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HubSpot is launching a litany of AI-powered features for its sales and marketing platform to help small businesses compete against larger brands. Among the highlights are upgrades to its Service Hub aimed at managing customer conversations, addressing problem areas and driving retention, and new ways to generate content through the Content Hub, formerly CMS Hub.
“Marketing, sales and service teams are going through a major shift as technology and customer expectations evolve,” HubSpot’s Executive Vice President of Product Andy Pitre said. “Right now, innovation happens in days, not years. It’s a huge opportunity for [small-to-medium businesses] SMBs, but keeping up with the pace of innovation can be daunting.”
Bringing together service and success
HubSpot believes the customer experience model is broken and this space has seen “so little innovation.” Customers and businesses won’t really hear from one another unless there’s an issue. The company argues this shouldn’t be the way — it’s more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to keep existing ones happy. HubSpot believes it has a solution that can be both proactive and reactive.
“There are two parts of Service Hub: There’s customer support, and then there’s customer success. Those are the two big use cases,” Pitre said to VentureBeat. “We’re launching customer success tools for the first time,” he explains, alluding to features that help account managers retain and grow their customers and increase their “book of business.”
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Customer service updates
Service Hub launched in 2018 as an all-in-one customer service solution powered by HubSpot’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Now, it’s receiving new tools infused with HubSpot AI to help keep customers happy.
Among the additions is a help desk where human agents can monitor real-time ticket updates across live chat, email, calls and SMS. The AI can summarize lengthy tickets and generate responses on behalf of human agents.
There’s also a tool Pitre describes as Service Hub’s “killer feature,” a support agent. Trained using a company’s knowledge base articles, this bot provides trained responses to queries posted through HubSpot’s live chat tool. Customers visiting a business’ website can post their queries, and the bot will provide answers derived from all the internal content it’s ingested.
New customer success tools
Service Hub is expanding beyond troubleshooting customer issues. For the first time, HubSpot is launching tools to drive customer retention. Now, businesses can be proactive in their outreach instead of exerting time and resources to keep customers.
“The big feature… is health scoring,” Pitre said. Using predictive AI, account managers can prioritize the customers they should reconnect with. “The idea is that you have a business, and because you’re using HubSpot, we have all these signals. We know when you talk to them last, when the renewal date is coming up, when they last used your product, [and] know if they had a bad support experience. All that information is coming into HubSpot. We’re using that to generate a customer health score,” he shares.
Health scoring is built into Service Hub’s Customer Success Workspace. Available today in beta, this is where Customer Success Managers manage their “book of business” and receive actionable insights. It also includes integration support for third-party apps such as Pendo, Amplitude and Segment.
Staying competitive against market leaders
HubSpot’s upgrades to Service Hub draw parallels to Salesforce, Zendesk and Intercom, two of which recently announced their own AI updates. The customer experience market is crowded with many players, so how does HubSpot imagine it can be a player in this space?
Pitre agrees that there are similarities between HubSpot’s six Hubs (marketing, sales, service, content, operations and commerce) and Salesforce’s individual Clouds. However, the two companies contrast in who they’re targeting — HubSpot sees itself as a leader in the SMB space while Salesforce has done well up-market in the enterprise.
Another advantage Pitre sought to play up is HubSpot’s CRM. With Salesforce, “their answer is that you have to buy another product to unify the customer data. The HubSpot story is that the customer data is unified from the beginning.” He elaborates further, “We’ve taken what some might call the harder path of building a lot of stuff ourselves rather than growing through acquisitions. All the data is centralized in the CRM… that knows all your customer data. And from an AI perspective, that’s a really important thing to have because the data you’re feeding in, whether it’s a HubSpot feature or an integration to HubSpot, the data that you’re feeding to the AI application you’re using, to interface with your customers, it needs to be powered by that customer data because that’s where the prompts are coming from.”
Using AI for content
HubSpot is also upgrading its CMS Hub. Initially designed to build websites, the offering has been rebranded as Content Hub and is now powered by AI. The website-building functionality still exists, but according to Pitre, “we realized that in an AI world, you’re not just building a website. That’s not the beginning and end of your content strategy. You’re creating content for the website.” This means you’re using AI to build website pages, compose blog posts about a topic, generate an image for your product and more.
Content Hub includes a feature that allows businesses to repurpose content easily for many use cases. With this idea of content remixes, “you can basically take one piece of content, say a blog post. And then you can create different types of content from that blog post. You can create multiple social posts, create a podcast version of my blog post, etc,” Pitre states.
It also has tools to help establish a unified brand voice across blogs, social media, and email, stand up and distribute podcasts and create a gated content library for premium content while easily capturing leads.
These capabilities may not be grand updates for businesses with sizable marketing teams. But everything HubSpot is announcing today is largely aimed at small-to-medium-sized businesses. “One to 2,000-size companies are really who we’re trying to serve when we talk about SMBs,” Pitre said. They are not likely to have the time and resources needed to develop engaging marketing campaigns manually. As such, HubSpot is looking to provide them with the tools and a virtual assistant so they can be as competitive as larger brands without breaking the bank and diverting resources needed elsewhere.
How HubSpot views AI
Pitre, like others, believes AI has been an important and transformative technology, changing how companies operate. It has served as a great equalizer, leveling the playing field between small and large businesses. Big companies have the resources to do many things smaller firms aren’t able to, from writing content, creating emails and marketing campaigns, organizing and selling leads, and handling incoming support tickets. “There’s still this kind of disadvantage as far as company size goes,” he declares. “We think that one of the big opportunities AI is going to provide is it’s going to make it so small companies can actually compete with relatively smaller teams…”
However, according to HubSpot, SMBs are slow to adopt AI. “There’s this huge opportunity to basically take the technology — which will ultimately make people’s work easier, faster and scale better — bring it to small companies, and let them use [it] to basically act like bigger companies. That’s where we see the opportunity.”
Today’s announcements aren’t the first time HubSpot has launched AI-powered tools. Pitre says that his team has been working with the technology for a long time, though most involved predictive AI. “We were basically building models based off of customer data to make the product better, easier and faster.”
He said that the past 18 months have shown HubSpot that “what wasn’t possible before is possible now.” This empowers smaller businesses, which might often have one person doing marketing—typically the owner—producing content that would rival their bigger peers with significantly larger staff. And though HubSpot is embracing generative AI now, it still considers predictive AI valuable for different use cases.
HubSpot’s revamped Service Hub and Content Hub are available today. Both hubs feature a free tier, with paid plans starting at $15 per month per seat.
