From terrible experience to life-changing tech

PH Digital's smart approach was winning plenty of business, which meant some pretty cracking growth. Great for the business, not so great for its systems. Pre-HubSpot, the team was using spreadsheets and manual calculations for almost everything. Something had to give.

The PH team has always put customers first — but there’s always room to improve. CEO Christine Kearney explains that the team moved to HubSpot because it wanted to level up in terms of client management and service. In her words, the goal was simple: "Run the business like a 5-star hotel."

Zippily wasn’t PH Digital’s first HubSpot partner (unfortunately). When it first adopted HubSpot, the business worked with an implementation partner that didn’t offer the support it needed. This wasted three vital months and left the business without the HubSpot setup it wanted. Christine doesn’t mince words: "We had a terrible, terrible experience."

Zippily came in at a stressful time: the business was trying to navigate HubSpot and ditch the spreadsheets ASAP — without dropping the ball on client work. We came in with a clear plan for a quick, responsive implementation.

“Having a team that understands that urgency and really pushes hard to get us the results that we need has been amazing,” says Christine.

Zippily reworked PH Digital’s HubSpot portal, customising their customer service pipeline, creating bespoke tools and automations, and building ultra-specific reports — complex formulas for hours-per-client, churn rates and industry details, all slotted into HubSpot so the team could use them. The goal was not just to replace manual spreadsheets, but to make data analytics part of its customer-facing work. If a client doesn’t get a reply within 12 hours, it’s registered in the portal and impacts the client’s sentiment score — so the leadership team can spot the issue and act.

The sales team now uses HubSpot for all inbound leads, pipeline work and new subscriber comms. Client-facing strategists use the platform for their communication and outreach as well.

The upshot: all PH Digital’s client information flows into one ecosystem. With a bit of help from HubSpot automations (set up by us), the PH team can now analyse client sentiment and track response rates through a single platform. For a team that lives and breathes data, it’s a game-changer — and ditching the spreadsheets is helping PH Digital manage more clients, more effectively, in far less time.