HubSpot Launches Customer Hub, Conversations, and an Expanded Sales Hub

HubSpot last week at its annual user conference officially launched HubSpot Customer Hub. The move expands the HubSpot platform, which also includes CRM, sales, and marketing tools, into customer service.

Customer Hub is designed to help companies understand, respond, and grow through the success of their customers. In addition to the standard features like customer inquiry management, live chat, and ticket escalation, Customer Hub will also offer tools for automated customer feedback and Net Promoter Score tracking, sentiment analysis and churn forecasting, customer testimonial capturing, and knowledge management. Also included is HubSpot Conversations, HubSpot's new solution to unify conversations from Facebook Messenger, onsite chat, social media, email, and other messaging outlets into one shared inbox. Conversations will also enable companies to build chatbots and scale responses to match high-volume inquiries.

"Whether it's between two humans, or a human and a bot, one-to-one messaging is the future of communications. Messages are simpler, smarter, and truly essential for creating an amazing customer experience," said Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and chief technology officer at HubSpot, in a statement. "With Conversations, we're going beyond a single solution, like site chat, to build something that centralizes all of a business's communications with customers and prospects into one, collaborative environment."

HubSpot Conversations draws insights from the company's CRM and marketing data to give teams the full context of every interaction. With Conversations, teams can stay connected with customers and prospects at any time, wherever they are. Now a customer interaction that starts on Facebook can be picked up via live chat on the company site, for example, with all communications synthesized in one central inbox.

"Let's face it, too often, companies pay lip-service to customer service and success. Customers are the lifeblood of a successful business, and based on the experience you provide them, they can be your biggest advocates, or your loudest detractors," Shah added. "With Customer Hub, businesses can now rally their teams around the customer, allowing them to have better conversations, develop deeper customer insights, and strengthen their relationship with your business."

HubSpot also announced major updates to the professional tier of its Sales Hub. The enhanced Sales Professional tier adds automation, predictive lead scoring, and other advanced features for growing sales teams. It offers smart email templates, document tracking, automated meeting calendar functionality, web chat, predictive lead scoring, automated email sequences, deal and task automation tools, team management features, and custom dashboards and reporting features.

In addition, HubSpot last week launched a native e-commerce integration with Shopify, a multichannel commerce platform, allowing shared customers to bring Shopify and its data, including customers, orders, and products, into the HubSpot platform. Users can see online sales in HubSpot as deals, organize and analyze purchasing patterns, and measure customer lifetime value. The new integration also helps e-commerce marketers complete specific ecommerce tasks, like sending transactional email and building workflows around shopping carts.

In another round of integrations, HubSpot has added a number of social tools inside HubSpot Marketing Hub, including a new Facebook lead ads integration, Facebook ads audience sync, and Instagram integration.

The Facebook Ads Audience Sync lets HubSpot Ads users retarget, nurture, and convert Facebook users based on HubSpot data. This includes company targeting for ABM strategies. HubSpot lists can also be expanded by Facebook's machine learning feature, Lookalike Audiences, allowing HubSpot users to target and convert new audiences that are similar to existing high-value customers.

Audience Sync is available in addition to the existing Facebook lead ads integration, which lets users create lead ads in HubSpot and sync leads generated back to HubSpot.

The new posting solution for Instagram allows users to draft and schedule posts inside the HubSpot desktop experience and then post them via HubSpot Mobile and Instagram. When the chosen scheduled time comes around, the user will receive a notification that it's time to post. Once received, the user swipes open the notification, which will auto-launch HubSpot Mobile, where the Instagram content, both image and text, will be automatically copied onto their clipboards. One click takes users to the editing screen within Instagram, where images will be auto-populated and can be pasted in the text.

"Our new social features come from new integrations between HubSpot and Facebook Ads and Instagram. These integrations give marketers the tools they need to reach, engage, and convert the most valuable audiences across the world's most popular social networks," said Christopher O'Donnell, vice president of product at HubSpot, in a statement. "These new additions help our customers adapt to mobile users and capitalize on the benefit of using CRM data for Facebook Ads targeting."

---