Consumer services has consistently been adapting and pivoting since being faced with economic uncertainty, a major disruption in the global supply chain and labor shortages, and major changes in consumer behavior.
These challenges continue to face the consumer services industry, and those brands who have embraced change have flourished while those who have stayed stagnant have closed up shop or are working hard to evolve and grow as “normal” life continues to morph. As with other industries, the key to prosperity has been innovation and technology.
What challenges has your consumer business been faced with?
To begin, let’s look at the consumer services industry as a whole. The customer experience management market worldwide was valued at $7.6 billion dollars. Approximately 21.4 million people in the United States alone are employed by professional and business services. Probably one of the most important statistics to keep in mind is that 90% of consumers in the United States use customer service as the deciding factor in who they do business with.
On the same note, 54% of consumers have higher customer service expectations that a year ago. As consumer services providers, we have to up our game to stay in the game.
54% of consumers have higher customer service expectations than one year ago. As a consumer services provider, the bar has been raised.
Nextiva
Other challenges facing the consumer services industry are the urgency and high expectations of customers. The alignment and communication across teams can be challenging as is targeting the right leads and segmenting them. Let’s look in more depth at these common challenges for consumer services businesses.
Timeliness Challenges
Customers have high expectations, sometimes maybe even a bit unrealistic, but businesses still strive to meet those demands. It is challenging to manage and prioritize requests as well as ensure that they are completed.
Alignment Challenges
Many customer service organizations struggle to execute seamless and numerous customer requests during shift changes. It is also challenging to align the sales, marketing, and customer service teams when they’re operating on different platforms, making it difficult to see the complete customer journey.
Communication Challenges
Consumer services have to engage with consumers on a number of platforms in order to garner enough visibility into their broad buyer personas. They are also challenged with communicating effectively internally and across multiple departments. Another big challenge with consumer service brands is they spend a great deal of time answering non-service related customer questions.
Targeting Challenges
Consumer services companies are faced with a number of targeting challenges, for example, they struggle to segment and target their most profitable customer types by service line. Many services are seasonal or repetitive and can be scheduled in advance so they need to target early. Also, they struggle to segment properly based on service offerings; many lacking the tools to segment by various criteria.
Digital Impact on Consumer Services
65% of consumers leave a brand due to bad customer service. We might even venture to say the percentage is higher than that. Local reviews are critical to the consumer services industry. And, let’s look at one of the biggest challenges facing consumer services–cost per lead in the home improvement market is a whopping $480. Ouch!
Consumer Expectations for Service Providers
While you’re in the business of making customers happy, it’s more difficult than ever. Again, the expectations of consumers is probably one of the biggest challenges. They expect to be able to find you easily and make appointments. They want their services customized and, let’s face it, they want individualized treatment.
Why HubSpot for Consumer Services?
HubSpot’s CRM platform has all the tools and integrations you need to solve for the many challenges mentioned above. HubSpot was created so that never again do you have multiple platforms you’re trying to force to work together, and instead everyone is operating from one single source of truth. Likewise, each one is intuitive and easy to use for the ultimate customer experience. Each product in the HubSpot CRM platform is powerful alone, but the real magic happens when you use them together.
HubSpot helps you to create a connected customer experience for individuals and companies seeking your services. It allows you to automate and unify your sales, marketing, and service teams so everyone is on the same page. It allows you to create workflows that make communication more efficient, while at the same time tracking them to ensure all leads are followed-through and buyer’s needs are met.
Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub are each part of HubSpot’s connected CRM platform to help you grow better. When you use two or more hubs together, your data is automatically connected on the platform, enabling you to easily (and powerfully) track your entire customer journey from first website visit, to closed deal, to happy customer.
Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub is a time-saving sales CRM that provides you with an in-depth 360 degree view of your prospects, while minimizing busy work and giving your sales team time to close deals. Sales Hub can also help you leverage documents, and track bids and proposals, ensuring the right follow-up communications occur. Sales Hub helps you track revenue by deal stage across various pipelines. Create email onboarding sequences to automate deal stage communications and reduce manual follow-up for recurring communications. And, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Rather than using multiple tools to accomplish each of these tasks separately, HubSpot’s sales software enables teams to do all their work under one roof. Save time and energy by using a single tool, rather than splitting up your team’s energy (and information) across multiple platforms..
Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub is a CRM-powered marketing platform that allows you to create, manage, and track your marketing campaigns. It provides everything you need to get found, connect with new prospects, and nurture them into buyers.
With Marketing Hub, all your marketing tools and data are in one place, so you don’t have to juggle multiple solutions and waste time stitching together reporting. It’s deeply powerful and easy to use. Last but not least, you can easily sync Marketing Hub with more than 1,250 custom integrations so your marketing team has all its favorite tools on one platform.
Popular features in HubSpot’s marketing software include the ability to:
- Build personalized, automated email campaigns
- Track marketing performance with built-in analytics and custom reporting
- Manage all your social media accounts in one place
- Design and host SEO optimized blog posts and web pages
- Get your whole team speaking with one voice with campaign management tools
Service Hub
Service Hub allows you to provide superior customer service. Among other things, it allows you to manage the onboarding of new customers, collect, organize, and respond to customer support requests, and ensure the growth and satisfaction of your customers.
While most customer service software solutions solve for a specific use case, Service Hub is unique in its connection to the HubSpot CRM platform. With features that make it easy to deliver authentic, personalized service, Service Hub empowers you to prioritize the customer experience.
CMS Hub
CMS Hub is a content management system (CMS) that facilitates creating, managing, and modifying information on a website. With a CMS, your developers can build flexible, beautiful website themes that your marketing team can use to make website updates on their own, creating and personalizing your website for every visitor.
HubSpot’s CMS Hub allows marketers to take ownership over their website. You won’t have to worry about security concerns or broken pages, freeing you up to focus on the experience you’re providing customers instead. And with flexible themes, you can ensure your brand and design stay consistent across pages.
Operations Hub
The Operations Hub seamlessly integrates with all the tools above, and allows you to connect data and automate processes for a friction-free experience between your teams. You are essentially aligning large amounts of data around a secure, single source of truth and presenting it in a clean, consistent, and easily accessible manner. Likewise, the Operations Hub helps you streamline processes that allow you to reduce manual work while at the same time personalizing your messaging and improving customer experience.
Wondering if HubSpot is right for you? Schedule a call with Carrie Gallagher at Lovable Marketing and learn how to start generating and nurturing the right leads for your business.