Inside Service Hub: Building a Unified Post-Sales Journey | INBOUND 2025

All right. Good afternoon inbound, and welcome to Inside Service Hub. I'm Paul Weston, GM and VP of product for Service Hub and I'm here with Kie, our leader for help desk and self Service tools, and Colette, our leader for customer success tools. And together we're going to dive into my favorite topic, which is of course, Service Hub. Now. Woo. We are really proud of Service Hub. It brings something that's really unique to the market across both customer support and customer success. In the post sales world, it unifies your team, your department and your entire front office in a way that just wasn't possible before. And the best part, the most important part, is that it delivers real tangible results. Service hub customers close 57% more tickets and they close those tickets 25% faster. And 83% of our customers say that it improves their customer retention. But it hasn't always been this way. So, so let's take a step back, let's say 10, 15 years ago and think about how we got here. So what was going on 10, 15 years ago? Well, Amy Poehler, inbound keynote speaker, was on Parks and Rec. Gangnam Style was a thing which by the way, my kids have rediscovered Gangnam Style and they love it to this day. It's a classic. But back then, Before I joined HubSpot, I worked in marketing software and I worked for a point solution tool and I would talk to marketers, hundreds of marketers, and it was clear that we were at an inflection point. At that point in time, point solutions just weren't working anymore. Marketers were spending their time clicking between tools and tabs and losing context along the way. It was super painful. What they really wanted was better line of sight into campaign performance. Holistically, they wanted to simplify their tech stack. In 2017, I came to HubSpot and the first product I worked on was Marketing Hub and I saw that vision come to life firsthand. Marketing Hub brought together lead gen, marketing automation and all sorts of different marketing activities into one unified product in a really powerful way. Now, fast forward a few years and I kind of feel like I'm having deja vu because we're at the exact same inflection point in the post sales world. Now these post sales teams are kind of notorious for cobbling together point solutions across this end to end customer journey. And guess what? It's not working. You've got your ticketing system over here, you've got a chatbot over there, you've got your feedback tools, you've got your knowledge base You've got an entirely separate customer success platform for your CSMs. And that's not to mention your CRM source of truth. It's painful. We think that that's detrimental to your business in the same way that siloed marketing tools were 10 years ago. The reality is to provide the experience that your customers expect, your teams need instant access to relevant and up to date data. Teams with unified data are 225% more likely to deliver personalized experiences. But only 35% of leaders say their customer data is fully integrated with the tools that they use every day. When your data is disconnected, your support and success teams can't offer the best experiences. It's impossible. So just like Marketing Hub unified the marketing tech stack a decade ago, we're doing the exact same thing with Service Hub. And as you'll see, we're aggressively investing in AI and user experiences that make teams more successful. It's the first truly unified post sales product spanning across customer support and customer success. With your CRM source of truth sitting in the middle with Surface Hub, you can manage your entire customer journey in one place. Now, unified data is great in theory, but it can be easier said than done. So I want to unpack the three layers of unified data as we see it. The first step is you've got to unify each team. So for example, your support team needs to unify each channel in your help desk platform. That means your chat, your in app, your calling, your email, all need to be unified on the same help desk platform. Now this should be table stick. Sounds obvious, but many teams still have fragmented tools across channels. Now the next step, you got to unify each department. You got to make sure your department is unified. What this means is that your entire post sales org should be running off of the same data. Your CSMs need to know when support tickets have been open and closed within their book of business. Your support teams need to know what onboarding status or subscription a customer has when they're trying to help them. It's a huge pain and it's a sub optimizer when your teams aren't reading from the same book. And the real nirvana in this hierarchy of needs is when your entire front office is unified across marketing, sales, customer success and customer support. So here CSM should be able to easily flag or automate case studies or social proof for your marketing team or send upsell and cross sell opportunities to your sales team. When the data flows across your entire front office, your personalization, your reporting, your automation all get way more More effective. And beyond features, we ran a survey. We found that 97% of customer support and customer success leaders actively want to improve collaboration with marketing and sales. I feel that pain, right? I feel like someone needs to give them a hug and a HubSpot login to help them collaborate better. Inside of HubSpot. Okay, over the next 20 minutes, we're going to share seven features that will help show off the power of unified data inside of Service Hub. And the kicker is that you can set these things up in an hour or less. That means you can do every single one of these things easily inside of one service hub. Trial Key A is going to kick us off by showing service operations in one place. And Colette's gonna take us home with features for CSMs and customer success teams. And spoiler, it's gonna include a lot of AI and they're gonna touch on every layer of that unified data pyramid. It's gonna unify your team, your department, and HubSpot's special sauce, the entire front office. Thanks for being on the surface Hub journey with us now. Kie, over to you.

All right. Hi everyone. I'm Kie Watanabe, Director of product for Help Desk and Self Service. Paul talked about the three layers of unification across teams, across departments, and across the front office. What does it mean to unify your support team? Let's start with the kind of experience you want to offer your customers. As Paul mentioned, customers expect and love fast, personalized, even proactive service. I want to share how Service Hub helps you deliver fast, personalized customer experiences in three different ways. First, self service. A common starting point for customers to help themselves. Second, AI agents. Customers can use the channels that they're familiar with, whether it be email, live chat, or calling, and speak with AI chatbots. Third, human agents. This one speaks for itself. A unified experience in support means that no matter how your customers are getting their questions answered, you're orchestrating them from one unified place. What happens if you do it wrong? What happens if your systems live in silos? The consequences are real. Two real life examples. First, a financial services company many of us are familiar with decided to replace 700 support agents with AI agents claimed $40 million in savings and had to backtrack when their customers demanded human connection back. Ouch. Another one, a famous burger chain, had a TikTok video go viral when customers were going through a drive thru laughing as a system added 260 chicken nuggets. As the mother of a toddler, I love chicken nuggets. But 260 is just too many. The lesson here isn't just that you need to balance AI with humans. It's that you need to use AI where it can be most impactful so that it frees up humans to do what humans can uniquely do. The only, and I mean the only way to do that is by having everything in one place. Service Hub can transform the way your team works and how service is delivered using the power of AI. Let's start with self service. Anybody want to guess what percent of customers prefer to solve their issues independently? 30. 30. I heard 30. I would have guessed closer to 32. 78% of customers prefer to solve their issues Independently. 8 out of 10 honestly prefer to just help themselves. I'm a bit surprised because I just like talking it through with people, but it turns out I'm in the minority. Your knowledge base is so essential to make sure that your customers can help themselves. But creating and updating a knowledge base takes a lot of time and effort. I know this because I've been that product manager that obsesses over making sure our documentation is as great as it can be. Now, I'm lucky to have dedicated technical content creators and writers, but many service teams don't. That means support reps are often multitasking. Worse, they're probably doing double work because they've answered those same cancers in previous tickets. What if we could take that information and help write content for you? With Knowledge Base Agent you can use the power of AI to shortcut the process of creating and updating knowledge based articles. Simply choose the knowledge base. You want Knowledge Base Agent to be working out of the ticket pipeline. You want Knowledge Base Agent to filter tickets by and Knowledge Base Agent identifies topic gaps to help create new articles for you. The result? No more product managers bugging you, no more multitaskers, and a better self service experience for your customers. So you've got your content up and running, but customers are still writing in asking for help. And we're here for it, right? As humans, we're evolutionarily wired to have help others. But it's also true that in that stack of support requests there are so many basic repetitive questions. In fact, 65% fall into that category. And if customers are expecting immediate responses, then there's literally no time to lose. This is where we should be leading into AI. Customer Agent is a powerful teammate that answers questions 24, 7 and can help you with those basic repetitive questions with a personal touch. With now over 65% resolution rates, getting set up is easy. Simply choose a name, goal personality the content you want Customer Agent to reference and Customer Agent is trained and ready to go. Customer Agent does an amazing job answering customers questions. Since Customer Agent is now fully connected to the CRM, Customer Agent can answer offer personalized answers to questions like when is my invoice due? Or when is my contract coming up for renewal? How cool is that? Customer Agent can do more than answer questions. It can even take actions for you. By configuring Customer Agent with third party systems, Customer Agent can handle repeat actions like tracking order status, password resets or managing billing issues. That's not it. Customer Agent can even update the CRM for you. Customer Agent also learns and improves. We recently launched new coaching and testing experiences so that you can deploy Customer Agent with trust and confidence. Don't take my word for it. See here what Ben Simon from Kaplan Early Learning Company has to say. He says that Customer Agent helped independently address 37% of their issues. That's so awesome. Imagine what you could do with 37% less volume and 37% more time. This isn't just about the resolution rate. We're driving down volume. No matter how great Customer Agent is, there are still going to be those issues that are best for humans to handle. And for those moments you want to bring your A game, Ideally your support team is in tip top shape to handle escalations, complex issues or your most valuable customers. This is easier said than done. A few months ago I shadowed our HubSpot support rep and they had to open up additional tabs to search through knowledge based articles to gather important context and then use another external AI tool to craft a response. Our AI First Help Desk makes it really easy for support reps to close tickets more easily and more quickly. The moment a ticket comes into a support rep's hands. HubSpot offers recommendations for knowledge sources and replies right at a rep's fingertips. This is how HubSpot support team works right here in our AI powered help desk. Customers using features like Reply Recommendations are showing 65% faster response times. All right, time for a pop quiz. What happens when you combine the effect of deflecting tickets using tools like Knowledge Based Agent and Customer Agent and time saved using our AI powered Help Desk? That creates a massive opportunity for your support teams to have more capacity to do the work that humans can uniquely do and let humans shine where AI simply can't on the more complex and strategic problems and help drive more efficiencies for your team? Overall, I shared a constellation of tools that helps unify your support teams and helps resolve tickets faster and also improve customer satisfaction. That creates an opportunity for you to focus on the next layer of unification, the unification between departments. I'm going to hand it over to Colette who can speak to how successful Service Hub can help you also think about growth.

Hi everyone. Thanks Kie. My name is Colette King and I am the product lead for HubSpot's customer success tools. Last year Service Hub released a suite of customer success tools. These tools became the dedicated home for CSMs inside of HubSpot. Now customer success managers can retain and grow their customer base directly from HubSpot. And a very fun fact. With the release of these new tools, I have been working very closely with HubSpot's own customer success team to get them onboarded to all of the same products that you, our customers use. And during that process I have had a front seat view into what's actually happening in customer success these days. Take a minute and think. How are your customer success colleagues actually doing? I can tell you what I'm hearing. CSMs are stretched thin. Now I am the oldest of five girls. There's an 11 year age gap between myself and my youngest sister. So I hope you believe me when I say that all of our CS colleagues are starting to sound a lot like my parents on the Sunday night of a long weekend. Incredibly overwhelmed and pulled in a million directions. One of the biggest issues, teams feel like they're flying blind. Only 24% of service leaders feel like they have full service, full funnel visibility into their customer experience. Only 24% of service leaders feel like they know what their customers are doing. And 75% of leaders are facing at least some gaps in their customer data. The thing is, when customer success teams are responsible for the entire customer experience, they can't afford these data gaps. They're gonna run into walls and spend too much time gathering context leading to a less effective customer success team who can manage fewer customers and a worse overall customer experience. Today I'm going to walk you through a handful of tools that help close these data gaps and turn that overwhelm into action. And not to sound too much like an infomercial, but CSMs don't have to be overwhelmed. When CSMs have the data and tools that they need, their broad scope becomes a superpower. When CSMs have that deep scope, they have an opportunity to develop a deep extra expertise in their customers goals and challenges. They can be much more flexible and creative when it comes to solving their customers problems. And most importantly, their customers get one person who knows their story and can act on it. Now, to start our first feature off, I want to preface this by saying that I do genuinely love HubSpot sales team. They are some of the best in the business, but like a lot of great sales teams, they are super focused on closing deals. So in the past we've had some trouble with the sales to customer success handoff, like I imagine a lot of you have. Let me know if this sounds familiar. CSMs scrolling through pages and pages and pages of notes, or constantly bugging a sales rep to give them the information they need to fill out that success plan. And the worst part is over 50% of customers report that they have to repeat themselves to different teams even after all of that effort. But rather than convincing a sales rep to do better documentation, we're introducing the brand new Sales to Customer success handoff agent. Here's how it works. HubSpot scans the information that's already being recorded in your CSM. In your in your CRM. We give CSMs an overview of the company, including some essential facts and figures. Then we'll pull out a list of all of the key stakeholders that were involved in the deal conversations and tag them as both champions or detractors, depending upon how they showed up during the deal process. Next, we'll answer critical questions like why did the customer buy my product? What are their goals and expectations? And we'll help CSMs get ahead of potential risks by flagging customer concerns that were surfaced during those deal conversations. With the full picture, customers won't have to repeat themselves and CSMs can start building trust from the very beginning. Now, once your CSMs have made an excellent first impression during the onboarding process, you want to keep that momentum going regardless of who your customers talk to. Now here at HubSpot, we actually have multiple post sales teams. We have onboarding specialists, run renewal managers, professional services, and more. And if, like HubSpot, you also have multiple post sale teams, you're familiar with the decision you have to make. You could put everybody into separate systems, creating data silos, muddying handoffs, or breaking all of your reporting. Or you can try to unify everybody on one system, but that means that everybody has to use a one size fits all approach. These are two objectively bad options. No thank you. Well, good news. The customer success workspace is getting even more flexible. We're introducing team workspaces that allow each team to have their own custom views. Team workspaces support multiple HubSpot teams and users will see the workspace associated with their main team and team. Each team workspace gets their own distinct ownership property. Onboarding teams don't need to see a list of customers who are renewing in the next three months, but renewal managers do. Instead, Onboarding teams probably want to know which customers have been stuck in an onboarding stage for a little bit too long. Teamworkspaces makes this happen. And don't worry if you're a manager, you can still view any any workspace as any of your team members, regardless of what team they're on. Team Workspaces prevents data silos by allowing both customization and collaboration. Pretty cool. All right, I have one more customer success focused feature to show you and it's probably one of my favorite. It's the real Chef's Kiss at the top of Paul's pyramid and marketers. This one's for you. I talked to our product marketing lead the other day and I asked him what his biggest challenge was. Easy, he said. Finding testimonials. It's traditionally a brute force approach, manually pulling data from different systems and triangulating it to find the perfect case study customer. Honestly, it's a nightmare and no one wants to do it. But if your entire go to market system is on the same platform, it doesn't have to be. This workflow is going to automatically collect case studies from HubSpot's marketing team's perfect customer using HubSpot's customer health score. The very first thing we'll do is send a slack message to the marketing team letting them know there's a new candidate. Then we'll send an email to the customer to gauge their interest in a case study. If they don't book a meeting, we'll automatically send a follow up without anyone having to think about it. The best part is marketing can customize and combine all kinds of triggers depending upon what they're looking for. High usage Send them to Marketing High csat, Send it to Marketing A great support experience. Send them to Marketing. Now I have one last feature to show you. I promise this is it. Who here uses ChatGPT?

Great.

What about Claude? Cool makes day two. Did you know that HubSpot is the very first CRM to integrate directly into both of those tools? This last feature spans both the scale support and drive retention use cases and these integrations are next level. By unifying Data both in HubSpot, you can generate even more insights outside of it. Let's take a look. So when I go ahead and open Claude, I'm going to enable the HubSpot integration and make sure that we're connected. Easy as that. Then I'm going to go ahead and ask my question. What are the most common causes of my recent support tickets? Now Claude is going to go ahead and give me an answer without me having to do anything. I am not tagging or categorizing any of my tickets and I can even ask more detailed questions like can you dig deeper into support tickets to help me understand my most common causes of churn? It is incredibly easy. These AI integrations are a great sneak peek of the road ahead for Service Hub. Over the next few quarters, we're going to focus on two things. One is unifying data across teams, departments and the entire front office. Second, we're going to layer AI on top of that to automate even more busy work and generate even more insights. We're just getting started and we are incredibly excited for all of your support and feedback. Now, to wrap up today, I'll give a quick summary of everything that I've talked about. Here is a full list including all of the packaging and availability. Screenshot it, share it and if you saw something interesting, sign up for a Service Hub trial and take it for a test run. If you have any questions, come chat with us. After, come visit us and our colleagues at the Service Hub demo station or or get deeper dives on the Mini Spotlight stage. Thank you so much.