HubSpot’s CRM enables growth-minded businesses to optimize their relationships with leads and customers. Through harnessing the power of carefully crafted sales, marketing, customer service, content management, and operations tools, the software aims to make it easy to unify team strategy and drive conversion. Additionally, the software allows users to connect with over 875 integration apps, APIs, and solutions partners to create a customizable user experience that suits the way teams work.…
$0
Per Month [Unlimited Users]
Kustomer
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform built for managing high support volume by optimizing experiences throughout the customer service journey. Kustomer was acquired by Facebook in late 2020, but spun out in 2023 and re-launched as an independent entity, Kustomer, LLC.
$89
per month per user
Pricing
HubSpot CRM
Kustomer
Editions & Modules
Free Forever
$0
Per Month [Unlimited Users]
CRM Bundle
$50
per month
Enterprise
$89
per month, per user
Ultimate
$139
per month, per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HubSpot CRM
Kustomer
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
All plans require an annual subscription and 8 users minimum.
I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the …
I have used HubSpot CRM to help grow and scale companies which range in size from SMB businesses owned by one person up through enterprise companies doing hundreds of millions in revenue. There are not any use cases where HubSpot CRM has not been able to suit the needs for what we've needed from it.
I would say the greatest strength of Kustomer is its flexibility. In the hands of a skilled admin, it can be adapted to tons and tons of different use cases. I've been able to make custom displays for different groups of agents, produce complex cross sections of users, draw interesting data relationships combining marketing contacts and customer-initiated contacts. For example, there's really no other data source in our company which could tell you which users received a specific promo code and checked out with it, received their delivery within 14 days and then can related that to the number of times they contacted us about using our product. At the intersection of communication, marketing, data, and relationship-management, Kustomer shines at the center. I would say it falls short when you are trying to coordinate multiple "side conversations" with multiple sources to resolve an issue. This is a tough task for any type of platform, but if you're maintaining 3 different email chains with a 3PL partner, the customer, and a separate internal conversation, it would be confusing anyway!
Personalized email campaigns: It helps to create highly effective personalized emails with its wonderful content tokens.
Scheduling of meetings: It eliminates the bottlenecks in the process of meeting schedule with its amazing integrating capabilities with other calendar tools like Google calendar. It also ensures the automatic reminders of meetings to the participants of meeting.
Automation for follow-up : With its feature called "sequences", follow-up emails made easy.
All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.
A lot of my companies have one URL for a ton of branches and each branch has their own name and location so I have to manually enter all the information because they all have the same URL so I can't easily use an Excel file to import those contacts so a faster solution to this would be appreciated
Making Corporate and branch associations is very tedious, it would be nice if the companies that all share the same url would automatically associate with the corporate company so I didn't have to manually do it
I would like to not see all the extra feature tabs in my layout because I am not using them so it would be nice to be able to turn them off (even the ones that are in my plan that I don't use, it would be nice to turn them off)
For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.
To be honest there are some barriers due to which we are unable to use Hubspot at it's full potentials. The region that we work in has some restrictions that don't allow us to make calls or text which leaves us to just Email to the client.
I give it this rating because when I first joined the team here I had never used HubSpot before. Within a week I was up to speed on the CRM and knew pretty much how to use it based on its user friendliness. The different tabs on the side and organization of the site did not make me anxious when I first started which is hard to say for most CRM platforms because their can be A LOT going on on but, HubSpot has been my favorite CRM thus far and being in marketing the last 7, going on 8 years now I have worked with PLENTY of CRM's
There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.
Because when I needed help HubSpot responded immediately and provided me with the information I needed which enabled me to realize that HubSpot was even more customizable and easier to use than I thought! And I already thought HubSpot was very user friendly and easy to use, and then Support showed me how to manipulate the settings, columns and the appearance of the tool.
I did not reach out to Kustomer support when we had an issue. Still, whenever we provide feedback to our manager regarding what can improve based on our experience using Kustomer, our manager always comments that Kustomer support always replies with some positive feedback based on our suggestions.
If you've had any prior experience with cloud based marketing automation or group communication tools, you can do the implementation without paid outside support. Though getting to a SLA (service level agreement) would be best achieved with the help of a third party who can facilitate
I have used two other CRM systems; they were in-house at my company, so I can't search for them in the list. Previous CRM systems ran very sluggishly, lacking many features such as transactions. Very often, they did not add sent emails or added them incorrectly. Adding contacts was unintuitive and had a lot of mandatory fields that had to be filled in manually, as this system did not download data online. There was no option to search if a lead existed; there was a function that theoretically should have notified of a duplicate, but only after the entire long list was filled out.
Apps like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gorgios all treat customer inquiries as tickets, just tracking that one issue or interaction with a customer. Kustomer treats each customer as an individual, which allows us to provide top-notch customer service. Customers love that we're able to be more conversational and informal, while still solving their issues quickly. It also helps us build relationships with customers and increases repeat orders.
We can raise the tickets easily from HubSpot only. There is no confusion about that.
There is difficulty raising tickets from Hubspot as once it is resolved, we will not be able to check again on the deal overview that needs to be solved.
HubSpot is very good compared to Salesforce and Zoho, as I have worked on all 3 till now.
We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.