How HubSpot Service Teams Use Customer Intelligence

Customer intelligence (CI) is information you collect about your customers that helps you understand more about them and their experience with your products, services, and business as a whole. You can get CI from things like surveys, social media, or purchase history data and analytics stored in a CRM.  

As a customer service team, you want to use, and collect, this intelligence. It allows you to understand your customers needs and deliver a personalized experience that will speak to their needs. In turn, when customers feel as though you truly understand their pain points and actively work to solve them, you’ll increase loyalty and drive revenue.

If you’re struggling to figure out how to use your business’ CI to better serve your customers, learn from HubSpot service teams on how they use their data to support their strategies.

How HubSpot Service Teams Use Customer Intelligence

1. To understand the scope of customer operations.

Jackie Lee, a Senior Customer Support specialist, uses customer intelligence to understand the scope of a customer's business operations. Lee uses an internal data resource to “Easily access information about a company, such as what business segment they are in, how long they have been using HubSpot, or where they are located. This gives me insight into the scope of their operations, as well as their potential knowledge with the tool.”

With this information, it becomes easier to understand how the customer interacts with your business, and what they do or don’t use. As an example, Lee says that customer location information lets her understand their ability to use certain tools, as privacy regulations can vary by country: “Having the customer info can prevent giving a suggestion that is not feasible for their location.

2. To help service reps grow.

Part of creating a delightful customer experience is having support teams that are trained to provide those exceptional experiences.

As such, you can use CI data to help service reps grow in their abilities. Brian Tassey, a support team lead, says, “I rely quite a bit on NPS® and associated comments to drill into growth opportunities for the reps that I am responsible for coaching. With specific feedback from customers, we can drill down into behaviors that might be having negative impacts, then coach on that.”

Support reps and teams that can improve upon their practices and grow from customer feedback are better suited to meet customers’ needs and provide them with the experiences they desire.

3. To make accurate solution recommendations.

You always want to make recommendations to customers that are in line with their needs and will help them meet their goals.

Lee uses customer intelligence on subscription information and says, “Having subscription information easily available is important so you don’t recommend a solution that is not available with the customer’s current subscription and cause friction — instead, having this info allows you to position an upgrade opportunity.”

4. To understand the customer experience with your product.

Surveys are a valuable source of CI data, and David Hunt, VP of Global Customer Support, uses their results — “In HubSpot support, we find the most valuable aspect of our surveys is the qualitative feedback we get from customers. It allows us to see where our customer’s experience lives up to our standards and where it falls short.”

This information helps Hunt and his teams find strategic direction in their processes to ensure that they’re constantly solving for the customer and exceeding their expectations.  

5. To make improvements that customers desire.

Amber Ebrahim, a manager on the Customer Support team, uses NPS® survey results to make improvements that customers desire.

She says, “NPS® survey analysis allows our team to understand...individual customer feedback to ensure that when working on strategic initiatives, we’re considering the improvements that customers would like to see.”

6. To ensure customers are on track to meet their goals.

Britney Talty, a Customer Success Enablement Manager, likes to use customer intelligence to ensure that customers are on track to meet their goals. She says, “We work with customers to identify key onboarding goals and leverage data to understand what tools a customer has activated or not activated against their goals as a way to drive success with a customer.”

If a customer is falling short on meeting their goals and not understanding why, seeing that they haven’t yet used a tool that will solve their problem makes it easy to set them on the right track.

Customer Testimonial Template

As mentioned above, feedback is a valuable way to obtain intelligence directly from the customer. One way to get this feedback is through testimonials, which are honest reviews of your product or service. These testimonials are typically posted on your website and used in different marketing materials as a means of attracting other customers and driving sales.

When customers reply and share their feedback with you, you know what they enjoy and want you to continue doing, and you get actionable information on areas for improvement. The template below is an example template that you can send to customers to request testimonials and reviews over email.

We’d love to hear from you!

Dear [Insert customer name],

We hope you’re enjoying your recent purchase of [insert product name].

Since you’ve had a bit of time to try it out, we’d love to know what you think! Please consider taking a few minutes of your time to [click this link, insert link] and share some of your thoughts about [insert product name] so learn a bit more about you, and how you view our product! This will help us make sure that it speaks to your needs.

Your feedback means a lot! Thanks [customer name] for being a loyal [business name] customer.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

[insert your name]

Customer Intelligence Serves A Variety of Purposes

As shown above, there is no single way to use customer intelligence. Depending on your individual team needs, think about how your data would best suit your strategies, and leverage the information you collect to continue delighting your customers and exceeding their expectations.