Announcing The New Customer Success Workspace in HubSpot Service Hub

The new addition to Service Hub provides a dedicated space for customer success teams to proactively support customers and increase retention.

We believe the role of customer success in a modern go-to-market function has changed forever.

But making customers successful is incredibly challenging when the teams responsible for each stage of the customer journey from marketing to sales and customer success become siloed.

The new customer success workspace in Service Hub marks HubSpot’s embrace of the connected customer journey and a viable path to aligning teams and data without disparate systems and processes.

You can now build an effective customer success program around tooling you already know and love in Service Hub connected to the HubSpot customer platform.

Customer expectations have shifted. It’s time for businesses to proactively invest in their success

In 2024, customer success teams aren’t only responsible for being reactive to the needs of  customers struggling to use and adopt the product but must create a holistic experience that drives the customer’s desired business results.

This means proactively building a relationship that actively identifies goals, aligns work, and educates customers on how to achieve those outcomes.

When you think about how businesses proactively make customers successful today, the status quo is embarrassingly bad, and runs counter to the goal of expanding customer revenue over time:

• Businesses still predominantly focus on new customer acquisition, a strategy that is significantly more expensive than improving existing customer retention.
• Customer onboarding after a new sales deal closes is still an afterthought in a world where lack of adoption is the biggest driver of early churn.
• Businesses use disconnected and outdated tools like email and spreadsheets for critical post-sale collaboration that require significant time and attention from customers.

We released the first version of our Playbook for Running Customer in HubSpot in August 2022, and since then we've seen more than 3,000 teams start implementing the templates and principles in HubSpot themselves to run a more connected customer success motion.

A lot has changed in the HubSpot ecosystem in the last 6 months, never mind the 2 years since Arrows collaborative onboarding plans launched in the HubSpot marketplace. Proactive customer success is fast becoming critical in an effective go-to-market motion, and we’re excited to see HubSpot explicitly building tools better enable teams to deliver holistic experiences.

Existing success platforms don’t map to the reality of how customers interact with companies

Customers shouldn’t have (and definitely don’t want) to navigate your org chart as they engage with your company. They expect that everyone they interact with across their journey will know who they are, what they are trying to achieve, and what has happened in their experience thus far.

The current generation of customer success platforms are disconnected from the rest of the customer journey, when in fact businesses need tooling that supports transparency and consistency whichever team is interacting with the customer at any given time.

Businesses need a connected customer platform like HubSpot with specific tooling built for each team across the customer journey.

The customer success workspace is a big step forward in supporting teams running customer success on HubSpot but let's also acknowledge the elephant in the room too - successfully implementing and adopting any new process doesn't just happen overnight and the tool itself isn't a magic bullet.

Here's how to start using HubSpot’s existing features across sales and service hub for customer success:

⚡️ Dedicated deal and ticket pipelines for each stage of the customer journey.

→ Deals for revenue - initial sale + renewals + upsells + expansions

→ Tickets for onboarding/implementation/services
‍

🔌 Integrated product usage and financial data

→ Use apps like Hightouch, Syncari, or June to get a complete picture of accounts

→ Combine product data with 1:1 interactions to drive your customer experience
‍

🤖 Automated workflows

→ Automate sales to onboarding handoffs

→ Move customers through pipeline stages

→ Trigger playbooks for the right customers at the right time
‍

🤝 Customer collaboration

Extend HubSpot with best-in-class marketplace apps like Arrows.

→ Enable customers with a collaborative action plan connected to HubSpot records

→ Collect information, book meetings, sign documents in a seamless flow
‍

📈 Reporting and dashboards

→ Calculate customer health scores

→ Identify at-risk accounts and expansion opportunities

→ Track revenue across the customer journey.

‍

Our guide to running customer success in HubSpot provides tactical templates for implementing all of these key elements in your own account. And of course all these components for proactive customer success are built on top of the HubSpot customer platform, which lets businesses leverage their customer data across the customer journey.

A connected GTM future that solves for the customer

The relationship between businesses and their customers has changed, and the investment in proactive customer success (whatever the team responsible for it is called) will play a central role in business growth for years to come. We think this release is a big step forward for HubSpot’s vision of a connected customer platform.

The customer success workspace however is just the start. We’re expecting to see more dedicated customer success functionality to extend the connected customer platform from health scoring to product data integrations coming very soon…Watch this space.