Has your customer success team been looking for ways to improve the customer experience at your company? Between HubSpot's free CRM (Customer Relationship Management tool) and its sales, marketing, and service platforms, it could be the tool you've been looking for to take your customer experience to the next level.
Tribute Media has made HubSpot the single source of truth for our team regarding company information, product usage, and other critical information to serve our customers better through a long history of sales and marketing efforts.
Over the last two years, we've put a larger focus on building out systems and functionality within HubSpot to better support (and automate) our client delight efforts—an area that's vital to any company's success.
As we began to find new areas of opportunity to improve our customer experience, we found new ways to utilize HubSpot to automate those processes, making our onboarding, training, and customer delight efforts a consistent experience for everyone and an effort we could analyze and scale over time.
If your team needs a few ideas to take your customer experience up a notch using HubSpot, we're here to help.
Automated workflows allow your company to create a repeatable and automated process for your leads or customers at any stage of the flywheel. Want to nurture your leads that downloaded an ebook? There's a workflow for that. Need to assign contact owners based on information input on a form? There's a workflow for that too.
💡Tip: See This as an Opportunity to Realign Your Customer Success Goals
While you may already have an onboarding process, it may not be accomplishing everything it could be in order to support both your customer AND your company. Start with an introductory email that gets your new customer excited about your product. Then send a series of educational emails over time that helps the customer get the most out of your product while also allowing your team to be proactive by addressing areas of possible friction down the road.
For example, at Tribute Media, each client has a primary point of contact that handles the strategy and day-to-day communications between the client and our team. We also have a support page on our website that includes live chat, a support form, and a knowledge base that allows our clients to connect with our development team directly or self-serve. Over time, our account managers found that support requests were staying in our inbox for far longer than expected, and due to the nature of our roles, it was taking us 24-36 hours to get a support ticket into our development team's hands to fix.
Our team saw an opportunity to train our clients earlier in the customer journey by including a "Meet Your Support Team" email seven days into the onboarding workflow. The email provides information about our team, our processes, and wait times for support requests depending on how users submitted their requests.
We saw an opportunity to best serve our customers through transparency and training, resulting in faster support response times and happier customers.
While HubSpot offers different HubSpot CMS options to fit your budget and your hosting needs, you can build a unique customer experience using any of the CMS packages available by utilizing HubSpot's drag-and-drop tools, personalization tokens, and more.
💡Tip: Start with the Basics
Start by asking yourself, "If I were to build a one-stop-shop for my customer's needs, what would I need to include?".
At Tribute Media, we built a customer portal using personalization tokens that outline the client's unique goals when they hired our team, links to their company's strategy documents, meeting links to schedule time with their account manager, links to website support, billing information, and more.
Not only did we create it to provide a tailored, behind-the-scenes experience for our customers, but we also used it as an opportunity to provide education through our marketing resources section for those customers who wanted to learn more about web marketing. We've spent 15 years creating blog content, white papers, and ebooks—why not put our best pieces of content front and center so our customers can learn from it?
While HubSpot offers NPS survey functionality within their Service tools, you can utilize HubSpot forms within the marketing platform to survey your customers and capture important information. The earlier you start to capture what's most important to each customer, the sooner you can start to customize their experience with your company and remove friction down the road.
The best part? Your customers' survey responses will be saved to their contact or company record for your team to revisit as needed or as new staff members come on board, which helps eliminate the need to "re-onboard" your customer if a new customer success rep steps in.
No use case within your company for an onboarding survey? Set up a survey for product or service feedback around the 45- or 90-day mark. This will help you capture important information that will help you determine if you're at risk of losing that customer or what your product or service has helped the customer overcome thus far.
You can send this to a customer manually by creating a HubSpot task 45 days after they become a customer or by creating an automated workflow triggered by a change in lifecycle stage.
It's important to remember that surveys aren't beneficial for anyone unless your team is willing to act on the information you collect. Use the information to tailor each customer's experience moving forward in a way that turns them into brand advocates for years to come.
HubSpot's email marketing tools can be a sales, marketing, or customer service team's best friend. Not only can you personalize your content to make your emails sound tailor-made for that user, but you can include video content, implement A/B testing, and more.
Outside of the email content itself, you can view the analytics of each email, including which contacts engaged with your email the most, what percentage of your audience clicked on the CTA or links, who marked it as SPAM, etc.
💡Tip: Before creating an email, ask yourself, "Who benefits most from this information?"
While email marketing is often viewed as an option for communicating with anyone and everyone who's ever engaged with your brand, it should be treated much more delicately and with intention. As you start to collect information on your customers and include it in their CRM record, you can start to create lists based on what services or products they use within your company, what product pages they've viewed most on your website, how engaged they are with your marketing emails, and other filters that allow you send the right emails to the right people.
This may result in your marketing team creating 2-3 different versions of your monthly newsletter, but it'll be worth it when your email engagement goes up, as well as your chances of increasing upsell opportunities for your sales team.
When leads or customers are trying to find solutions, they'll often go straight to the source (aka your website). They'll look for a troubleshooting page, an FAQ page, or a contact page to try to find the ideal way to connect with your company for support. Why not add a way for them to get answers to their problems faster through a chatbot? They're already on your website; why not meet them there?
Customers want support faster, with as little effort needed from them as possible, and often without the need to pick up the phone.
Companies still resist the idea due to the belief that someone from their team must be on their website all day. With HubSpot's ChatBot tool (which is free by the way!), you can update your customer service team's settings to opt for email, desktop, or Slack notifications when someone has started a conversation on your website, allowing you and your team to continue to go about your day as usual until a live chat has been initiated.
💡Tip: You can update your preferences to only show live chat is available during business hours, allowing you to have more control over when a customer should expect someone from your team to respond.
In conclusion, HubSpot offers a wide range of tools to help improve your customer experience and make your customer success efforts more efficient. From automated workflows and personalized landing pages to surveys and email marketing, there are many ways to utilize HubSpot to better support your customers. By focusing on transparency, training, and personalization, you can turn your customers into brand advocates who will stick with you for years to come.
If you need help getting started with HubSpot or want to take your customer experience to the next level, don't hesitate to reach out and find out how we can help. Get in touch!