HubSpot is unleashing a suite of AI-powered features on its sales and marketing platform, specifically designed to empower small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) to compete with larger brands. Key updates include enhancements to its Service Hub for managing customer interactions and addressing pain points, alongside innovative content generation tools in the rebranded Content Hub.
"Marketing, sales, and service teams are experiencing a significant transformation as technology and customer expectations evolve," said Andy Pitre, HubSpot’s Executive Vice President of Product. "Innovation now happens in days, not years. While this presents a tremendous opportunity for SMBs, keeping pace with such rapid changes can be challenging."
HubSpot argues that the current customer experience model is outdated, primarily reactive to problems rather than proactive in engagement. The company posits that retaining existing customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones and aims to address this with solutions that facilitate both proactive and reactive customer service.
“There are two major components of Service Hub: customer support and customer success,” Pitre explained. For the first time, HubSpot is rolling out customer success tools aimed at helping account managers retain and grow their customer base, thus increasing their overall business value.
Customer Service Updates
Launched in 2018 as a comprehensive customer service solution integrated with HubSpot’s CRM platform, Service Hub is now equipped with AI-driven tools to enhance customer satisfaction. A new help desk feature allows human agents to monitor real-time ticket updates across live chat, email, calls, and SMS. AI functionality summarizes lengthy tickets and generates responses for agents, streamlining communication.
Highlighting a standout feature, Pitre introduced a support agent powered by AI. Trained on a company’s knowledge base articles, this bot provides contextual responses to customer inquiries via HubSpot’s live chat. Customers visiting a business's website can get accurate answers based on internal resources.
New Customer Success Tools
Expanding on customer service, HubSpot is launching health scoring tools designed to boost customer retention. With these predictive AI capabilities, account managers can prioritize customer follow-ups based on various signals, such as last contact date and product usage.
“The essential feature is health scoring,” Pitre noted. This functionality, currently in beta within the Customer Success Workspace, integrates with third-party applications like Pendo and Amplitude to provide actionable insights for Customer Success Managers.
Staying Competitive Against Market Leaders
HubSpot’s enhanced Service Hub positions it alongside competitors like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Intercom, who have recently rolled out their AI updates. “HubSpot caters to the SMB sector, while Salesforce targets larger enterprises," Pitre elaborated. He emphasized that HubSpot’s unified CRM enables seamless data integration from the start, unlike Salesforce, which requires additional purchases for data unification.
Using AI for Content
HubSpot is also revamping its CMS, now called Content Hub, to leverage AI in content creation. While retaining its website-building capabilities, the platform now supports a broader content strategy, allowing users to generate website pages, blog posts, and even product images.
The Content Hub’s new "content remix" feature facilitates easy repurposing of existing material, enabling businesses to convert a single blog post into multiple formats—social media posts, podcasts, and more. Additional tools help maintain a consistent brand voice across different platforms and support gated content libraries for lead capture.
These updates primarily target small-to-medium businesses, which often lack the resources for extensive marketing efforts. HubSpot aims to equip these companies with tools to compete effectively without overextending their resources.
How HubSpot Views AI
Pitre acknowledges that AI is a transformative force, helping level the playing field for smaller businesses that traditionally faced disadvantages. “AI can empower small companies to compete with larger teams,” he asserted. However, many SMBs have been slow to adopt these technologies.
“By introducing tools that simplify tasks and improve efficiencies, we empower smaller firms to operate like larger organizations,” Pitre explained.
HubSpot’s recent AI innovations build upon a foundation of predictive AI, a space the company has explored for years. The developments of the past 18 months have revealed capabilities that allow smaller businesses to produce high-quality content comparable to that of larger competitors.
HubSpot's revamped Service Hub and Content Hub are now available, featuring a free tier, with paid plans starting at $15 per month per seat.
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