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by Emel Mesekoparan on November 18, 2024
HubSpot’s annual State of Service Trends Report features an in-depth look into what’s making CRM service businesses tick today.
Most of the report revolves around CX (customer experience), and HubSpot surveyed business leaders around the world who use their CRM to identify common challenges, opportunities, and motivations.
The three prevailing themes that emerged across the survey, which focused on the 2023 business year, were:
- Rapidly shifting customer expectations
- Using AI to improve CX and scalability
- Alignment strategies for cross-department collaboration
In reference to #1, the report points out that customers are demanding more than ever from service teams. This includes wanting increased response time and efficiency while simultaneously demanding more personalization, a more human experience.
This creates challenges related to deploying AI, #2, wherein AI can be of great help to scale services, but it has to be configured in a highly personalized, highly intentional way in order to improve CX.
Finally, the third theme is all about cohesion and efficiency, which often proves cumbersome as service businesses grow and scale, according to most HubSpot-using leaders.
Let’s take a deeper look into what the 2024 HubSpot State of Service Trends Report reveals about this movement toward better alignment in the interest of CX, plus growing and scaling a professional service business.
Why focus on alignment?
Number one, better alignment drives profitability. HubSpot accurately asserts that internal alignment is a cheap way to increase ROI. Simple things like holding a weekly accomplishment check-in or onboarding a more holistic software are examples.
But getting better cohesion across teams is easier said than done. While CRM leaders have a good grasp on the metrics needed to measure this alignment, most claim it’s still a goal that’s not yet within reach.
Many HubSpot leaders said that alignment was their primary goal for 2024, but also said that this is where they had the most work to do. In other words, leaders can envision how to get there and how to measure their progress, but they’re still struggling to make cross-team unification a reality.
Part of that is because their companies are growing. 75% of HubSpot business leaders said they’re getting more customer service tickets than ever before.
In fact, scaling operations with company growth is one of the top three challenges HubSpot businesses are currently facing.
That said, across the board, leaders are intently focused on meeting these challenges by unifying their systems and teams in a more holistic, efficient way, mostly by figuring out how to make their software work better for them, be it a project management tool or their CRM.
The clearest path forward that emerges from the report lies in CX and operational efficiency. HubSpot’s survey takers identified these top KPIs when asked about how they could achieve better alignment into 2024 and beyond:
Customer retention - CX has to make sure that customers get perceived value at every stage of their journey. As alluded to earlier, achieving less churn involves a delicate balance of AI and either human-to-human, or at least, human-to-human-inspired, interaction.
Personalization - Personalization is the major key to customer retention in an increasingly non-personal world. HubSpot leaders are working toward more full-funnel visibility, so that service agents can provide more personalized solutions in lieu of defaulting to generic, blanket tactics that today’s customers don’t like and can smell a mile away.
Operational spend - Achieving alignment, or at least getting close to it, can drastically decrease operational spend. Businesses who are using these strategies are trying to mitigate their SaaS sprawl and move toward more streamlined, all-in-one software solutions.
Operational efficiency - HubSpot leaders are looking for new software to not only cut costs, but to increase efficiency. Less tools means service agents will spend less time switching between them to complete a ticket.
74% of HubSpot business leaders report it takes agents longer to resolve service tickets when they have to switch between tools.
Getting rid of silos and disconnected teams
Top of mind for HubSpot leaders this year and beyond is eliminating both operational and digital silos, to bring disconnected teams together in a harmonious way through the right channels and processes.
Poor collaboration and communication create silos in which sales, marketing, and service operate within their own jurisdictions. This can have a direct impact on CX, as trends in the customer journey increasingly stray from the common trajectory.
If sales questions pop up in a service ticket, for example, or service issues are raised during top-of-funnel discussions, not effectively connecting those communications creates silos where information gets lost and customers inevitably get churned.
Disconnected teams are ultimately what create silos and gaps in visibility, but CRM software can help put everyone on the same page, without bogging people down with irrelevant information.
In pursuit of greater alignment, HubSpot leaders in the trends report identified the following successful strategies they leveraged in 2023:
- CRM software integration - By integrating HubSpot with other digital tools, i.e. project management software, accounting software, Slack, etc, service businesses were better equipped at preventing information silos that can negatively impact the customer experience.
- Software consolidation - Especially with the rise of AI, software solutions, particularly in the project management and CRM spaces, are moving more and more toward all-in-one functionality. Leaders are taking advantage of this to prevent SaaS sprawl (save money) and increase productivity, as team members have to switch between tools less and less.
- Cross-department communication/collaboration - The sales-to-service handoff is a problem old as time for service businesses, but with technology, HubSpot leaders have realized it can be prevented with a little foresight and intention. They’ve therefore been merging communications between sales, service, and project teams via the HubSpot feed, specific Slack channels, and other ways that foster more seamless collaboration.
Just 35% of CRM leaders say their customer data is fully integrated with their service tools.
The biggest challenges to alignment for HubSpot service businesses
The 2024 State of Service Trends Report poignantly explains that getting a fully integrated team and a crystal-clear level of visibility isn’t something that can be accomplished overnight. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and improving alignment takes time, patience, and a willingness to think out of the box.
HubSpot business leaders identified the following four problems as the greatest challenges currently facing their pursuit of greater alignment:
- Using CRM to prioritize CX… and using it the right way.
- SaaS sprawl
- Low visibility
- Inefficient communication
To solve these problems and more, HubSpot poses a surprisingly simple, low-cost solution.
Solution? Use your CRM as a single source of truth.
To close, HubSpot came to the conclusion, based on the results of their annual survey of business leaders, that simply using your CRM as a single source of truth can cover many sins.
And although only 32% of HubSpot leaders used their CRM as a single source of truth in 2023, you can see the trend moving toward that direction in many of the forward-thinking responses.
A major growth strategy that’s emerged in the interest of scaling among HubSpot businesses is to use their CRM as a baseline to streamline workflows.
If service businesses take that a step further, consolidating their tech stack and integrating their project management and collaboration software with HubSpot, that single source of truth with interconnected data can effectively solve the most common pain points.
Businesses that integrate everything digitally with their CRM, in theory, can simultaneously:
- Improve CX,
- Improve cross-functional collaboration
- Increase data quality
- Increase profitability
- Streamline operations
At the end of the day, pursuing alignment empower service businesses to achieve greater cohesion across the human and digital worlds, simply by way of communication, consolidation, and integration.
