Hubspot for Customer Success?

daniele

Hello everyone 👋 In our company we currently use hubspot for sales and marketing, Totango for customer success, Intercom for support tickets and a mixture of Jira and slack for managing tasks. Does anyone have experience of using hubspot for customer success and support? I am interested in consolidating to help with transparency and efficiency so any advice would be appreciated!!

Amy Long

I am in the beginning stages of setting up Hubspot for CS right now as well. So far it's been pretty easy to make custom fields and reports, so I'm figuring out what fields I need and am hoping to set up some automated flows as well.

We are not using Hubspot for support ticketing at this time - but we are using Intercom and I'm looking into a sync to see if I can show open tickets on the Company level.

Would also love to learn from what others have done as we're too small for a CSP right now.

DBacero

Before purchasing Totango and meeting with other vendors during the CS platform hunt, I was asked to review HubSpot first as we use them for our Sales and Marketing. I was not impressed with the demo as many of our requirements would not be met and the answer I would receive from the HS rep was usually "We could possibly create a custom field" or "Let me check if we can do that". I may have received a not-so-great demo, but I am happy with moving forward with Totango as many of our "must haves" were simply out of the box with Totango. We now connect Totango to HubSpot, Zendesk, and Microsoft GP. We are looking to bring in SkillJar later this year as well as information from our own DW.

Jeffrey Kushmerek

I agree with the last comment (sorry Amy!) - Hubspot is not purpose built for CS and you will spend more time in opportunity cost hacking Hubspot. I would rather start with a lower cost CSP

Amy Long

LOL I get it Jeff! Hubspot is far from ideal as a CSP but it's what I've got to work with at the moment!

pkelly38

https://gaingrowretain.com/discussion/comment/11440#Comment_11440

We have all been there. Good luck!

RobSanchez

This is going to be a longer reply, so please bare with me. The company I work for purchased Hubspot about a year ago. We were previously using Pipelines for Sales and CS. I had very little experience using any CRM tool, let alone building processes and reports. I spent a ton of time in Pipelines trying to nail down CS Processes for our team, creating custom fields, reports, etc...

Fast forward to the last year. After purchasing Hubspot, our team decided to migrate everything we had from Pipelines into Hubspot. In theory this was ideal and should have made everything a little easier, but this seemed to create a few speed bumps for us. However, I think the mess was created because Pipelines was not so easy to manage and is really geared towards Sales, so take that part with a grain of salt.

Over the last 4 months, I've been working to get our Hubspot instance geared towards CS because it really isn't right out of the box, at least for us. We do use it for Marketing and Sales too. I've built out a few custom fields, and built out custom reports. Here's a few of my pros and cons with Hubspot

Pro:

• Creating Custom Fields is great with all the different options you have, i.e date fields, picklist, multi-line text, etc...
• Customizing the Companies list view for each member is great. I have different metrics I want to see for my accounts that someone else may not want, or need, to see. It's also a great way to quickly add notes, or update some fields (as long as the column is added to the list view). Well, being able to customize just about any view is amazing
• Adding custom reports into a single dashboard is a nice feature. We send out a Weekly CS Recap to our team, and with this Hubspot Dashboard we're able to automate most of this Weekly Recap. This includes account updates (multi-line text custom field), our calls for the week, and account health (needed a custom field for this)
• The Hubspot X Gmail integration is amazing! I love having emails logged easily into accounts, and with the Hubspot mobile app you can see when your email is opened! Unfortunately if you send an email to multiple people the app does not tell you who opened it though.

Cons - Most, if not all, are around reporting from Hubspot

• Building custom reports is frustrating. Often times the report will not refresh properly and it can feel like something is wrong. I had built out a custom report to pull in data from a custom field and even after receiving a little assistance from Hubspot support, I ended up deleting the report I was working on and re-do everything with the same configuration and... it magically worked. This has happened twice so far, but re-building the report wasn't that difficult, just frustrating
• When building reports, there isn't an option to report on the last posted update for a given field. There's a couple weird work arounds, but nothing ideal
• Contacts who move, or leave, companies can be a tough decision. If you want the historical record of the companies a user is with, that user will remain associated with any previous company. So when you're viewing a company, even though a user may have another company set to be their primary, they will still appear in the contact list for the company you're viewing (their old company)

All in all, it's a good tool to use but it's not perfect and it is not a CS CRM. You do need to put in a little elbow grease to make it what you want or need, but it is a good tool to have.

Hope this helps!!

daniele

This is SO helpful, thanks so much!

Jeffrey Kushmerek

IMHO, the ability to have usage and support and other factors wired into a CSP to get health score data is that main reason I like those tools.

chrisdishman

Well, slightly biased opinion here, but I would agree with Jeff. Whenever possible, you want to use the right tool custom built for the job. Yes, I have used a wrench as a hammer...because i didn't have one handy, but its obviously not ideal. In the same way, using a CRM as CSP is not ideal. Nor would I suggest trying to use a CSP as a CRM. Different tools for different purposes.

But as was mentioned above, if you are not a big enough team to pay for both...sometimes you have to leverage what you have in hand...so a wrench may do the trick. (just try not to bend too many nails) ;-)

Laurie Barlev

I want to pipe in here a sec. What do you need to support a Customer Success organization at this moment? Is it to be able to capture ongoing conversations, meeting dates and possibly content (Fathom syncs call transcripts and calls to a contact), create and send templated emails? Or are you looking for a health score that "stays up-to-date", automate processes (ie playbooks) based on triggers, have an easy to read overall summary of clients and/or 360 view of a client?

Start with needs and work from there. If a CRM can capture some of the essential information you need for now, that might be enough for the time being. I would encourage you to spend time creating and running manual playbooks, health scores, etc to test and refine them before spending money on a customer success platform. The value of the platform is only as good as how it is set up.

Cody

Daniele, like many of the others on this string I too have been asked to use hubspot for better consistency and end to end customer journey's.

Although I agree that Hubspot is not designed as CSP I have found that for the size that we are and the "High Touch" CS program we currently run Hubspot has worked great.

I leverage the support tool and it integrates really well with Jira so we can coordinate escalated tickets with our engineers. We also have integrated slack with Hubspot so it helps communication and updates through workflows we created that I can show you. I also have found using the sales pipeline as a great tool to track expansion opportunities, renewals, and key moments in the life cycle.

I also enjoy the CSAT surveys and NPS surveys I'm able to automate through the tool.

I will say it took a while to really understand all the capabilities in Hubspot and I'd be more than willing to chat 1 on 1 if you want to review our Hubspot account and the tools my team uses?

tejash_24

https://gaingrowretain.com/discussion/10647/hubspot-for-customer-success

We personally use our in house developed CRM however I know many companies who uses Hubspot for CSM.

Yes, HubSpot is a good option for customer success and support. It offers a variety of features that can help you manage your customer relationships, including:

• Customer relationship management (CRM): HubSpot CRM helps you track customer interactions, keep track of their purchase history, and identify their needs.
• Ticketing system: HubSpot's ticketing system allows you to manage customer support requests, track their progress, and assign them to the right team members.
• Knowledge base: HubSpot's knowledge base allows you to create and manage a library of self-service articles that customers can use to find answers to their questions.
• Chatbots: HubSpot's chatbots can answer customer questions and resolve simple issues without the need for human intervention.
• Reporting and analytics: HubSpot's reporting and analytics tools can help you track your customer success metrics and identify areas where you can improve.

Overall, HubSpot is a comprehensive customer success and support solution that can help you improve your customer relationships and reduce churn.

Here are some of the pros and cons of using HubSpot for customer success and support:

Pros:

• All-in-one solution: HubSpot offers a variety of features that can help you manage your customer relationships, including CRM, ticketing, knowledge base, chatbots, and reporting.
• Easy to use: HubSpot is easy to use for both technical and non-technical users.
• Scalable: HubSpot can be scaled to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.
• Affordable: HubSpot offers a variety of pricing plans to fit your budget.

Cons:

• Not as customizable as some other CRM solutions: HubSpot is not as customizable as some other CRM solutions, such as Salesforce.
• Can be complex to set up: HubSpot can be complex to set up and configure, especially for businesses with complex customer needs.
• Not as many integrations as some other CRM solutions: HubSpot does not have as many integrations with other business applications as some other CRM solutions.

Overall, HubSpot is a good option for customer success and support for businesses of all sizes. It is easy to use, scalable, and affordable. However, it is not as customizable as some other CRM solutions and can be complex to set up.