Case Study: Building a Self-Service Customer Portal Inside HubSpot for a Manufacturing Company

Graber Manufacturing had a challenge keeping customers informed throughout a complex, build-to-order production process. Process Pro solved this by building a fully functional customer portal inside HubSpot that gives Graber's clients real-time visibility into their orders, a place to manage their account, and a streamlined way to submit support tickets and track their progress.

Challenges

Because Graber builds to order, a single customer might have 5 to 10 active orders at different stages of production, some in welding, some in finishing, some awaiting shipping. Keeping those customers informed was a serious operational burden:

• High volume of inbound status requests. Customers regularly emailed or called reps to ask where their orders stood. With multiple orders per customer, those conversations added up fast.
• Manual ticket creation. When a customer reached out, a rep had to open a ticket in HubSpot's help desk, track down the relevant order info, respond, and manually keep everything linked. All of it was handled through email and phone.
• No centralized place for customers to manage their account. If a shipping address changed, a customer had to contact a rep. If they wanted to change or reprioritize part of an order, that was another email chain.
• Disconnected systems. Order data lived in Sage 100. Customer and deal data lived in HubSpot. Magento handled ecommerce. Getting a full picture of any customer's situation required jumping between systems.

Project Goals

• Give customers real-time visibility into their order status without having to contact a rep
• Reduce inbound support volume and the manual work required to respond to status inquiries
• Provide a central place for customers to manage their account and submit support requests
• Build on top of the existing HubSpot and Syncari infrastructure
• Deliver something customers would actually trust and use

The Solution

Before building the customer portal, Process Pro completed the necessary foundational work, connecting HubSpot, Sage 100, and Magento through Syncari to ensure the data infrastructure was solid. With that foundation in place, the portal was the next logical step.

Choosing the Right Approach. When the customer portal project was scoped, Process Pro evaluated HubSpot's customer portal beta and found that the platform had advanced to a point where the full solution could be built natively. Combined with HubSpot's improved CMS capabilities, including serverless functions, React, JavaScript, and Hubl templating, there was no need to develop outside the platform.

Design and Branding. Process Pro used HubSpot's customer portal theme as the design foundation, then applied Graber's branding on top. For custom pages and templates built beyond the theme defaults, AI tools were used to accelerate UI decisions and keep the experience visually consistent. The result was a portal that feels like a natural extension of Graber's brand.

Core Functionality. Process Pro built the portal to give Graber's customers a single place to:

• View all active orders and their current production status
• Submit and manage support tickets directly, without going through email
• Update account information like shipping addresses
• Communicate with the Graber team through the help desk, with all interactions tied to the relevant order record in HubSpot

HubSpot as the Source of Truth. Because the portal pulls directly from HubSpot, which is already synced with Sage 100 via Syncari, Graber's team doesn't have to do anything differently. They keep doing their work in HubSpot, and the portal reflects that data automatically. There's no separate system to maintain.

Speed of Build. Using AI to handle standard code patterns and UI layout decisions, Process Pro completed the development phase in roughly three weeks, significantly faster than a traditional build of this complexity.

The Results

Graber's initial reaction to the portal exceeded their expectations. The anticipated impact includes:

• Customer service reps spending far less time fielding inbound status calls and emails
• Customers having on-demand visibility into every active order without needing to reach out to reps
• Support tickets created and managed by customers directly, with automatic association to the correct deal record in HubSpot
• Account updates like shipping address changes handled through the portal, reducing back-and-forth with reps

Project Impact

The portal Process Pro built represents a meaningful shift in how Graber serves its clients. What was previously a high-touch, email-heavy process becomes a self-service experience that scales with Graber's growth without requiring proportional increases in headcount. For a company doing complex, build-to-order manufacturing across multiple customer segments and revenue channels, that kind of operational leverage matters.

It also future-proofs Graber's customer experience layer. Because the portal is built on HubSpot and connected to their existing data infrastructure, new functionality can be added over time without rebuilding from scratch. The team has already discussed expanding the portal to surface related products and enable more sophisticated order management.