How to Configure HubSpot Service Hub for Customer Success Teams

Customer expectations are at an all-time high.

Companies are moving away from a “growth at all costs” mentality to a smart and efficient growth mentality. With this shift, the focus on retaining customers, consistently adding incremental value (via proactive communication and planning), and delivering exceptional customer experiences has never been more critical.

With the reinvention of HubSpot Service Hub in 2024, HubSpot provides customer success teams with a comprehensive set of tools to help meet evolving customer needs.

In this guide, we'll go through how companies progress through different phases of customer success maturity—react, define, manage, and optimize—and how specific HubSpot functionalities and tools can best support each phase.

We’ll also explore how Service Hub becomes even more valuable when combined with other Hubs in HubSpot.

Hubspot Service Hub’s role in the customer success maturity model stages

An organization's customer success maturity grows as it moves from simply reacting to issues to proactively helping customers achieve their goals and find new ways to use its products.

The customer success maturity model framework helps companies evaluate their current strategies and plan for improvement. This model from HubSpot breaks customer success maturity into four main stages: react, define, manage, and optimize.

Source: HubSpot

Stage 1 — React: responding to customer needs

In the react stage, customer success teams primarily respond to customer complaints and issues as they arise. At this level, interactions are mainly reactive, and customer success teams have minimal customer data to work with.

The focus is on addressing immediate needs and resolving issues promptly to maintain customer satisfaction.

In this stage, most commonly, a single customer success manager (CSM) or a team member wears multiple hats, such as of a salesperson, marketer, or IT person, and owns these responsibilities.

Key focus areas where HubSpot Service Hub can help:

• Setting up basic ticketing systems for issue tracking
• Configuring helpdesk support to manage customer queries effectively
• Creating initial knowledge base articles to address the most common problems

AI integration: Use AI tools for ticket summarization and automated responses to common inquiries, which will help reduce response times and ensure consistent support.

Stage 2 — Define: structuring customer success efforts

Moving to the define stage, companies begin to structure and organize their customer success teams, defining individual roles within the support process. Goals and performance benchmarks are established to guide decisions and measure success.

The aim is to understand customer needs more deeply and start building proactive strategies.

In this stage, one or more CSMs typically own a certain customer segment. They may also manage the onboarding of new customers on top of handling customer inquiries.

Key focus areas where HubSpot Service Hub can help:

• Expanding the knowledge base with detailed articles and proactive content updates
• Using data from ticketing systems and knowledge base search volumes to inform new support content creation
• Setting up and utilizing customer health scores to monitor engagement
• Setting up basic reporting dashboards to track key metrics like customer health score and net promoter score (NPS)

AI integration: Leverage AI to assist in writing knowledge base articles and analyze ticket data for common issues.

Stage 3 — Manage: proactive customer success

In the manage stage, customer success teams leverage data and insights to take proactive measures. This involves strategic engagement with customers, refining success strategies based on feedback, and using metrics to guide actions. The focus shifts from reactive problem solving to proactive customer engagement.

At this stage, there may be CSMs responsible for customers of varying complexity or customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Key focus areas where HubSpot Service Hub can help:

• Organizing customer success workspaces for strategic follow-ups
• Integrating product usage data to identify upsell opportunities and track customer engagement
• Creating detailed dashboards for metrics such as monthly recurring revenue (MRR), CLTV, and customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
• Conducting quarterly business reviews with customers to discuss goals and progress
• Implementing proactive outreach campaigns based on customer behavior and usage patterns

AI integration: Incorporate your own large language models (LLMs) into the customer success experience. These LLMs can leverage historical data to provide advanced capabilities, such as routing customers to sales or support depending on their needs.

For instance, if a customer inquiry suggests an upsell need, the LLM can seamlessly route the conversation to a sales rep.

Conversely, if the customer needs technical assistance, the LLM can route them to the appropriate support agent or provide immediate solutions.

Stage 4 — Optimize: seamless customer experience

At the optimize stage, delivering a five-star customer experience becomes a core business operation. Customer success efforts are fully integrated with other departments like sales and marketing, ensuring a unified approach to customer engagement and retention. The focus is on continuous improvement and optimizing every touchpoint in the customer journey.

In this stage, CSMs may see upsell and cross-sell as some of their primary responsibilities on top of retention. There will often be more in-depth documentation, systems and processes built out that allow for scalability.

Key focus areas where HubSpot Service Hub can help:

• Integrating omnichannel support, including live chat, email, SMS, and social media
• Creating automations to trigger alerts when churn risk is elevated or there are opportunities for cross-selling and upselling
• Collecting comprehensive feedback through CSAT and NPS surveys to drive continuous improvement
• Implementing customer journey maps to tailor experiences to individual customer needs
• Developing advanced analytics to predict customer behavior and needs

As your team progresses through these stages, HubSpot Service Hub provides the functionalities and tools needed to support each phase, ensuring your customer success efforts are both effective and scalable.

By understanding and utilizing the customer success maturity model, your company can systematically improve its customer success strategies, ultimately driving higher retention, satisfaction, and growth.

Maximizing Service Hub tie-ins with other HubSpot Hubs

HubSpot’s biggest value is that all of your data is in one place.

This means less complexity, lower costs in building or maintaining integrations, and the ability for your entire company to have a 360-degree view of the customer. Many platforms promise this, but very few are actually able to accomplish this.

Integrating HubSpot Service Hub with other HubSpot Hubs—Marketing, Sales, Operations, Content, and Commerce—unlocks visibility and insights that enhance customer success efforts.

Customer success teams can deliver a personalized customer experience when they can easily see marketing, sales, operations, analytics, and customer support data all in one place.

By leveraging a 360-degree view of the customers based on data from each Hub, companies can create more effective strategies that mitigate churn, drive product usage, and increase upsell or cross-sell revenue.

Here are a few ways that other HubSpot Hubs benefit from an integration with Service Hub.

Marketing Hub integration

CSMs benefit when they have visibility into how the customer has engaged with various marketing touchpoints. A few benefits of the HubSpot Marketing Hub integration for organizations include:

• Using marketing insights to enhance customer success efforts: Customer success teams can use data from marketing campaigns to better understand clients’ goals and identify if there are certain products that a customer is showing interest in (that they don’t currently have). 
  
  When CSMs see that a customer is engaging with specific product content, they can strike while the iron is hot and see if the client is interested in a demo or trial of some of the new functionality and products.

• Using social media data to track customer advocacy: HubSpot’s social media tools allow you to build listening and monitoring streams that alert you when your customers mention your brand or any topic related to what you do. 
  
  This is useful for CSMs so they can get a quick refresh of what the customer has been discussing on social media before their check-in.
• Using engagement metrics to inform future customer marketing campaigns: This is one of the most under-utilized parts of HubSpot - leveraging existing customer data to plan future campaigns. 

When you're tracking all of your website and marketing campaigns in HubSpot, the customer marketing team can leverage data from existing clients to see if messaging and campaigns (targeted towards new customers) are resonating.

Further, customer marketing teams can then leverage targeted nurturing emails and custom audience-targeted ads to promote products to existing clients.

Sales Hub Integration

Sales and customer success teams benefit when their data lives in the same place. When HubSpot Sales Hub and Service Hub data are leveraged, CSMs can see if there are sales opportunities (aka deals) in flight. When CSMs see in-progress deals, they can work closely with the sales rep to help them best understand the customer goals, struggles, integrations, and team dynamics.

Vice versa, a sales rep working on a customer upsell benefits from seeing if there are tickets, recent surveys, or product usage data insights that would better inform follow-up conversations.

A common disconnect between sales and CSMs is when this data is not easily seen together, sales will be trying to work an opportunity when the customer is struggling and has outstanding unresolved support issues.

When the sales rep then reaches out, the customer often thinks the sales rep isn’t doing enough to help them solve their issues, and this leads to assumptions from the customer that that company is just trying to sell them more stuff vs. trying to help them solve their problems.

When a sales opportunity or deal data is physically adjacent to their ticketing data, this happens much less. On the other hand, if you are using a helpdesk outside of HubSpot, like Zendesk, the support data lives in one database and sales data lives in another. Unless your integration is well developed, there is an elevated risk of these disconnects happening. This is a common struggle HubSpot customers face when using third-party customer service tools.

Lastly, one of the most commonly used integrations between service and sales hub is deal management. If your CSMs are responsible for up-sells, then they will naturally use some of the deal functionality in the Sales Hub to create new deals and track those to close.

Operations Hub integration

HubSpot Operations Hub, or Ops Hub, benefits organizations that are looking for integration, data partitioning for reporting, and highly customizable automation functionality. Here are a few use cases where customer success teams can benefit from Ops Hub:

• Synchronizing data across systems for a unified customer view: CS teams benefit when marketing, sales, and CS data are synchronized across all systems. Operations Hub’s data sync feature provides easy-to-use, natively-built connectors for customer information across CRM, support systems, and hundreds of other supported tools. 
  
  Improved data accuracy helps mitigate churn by ensuring all customer interactions are based on the latest information and supports upsell and cross-sell efforts by providing a comprehensive view of customer needs.

• Maintaining data integrity for improved customer insights: Data quality automation is another Ops Hub use case. CS teams are in the same boat as sales team members in having to sift through data (some of it questionable at times) to find the most accurate piece of information on a customer. Duplicate, out-of-date, or poorly formatted data are just a few of the issues that plague CRM systems. 
  
  Operations Hub can automate data quality tasks such as deduplication, standardization, and validation of customer information. 
  
  High-quality data enables customer success teams to trust the insights they derive, improving their ability to identify churn risks, uncover upsell opportunities, and provide more accurate forecasting for their leaders.

• Addressing churn risk through automated workflows proactively: Automating the identification of churn risk indicators can be built out using Operations Hub’s custom-coded workflows. 
  
  Identifying and addressing churn risks proactively can be complex (especially if you need to pull in product usage, firmographics, or third-party data). 
  
  These workflows can trigger specific actions, like sending personalized re-engagement emails, internal emails to CSMs and executive sponsors, scheduling follow-up calls, or offering targeted incentives to at-risk customers. 
  
  Automating these processes ensures that at-risk customers are receiving the type of attention and care needed to keep them around.

• Enhancing customer success with unified data insights: Customer success teams can benefit from enhanced reporting capabilities provided by datasets in the Operations Hub. 
  
  Often struggling with fragmented data, teams can now consolidate information from various sources into unified, customizable reports. This allows for better reporting and analysis, helping identify patterns in customer behavior and product usage without the need for a data analyst to write out SQL queries. 
  
  Datasets are also valuable for larger organizations that need access to very specific segments of the database or data that has been treated with custom calculations or other filters.

With Operations Hub, CS teams are given a breadth of integration, reporting, and data quality features that will help them better connect the dots between the other major functional areas in their organization.

Content Hub integration

Content Hub is HubSpot’s content management system (CMS), as well as other content creation and hosting tools that can benefit customer success teams looking to drive increased product usage or engagement with customers. Here’s how integrating HubSpot CMS Hub with Service Hub can benefit customer success teams:

• Creating a private membership experience: Using the CMS, customer success teams can create a private membership experience that offers customers exclusive access to information like private betas, product details, submitted tickets, and main points of contact.
  
  By using the data in your CRM, you can design a truly personalized experience for each customer. This strengthens loyalty by making customers feel valued and informed about opportunities that are specifically tailored to them. These types of personal experiences can add outsized value beyond the core product or service they originally came to you for. 
• Utilizing Content Remix for diverse content formats: Customer success teams are strapped for time, but given each customer is different, you need to provide proactive support in multiple formats to cater to different types of learners. Some customers prefer help docs, others videos, and some prefer audio content. 
  
  With Content Remix, you can take an existing piece of collateral (like a knowledge base article) and publish it in multiple formats using AI functionality within the platform, ensuring that users have access to information in their preferred format. This type of functionality saves you time and production costs and will help you impact more customers.

Most organizations primarily use their CMS as a tool for acquiring new customers, but in a world where growth needs to come from retention and upselling, your CMS unlocks tools that many of your competitors are likely barely exploring.

Commerce Hub Integration

HubSpot Commerce Hub is a collection of tools for managing quotes, invoices, and payments. Here are a couple of ways that CS teams can leverage these tools within their organizations:

• Using quotes, invoicing, and payments for upsells: Commerce Hub allows customer success teams to handle quoting, invoicing, and payments directly within the HubSpot ecosystem. This capability can be used for upselling and cross-selling opportunities (in conjunction with deals in CRM).
• Offering premium customer support: Commerce Hub opens new doors for your team if you offer premium customer support services. By integrating payment processing, customer success teams can create and manage premium support plans, allowing customers to pay for enhanced support services directly through the platform. Premium support could include faster response times, dedicated account managers, or additional training resources.

With the relaunch of Service Hub and its host of new features built for proactive support, customer success teams can derive huge benefits.

Unlocking customer success with Hubspot Service Hub

Integrating HubSpot Service Hub with other HubSpot Hubs provides a 360-degree view to every employee. This ultimately benefits the customer and gives your team the best fighting chance at retaining and hopefully growing existing customer relationships.

By advancing through the customer success maturity stages, teams can systematically enhance their CS processes, drive retention, and unlock new revenue growth opportunities.

Ready to harness HubSpot's full potential? Learn how to plan your implementation for maximum success.

Edited by Shanti S Nair