When customers feel cared for, they’re more likely to stay, spend more, and share their experience with others.
HubSpot gives you the tools to make this easier. With playbooks, your team can consistently handle customer interactions. And with customer surveys, you can learn what’s working and what’s not so that you can make smarter decisions.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to build a strong customer retention plan using these tools to keep your customers happy, loyal, and engaged.
A strong customer retention plan helps your business build lasting relationships. Instead of focusing only on new leads, it puts just as much care into the people who have already said yes.
This kind of plan includes:
It’s not just a nice-to-have. It’s a strategy that directly supports your bottom line. 73% of companies with above-average customer experience perform better financially than their competitors.
When your team consistently handles customer needs and learns from customer feedback, you can create better experiences, reduce churn, and encourage repeat business.
Playbooks in HubSpot are step-by-step guides your team can follow during customer calls, chats, or emails. They show up inside your CRM so your team knows exactly what to say and do.
Instead of guessing, your team uses a consistent script, checklist, or set of questions to handle each situation. This makes service more reliable and builds trust with your customers.
You can also link playbooks to CRM properties so updates get logged automatically. That saves time and helps your team stay focused.
When support feels clear and personal, people are more likely to stay. In fact, 96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand. Playbooks make that kind of service easier to deliver every time.
Once you understand what playbooks are and why they matter, the next step is to utilize them in a way that genuinely supports your customer retention strategy. Playbooks help your team stay consistent, respond faster, and make every customer feel valued.
Here’s how to build and use them inside HubSpot:
To build a strong customer retention plan, you first need to know when your customers need support the most. These key moments, also called touchpoints, are when customers form opinions about your brand.
Examine your customer journey and identify the points where people may require guidance or reassurance. Some examples include:
For each of these moments, create a plan for what your team should say and do. These are great candidates for playbooks. Even a brief checklist can help ensure your team provides a consistent, thoughtful response every time.
This step sets the foundation for everything else. The better you understand your customers’ pain points, the more effective your playbooks will be at keeping them happy and loyal.
To get started, go to CRM > Playbooks in HubSpot. Click Create playbook and either use a ready-made template or start from scratch.
Give your playbook a simple, clear title that describes its purpose. Inside the editor, you can:
This saves your team time and reduces errors. They won’t have to rely on memory or dig through notes, and everything they need is built into the workflow.
The clearer your playbook, the easier it is to deliver a smooth, confident customer experience.
Once your playbook is ready, assign it to the right type of CRM record, like contacts, companies, deals, or support tickets.
You can also set up recommendation rules, so HubSpot suggests the best playbook based on what’s happening. For example:
This way, your team doesn’t have to dig around or guess which playbook to use. The right one shows up at the right time.
Your playbooks only work if people use them. So take time to train your team on where to find them, when to use them, and how to log their notes properly.
Encourage reps to open the playbook during real customer calls or support chats. They can follow along, fill in notes, and even trigger follow-up actions or update contact details without needing to switch screens.
This makes every interaction more professional, clear, and helpful. It also helps customers feel like they’re in good hands.
Playbooks aren’t set-and-forget tools. Over time, check how they’re being used by going to the Analyze tab under Playbooks.
You can track:
Use this data to spot what’s working and what needs adjusting. Maybe a question isn’t clear, or a step is missing. Even small changes can improve how your team supports customers.
And when your support improves, your retention grows. After all, 83% of companies that focus on making customers happy also report growing revenue.
Even the best team can’t fix what they don’t know. That’s why collecting customer feedback is a big part of any smart retention plan. Surveys help you understand how customers really feel and give you a chance to fix problems before they leave.
HubSpot makes it easy to create and send simple surveys like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Score), and CES (Customer Effort Score). These tools help you measure how happy customers are, how likely they are to recommend you, and how easy it is to get help.
Here’s how to use surveys to improve customer retention:
Each type of survey in HubSpot has a different purpose. Choosing the right one helps you ask the right questions and get more useful answers.
CSAT is great after support calls, product deliveries, or onboarding. It helps you understand how satisfied someone is with a particular moment. NPS is broader. It measures how likely someone is to recommend your brand to others, which is a strong signal of loyalty.
CES is helpful when testing the smoothness of a process, such as submitting a request or using a help article. Mapping the proper survey to the right moment helps you catch issues as they happen and track how customer sentiment changes over time.
Once you’ve chosen the right type of survey, HubSpot makes it easy to customize and send it. You’ll need to set a few key details.
You can send a survey through email after a ticket is closed, show it in chat after a live support session, or pop it up on a specific web page. Then, you can personalize the look and feel by adding your brand colors, logo, and a brief message that explains why you’re seeking feedback.
Finally, you choose who gets the survey. You might target only new customers, only those with a recent interaction, or exclude anyone who’s already filled one out. This ensures your survey feels timely and relevant, not random or annoying.
Surveys aren’t just for collecting data. When someone responds, HubSpot enables you to trigger automated actions, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.
Let’s say a customer gives a three on your CSAT survey. You can automatically assign a task to a team member to follow up and ask what went wrong.
If someone gives you a 9 or 10 on NPS, you can immediately thank them and ask if they’d be open to writing a review or joining a referral program. This type of automation lets you respond more quickly and thoughtfully, which fosters trust and encourages people to stay engaged.
Once your surveys are live, it’s important to look beyond individual scores and analyze the bigger picture. HubSpot gives you tools to track trends over time.
Maybe customers who get help via chat are more satisfied than those using email. Or maybe scores are lower after a recent product update. When you see patterns like this, you can make changes where they matter.
That might mean adding new playbooks for common complaints, improving training for a specific team, or redesigning part of your onboarding process. The goal is to use feedback not just to fix isolated issues, but to improve your whole retention strategy over time.
Surveys help you understand what’s going wrong. Playbooks help your team respond in the right way. When you use them together, you create a system that doesn’t just fix problems but prevents them from repeating.
Here’s how they work side by side:
For example, let’s say a customer gives a 2 out of 5 on a support survey. That response can trigger a playbook for handling unhappy customers.
The playbook might include what questions to ask, what solutions to offer, and how to escalate if needed. Meanwhile, that same feedback gets logged in the CRM, and your team can use the survey report later to see how often this type of issue comes up.
This creates a loop: the customer shares feedback, the team responds using a clear process, and the team learns and improves over time.
It’s a simple system that keeps getting smarter, because it’s built on both listening and action.
Keeping your customers around doesn’t have to be complicated. With the right tools and a thoughtful process, you can build stronger relationships over time.
Use HubSpot playbooks to guide your team with clarity and consistency. Use surveys to check in, gather feedback, and learn what matters most to your customers.
And when you bring both tools together, you get a more intelligent system that helps you respond faster, improve service, and make your customers feel seen.
Good retention starts with being present, prepared, and willing to act on what your customers tell you.
Let Origin 63 help you set up HubSpot in a way that works for your business. We’ll help you design the right playbooks, set up strategic surveys, and build smart workflows—so you can spend less time guessing and more time growing. Contact us to get started!