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.
The HubSpot Customer Platform
HubSpot is an AI-powered customer platform that connects your marketing, sales, customer service, content, data, and revenue processes around one shared CRM.
Instead of forcing separate systems and disconnected data to work together, HubSpot gives your teams a shared view of your prospects and customers. Marketing can see what’s happening in sales. Sales can see the marketing activity that led to a conversation. Service teams have the context of the entire customer relationship. And automation can connect processes across all of them.
At the center of the platform is HubSpot Smart CRM, which connects your customer data across HubSpot’s products. HubSpot’s Breeze AI tools are also integrated throughout the platform to help teams automate work, create and analyze content, research prospects and customers, and use CRM data more effectively.
HubSpot’s six core products are Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub, and Revenue Hub. Each can be used on its own, but the real power comes from using them together because they share the same CRM and customer data.
Sales Hub
Sales Hub is HubSpot’s AI-powered sales software for building pipeline and closing deals.
Sales teams can manage contacts and companies, build deal pipelines, automate follow-up with sequences and workflows, track sales activity, forecast revenue, score leads, create playbooks, and manage prospecting from one connected workspace.
Because Sales Hub is built on HubSpot Smart CRM, your sales team can also see the marketing, service, and other customer activity surrounding each relationship instead of working from an isolated sales database.
Marketing Hub
Marketing Hub brings your marketing data, campaigns, automation, and lead generation tools together with your CRM.
You can use Marketing Hub to create and automate email campaigns, build forms and landing pages, manage campaigns and social media, segment audiences, score leads, personalize communications, and measure how marketing activity contributes to leads and revenue.
HubSpot is also increasingly incorporating AI into Marketing Hub, including AI-powered lead generation, campaign creation, automation, and tools that help marketers understand how buyers are discovering their brands through both traditional search and AI-generated answers.
Service Hub
Service Hub connects customer service and customer success with the rest of the customer journey.
Teams can manage support through HubSpot’s help desk and ticketing tools, create a knowledge base, collect customer feedback, route requests, track service performance, and manage customer success and retention.
Service Hub also includes AI-powered tools such as Customer Agent, which can answer customer questions and take actions using your business and CRM data. Because service activity lives alongside marketing and sales data, your team has a much more complete picture of each customer relationship.
Content Hub
Content Hub replaced what was previously known as CMS Hub and expands HubSpot’s website tools into a broader AI-powered content marketing platform.
In addition to building and managing websites, landing pages, and blogs, Content Hub includes tools for content creation, personalization, repurposing, podcasts, video, reporting, and content management.
HubSpot is also bringing answer engine optimization into Content Hub with HubSpot AEO, which helps businesses understand how their brands appear when buyers ask questions in AI tools and identify opportunities to improve that visibility.
Data Hub
Data Hub is the evolution of what was previously Operations Hub. It’s designed to help businesses connect, clean, organize, and activate data across HubSpot and the rest of their technology stack.
Data Hub includes data syncing, data quality tools, automation, reporting, and tools for combining first- and third-party data. It can also help connect HubSpot with external data sources and maintain cleaner, more consistent CRM data.
This becomes increasingly important as businesses use more AI because the quality of the results you get from AI depends heavily on the quality and completeness of the underlying data.
Revenue Hub
Revenue Hub is HubSpot’s connected system for managing the revenue process, including quoting, contracts, billing, and payments.
Revenue Hub is the evolution of Commerce Hub, expanding HubSpot’s commerce tools beyond payments and billing into a broader quote-to-cash process.
Because this information lives alongside your CRM data, sales, service, and finance processes can stay connected to the customer relationship instead of operating from separate systems.
What about HubSpot’s AI tools?
AI isn’t really a separate Hub. Breeze, HubSpot’s collection of AI tools, is integrated throughout the customer platform.
Depending on the HubSpot products and features you’re using, AI can help with everything from prospecting and customer service to content creation, data analysis, automation, research, and CRM work.
HubSpot is also expanding its AI agent capabilities so businesses can use agents to perform work using the context and data already stored in HubSpot.
Wondering if HubSpot is right for your business?
Choosing the right HubSpot products and figuring out how they should work together depends on your business, your existing technology, and what you’re trying to accomplish.
If you’re considering HubSpot, I can help you determine what you actually need and provide hands-on HubSpot onboarding to configure the platform around your business.
If you’re already using HubSpot and need help with automation, integrations, CRM cleanup, custom objects, reporting, training, or another specific challenge, take a look at my one-off HubSpot projects.
And if you’re not quite sure what kind of help you need, schedule a 15-minute HubSpot consultation and tell me what you’re working on.