Partner Day is an exclusive behind-the-scenes event for tiered HubSpot agencies held each spring. We at Illumine8 were excited to participate in our 3rd Partner Day event this year, and even more excited about some of the announced changes coming from the inbound marketing software company. Here are our top 5 takeaways from Partner Day 2018 at HubSpot Headquarters.
Service Hub
HubSpot has progressively built out their software system over the years to serve the entire customer lifecycle. As a marketing consultancy, we couldn’t be more excited to see HubSpot embrace business areas outside of the traditional marketing function. Beginning with the CRM and Sales Hub a few years ago, this year HubSpot announces the Service Hub, which leverages your customer CRM data obtained in the sales and marketing processes to provide a holistic suite of tools for your customer service team. We’ve had a chance to look under the hood of this new product and are extremely excited to see native NPS (Net Promoter Score) and survey functionality. In the past, we would rely on other survey tools such as SurveyMonkey or GuildQuality surveys to obtain feedback from customers. This new functionality gives you the ability to time the delivery of surveys to individual customers seamlessly, just like your marketing activities, all based on online customer behavior.
Timed with the new Service Hub is an overall upgrade to the CRM in the form of “conversations” - another new tool, giving you the ability to leverage on-site chat and Facebook Messenger across your business’ marketing, sales, and service functions. No matter what stage a customer might be interacting with your business, any and all chat conversations are documented in that customer’s database record. This means anyone in your organization will be able to see the entire contact’s history of engaging with your communications in a timeline format, or even search that timeline for a specific activity. The ability for customer service support teams to contextualize an individual customer’s entire sales and marketing history is now possible with one click.
The new Service Hub also has built-in ticketing capabilities. Anyone in the technology space has most likely heard the term “tickets” when it comes to customer service practices. A ticketing system gives representatives the ability to document unresolved customer challenges in the CRM, assign follow up tasks with other representatives or stakeholders, and track the progress of solving the customer’s issue. Much like the Sales Hub, the ticketing functions are available in board view and can be moved from stage to stage until resolved.
No more lost customer support issues and transparency between marketing, sales and service departments - this powerful trio of tools is really the only solution on the market right now that gives business owners and department managers a true sightline to the entire customer lifecycle.
Integration of AI Realized
Announced in September of 2017 during INBOUND2017, HubSpot acquired Motion AI, a leading visual chatbot builder. The company’s technology enables anyone to create a chatbot for their site via SMS, Facebook Messenger, Slack, etc – with no programming skills required.
We are now seeing this functionality native in HubSpot in the newly named Conversations Tool. This cross-hub tool allows anyone to interact with via chat and now Facebook messenger with a prospect or customer. The conversation is documented seamlessly in HubSpot on the contact record.
Even more exciting is the new ability to build bots for Facebook Messenger through the Conversations tool. If you wish to respond immediately or ask simple qualifying questions so you can route an inquiry appropriately, the new bot tool gives you the ability to create conversation-based workflows without a Ph.D. or sacrificing valuable data.
Native Shopify Integration
For a long time, we have recommended other solutions for clients requiring e-commerce applications. HubSpot required a specific integration for e-commerce, the data wasn’t seamless and frankly, better tools existed in the market to serve our e-commerce customers.
The past six months have brought significant upgrades to the HubSpot developer program consisting of a robust community of HubSpot Connect Partners, including a native Shopify integration.
This allows your ecommerce shop to sync Shopify customers, products, and deals into the CRM for easy tracking of customer data. You can also use the integration to leverage automated marketing strategies like abandoned cart email nurturing, smart CTAs in content, product-specific re-engagement ads, and more.
This environment is ideal for companies that have an e-commerce strategy in addition to other services, wishing to track and execute all their marketing, sales and CRM activities in one place. Companies leveraging this new integration have seen a 63% increase in customer sales growth using Shopify + HubSpot together.
Upgrades to the Sales Hub
The Sales Hub continues to impress us as the product grows into a more robust toolset, leveraging the data-wide CRM. Two surprises really pleased us at Partner Day:
First, the additional functionality that allows reps to send quotes directly from the CRM. Formally, we would encourage users to attach their documents to a deal in HubSpot for reference later and track the email sent to the prospect. By allowing users to send quotes directly, the steps required to set up a separate document, save it to the deal and track it in the email are eliminated.
Because the data to produce the quote is also saved in HubSpot as a snippet and a product catalog, sales reps are no longer burdened with copying and pasting frequently used text. A centralized product and service data catalog also eliminates the issue of pricing errors.
In addition to the quoting capabilities, the Sales Hub now integrates with Stripe natively. This allows users to accept the terms of the quote in one click, add a credit card or ACH information, and process the quote immediately into a sale. This information tracks in the CRM, giving sales managers and general managers even more visibility into pipeline and revenue in real time.
Did we mention we were excited?
APIs
For several years we have built customized integrations between HubSpot and different Business Intelligence tools used by our customers. At Illumine8 we know the power of data integration is key to tracking business KPIs quickly and accurately. Until now, the toolset we have been able to leverage for integrating HubSpot data has been powerful but limited.
That has changed.
In addition to the several connect partners providing native integrations into their apps, HubSpot has developed new APIs for developers to build integrations between customer applications and HubSpot tools, including:
- Analytics
- Tickets
- Products
- Line Items
- CRM Object Properties
- Associations
- Change log
We now can sync complex product catalogs, existing customer service ticketing systems, and more previously unavailable data.
New technical integrations and APIs, the addition of bots, Facebook Messenger integration, AI, and an entirely new software suite for customer service... it was a full 2 days at HubSpot Partner Day this year to say the least. We look forward to rolling out these new features to our HubSpot clients over the coming months, as well as updating our thoughts on these additions right here on the Illumine8 Blog.
