating a customer-centric experience?

How will Conversations solve for users that are in various portals on a daily basis (like Agencies with a single email address or Agency consultants with varying email addresses)?

For example, email logging with gmail can only be connected to a single portal for a single email, where I am in at least 5 or 6 different portals a day sometimes with my own agency partner email, othertimes with my agency alias email (from the partner agency I work with).

[#7]

How to provide exceptional customer service using the flywheel approach to customer delight? 

[#8]

Hey @mstarnes

Companies that use a flywheel approach are in the best position to delight their customers. They can target customers or customer segments that will help them to grow. Being more specialised and segmenting customer groups allows you to get to know those specific customer needs and address them. A mulitnational doesn't have the same needs as a two person startup, being able to understand and service both customer needs appropriately is setting your company up to provide exceptional customer success. 

[#9]

Knowledge.hubspot.com is an incredible resource, containing an answer for practically any question I ever have about HubSpot - even regarding relatively new releases. 

How does HubSpot go about creating and managing the knowledge base? How are articles selected, who writes them, are there processes governing the preparation and publication of content related to new product launches.

[#10]

Hi @Phil_Vallender,

Thank you for the kind words regarding our knowledge base. We have a team of four dedicated technical writers responsible for the creation and maintenance of articles. They work closely with product managers and product marketing managers to stay informed on updates to the HubSpot software. As part of that collaboration, they think about what topics are likely most useful to our customers and proactively address them. Other times, they lean on what they hear from our Support teams and create/modify articles based on where customers are needing help.

For product launches, our technical writers are one component of many cross-functional teams, all working to release on a pre-determined date. We strive to have the necessary documentation ready and published at the time of launch. Updates to existing articles are much more fluid, in-line with how our development team does software updates. Again, through collaboration with our Product teams, the technical writers update and republish articles as change requests come in.

Our goal is to empower customers to help themselves via our knowledge base and we believe that this empowerment is important to overall satisfaction with using HubSpot. We recognize that we also have room for improvement. We are creating new processes for managing our articles so that we better catch outdated material. We are also working closely with our localization team to create better processes around translation of articles to better serve our customers across the globe.

Again, thanks for the praise. Our tech writers are thrilled to see your post!

Also, adding @bchang here as the leader of our knowledge team in case you have additional questions.

[#11]

How to upsell customers on additional products/services? What is worth upselling and what should just be overdelivering?

[#12]

Hey @MajaFM

Choosing the right stage in a customers lifecycle to position an upsell is critical to making sure you are giving your customer what they want, when they want it. You might determine, based off your business, that after three months or at a renewal your customers might need additional products or services. You have to spend time understand what the customer journey looks like and what the trends are with upsold customers.  Make sure the upsell is a value add based conversation. The additional resources you are selling should be sold when it can better help your customer grow. Choose a consultative sales approach and consider who should manage the sales process; customer success vs. sales. 

[#13]

"Choose a consultative sales approach and consider who should manage the sales process; customer success vs. sales."

@ColleenOSul, can you say more as to why HubSpot recently made the shift from customer success owning this process, to sales? And how does that shift fit with the rollout?

[#14]

Totally agree with Colleen on this one - identifying when to introduce another product to a customer is really important. I would add that it's also important to ensure the customer is seeing success on the product they bought before you can have a conversation about what else they should buy from you. It makes it much easier to have that consultative sales conversation when they're already seeing value from what they bought.

In terms of thinking about what should be included in your product versus what should be considered an add-on, it depends. If the add-on is required for the vast majority of your customers to realize success on your core product, it should probably be included. If the add-on serves a unique customer need or a subset of customers (advanced users or a particular industry for example), it's probably an add-on.

[#15]

What do you think is the best way to 'delight' customers authentically, and without annoying them? 

[#16]

Hey @bridgey_d

Listen to your customers and act on their feedback. Pick up the phone and figure out what the needs of your customers are and commit to giving them what they are looking for. Some customer may need more than others, determine what those segments are and service accordingly to their needs.  Feedback is the breakfast of champs and the more you get from your customers the better you will be able to delight without annoying :-)

[#17]

Agreed! Help your customers grow their businesses and achieve their business goals (not just yours). Help your customers gain incremental value from your offering(s). Help your customers help their customers. 

[#18]

Thoughts on drawing a line between free and paid product training?

Training is essential to a good end-user experience, and HubSpot clearly puts a lot of TLC into its very extensive and mature training/help/community/academy/etc....how did you come to that decision?

[#19]

Hi @kcooper,

In a perfect world, your product is well designed to the point where training and support needs are minimal. That being said, in addition to investing in UX, training and support should be prioritized, and I would advocate for giving as much training away as possible for free. While there is a time and a place for onsite consulting and other high touch onboarding programs, most users want to learn by doing and learn on their own. I am always shocked when companies put knowledge resources behind paywalls. Google is the largest source of traffic for getting help with HubSpot, so while we spend a lot of time trying to create a great in-app learning experience, it's also important that resources are publicly indexable. 

In addition to being the customer-centric thing to do, it also can significantly reduce the cost of support. The majority of customers don't want to have to reach out to support. 

[#20]

Do you see HubSpot reconsidering how it charges for its product(s) now that it's expanding into multiple areas of a business with multiple contact segments/databases? Having all of your contacts centralized in one database from marketing to sales to customer service is great as a small to medium-sized business, but is HubSpot making it affordable to be spending multiple thousands of dollars a month to house all of them? Will you be considering a new pricing model for people using the full stack or multiple elements of it?

[#21]

Where do you see hubspot in 3 years? What features will it have?

[#22]

For an agency, what tips and tricks would you recommend to ensure we find a happy medium between going above and beyond for our clients but not over-servicing them at the same time?

[#23]

Hi @Stewartbennett - I'd recommend using data to determine the right balance. Take a look at the costs of your services and the desired outcomes. Does delivering that extra level of service at no charge equate to an increase in adoption, retention, lifetime value, NPS, referrals, etc.? If so, are you accounting for the overage in the right / legal way (I.E. If you're a saas company, do you need to carve out the costs of the service delivery overage from your recurring subscription revenue)? What are your profit margin goals? Can you afford to reduce your profit margin in order to improve retention? Does delivering extra service reduce future reliance/dependence on your support or customer success teams? Find out what metrics are the most important to your business and make sure any extra efforts are contributing to an improvement in those metrics. 

[#24]

We have been with HubSpot since 2016, but have used Constant Contact for event registration because it has an "Add Event to Calendar" feature. Is there any discussion of HubSpot natively integrating this feature in the future? 

I know you can currently create events in multiple platforms and add them, but we don't use every platform our customers do and like the natively integrated option. 

[#25]

Hey @eden09 - thanks for your question! 

David, Emily, Eva and Colleen represent our Customer Success team, so this discussion thread isn't the best place to find the answers / information you are looking for. I'd reccommend voting/commenting on this feature request: "Add to Calendar" function 

@Tom are you able to comment further for @eden09's on that particular idea? Thanks!

[#26]

Hey @eden09! 

We have no immediate plans for the time being to natively integrate constant contacts into HubSpot. We're currently leaning in to our integration platform to allow third party integrators to create useful and amazing integrations with HubSpot and we have open apis to allow people to create their own custom integrations if they wish. A huge integrator for us is zapier, who have already created a CC to HS integration:

https://zapier.com/apps/constant-contact/integrations/hubspot

Automate.io have also created one here: https://automate.io/integration/constant-contact/hubspot

I'd definitely recomend checking out zapier as I've seen people do some incredibly cool things with their integrations and HubSpot. 

I'd also definitely recomend upvoting the idea post Ro linked in her post. We really value idea posts from customers to allow us to weigh up the customer need and impact of new features being roadmapped. 

Hope this helps! 

[#27]

Hi @Tom adn @roisinkirby! 

Sorry for the confusion in the board I posted to. Thank you for your help! I've upvoted the other post 

[#28]

How will the HubSpot Service Hub integrate with Salesforce CRM?

[#29]

Hey @g2anna, @Mike and @cjankowski might be able to comment further on this. 

Can you share some more details / context r.e. how you are currently using Salesforce to manage your customer success efforts?

[#30]

Hi @roisinkirby @Mike @cjankowski,

We're currently using TeamSupport to manage our customer success efforts. In TeamSupport, we have an external knowledgebase, internal knowledgebase, and tickets (which can be created by both internal users and customers). Our biggest struggle with TeamSupport right now is that it does not integrate into how we have Salesforce set up, so in looking to switch, we would want a system where tickets/interactions with a customer live on the Account in Salesforce, as that is where we have the rest of the customer's information. Mostly, we're looking to make it a more seamless integration where a few months from now, if an Account Manager is looking at one of their Accounts, they can see all the interactions we've had with that customer through tickets or chat. 

Thanks!