So you heard about customer hubs.
They sound great, right? A place to centralize customer data. A key customer success dashboard. Somewhere to oversee customer communications.
But wait – which of these definitions actually fit? Many CS professionals discuss customer hubs, yet few agree on the basics about them. So, today, I’m setting out to:
- Clear any confusion on what a customer hub actually is
- Present the different types of customer hubs
- Review the common elements shared by all client hubs
- Talk about the benefits of using customer hubs in CS
- Discuss using a customer success platform as a customer hub
- Show some future trends regarding client hubs
What Is a Customer Hub?
A customer hub is an interface designed to help manage customer interactions, data, and engagement functions, either reactive or proactive. While some confusion exists regarding customer hubs, a few characteristics stand out as shared across all definitions: a unified dashboard for customer success that helps analyze customer information and facilitates customer engagement.
Types of Customer Hubs
Seeing as the definition above is quite broad, several types of common customer dashboards fit into it:
- Customer Success Hubs. Customer success hubs or customer dashboards are essentially a daily monitoring tool that customer success managers use to manage post-sale customer relationships. CSMs employ such hubs to facilitate onboarding, track product usage, and bank on expansion opportunities. The ultimate goal of a customer success hub is to facilitate customer goals and outcomes, thereby increasing loyalty and reducing churn.
- Customer Service and Support Hubs. Service hubs, on the other hand, are more geared towards handling customer support requests, monitoring customer interactions and communication channels, and, to a lesser extent, tracking product usage. Service and support hubs are all about ticketing systems and lowering the time to resolution.
- Customer Data / Analytics Hubs. Some hubs go the extra mile when it comes to collecting and organizing customer data. From account basics to advanced product and feature usage metrics, customer data hubs are great for complex, high-touch SaaS products where customers require more help and hand-holding than usual.
- Customer Community / Engagement Hubs. Community hubs are just what you think – places where customers can interact with the company and, potentially, with each other. These types of engagement hubs are fantastic for complex products and use cases where knowledge sharing can be a big value-addition.
- Customer / Self-Service Portals. Lastly, self-service customer portals can also fall into the broader category of customer hubs. The only requirements are that the company can track those self-service interactions, analyze them, monitor customer health, and optimize customer engagement.
Now that we’ve seen the main types of customer hubs, the question remains: why so many? The simple answer is that every company that offers one of these as part of its services has attempted to define customer hubs to adhere to its own products.
While that’s commonplace in the online world, I thought I’d clear up any confusion by distilling all the concepts and seeing what the key connection is between all of them. So in the next section, I’ll talk about the key elements that make up a customer hub.
Key Elements of a Customer Hub
1. Centralized Location for Customer Engagement
The first key component of customer hubs is the ability to oversee all customer engagement efforts in one centralized location. That means all customer communications can easily be reviewed – from reactive support tickets to proactive emails that were sent out, to quick Slack messages that the lead CSM sent. Every single touchpoint needs to be monitored. Bonus points if the dashboard allows you to take context-aware actions based on those interactions.
2. Multichannel / Omnichannel Support
To truly fulfil the role of a centralized engagement center, your customer hub also needs to feature all communication channels you employ in your day-to-day. From live chat to email, Slack, WhatsApp, and any other tool you use for customer communication, you need to be able to integrate and review all of them in a single, intuitive dashboard.
3. Customer Data and Analytics Dashboard(s)
Beyond communication, a true customer hub must also include key data about each account. Starting with the basics, you should be able to review account information – such as the owner, the renewal date, the point of contact, and so on. Next, you should be able to review success metrics – such as customer health, CSAT, and the promoter score. Lastly, but maybe most importantly, you need to have visibility of product and feature usage metrics that you can set up yourself for each account or segment.
4. Automated Playbooks and Workflows
Finally, a top-of-the-line customer hub will allow you to monitor automated playbooks and workflows from the same dashboard. While these can be set up in a separate interface within the same product, the hub should have some visibility as to customers’ progress through those playbooks and the steps you need to take (if any).
Why Should I Use One? Benefits of Using a Customer Hub for CS
There are many benefits to having a centralized location for your engagement, analytics, success metrics, and automation:
Improves focus on the key metrics for your business.
- Zeroes in on product and feature adoption and usage metrics.
- Allows CSMs to work with increased efficiency by showing all the essentials in one place.
- Clear visibility of customer status, allowing any CSM to proactively step in.
- The ability to customize dashboards, metrics, and portals to match your accounts.
- AI capabilities – many customer hubs are adding AI options on top of their existing toolset (such as Custify’s AI summaries).
It’s my daily place where I go, it’s how I start my day. And that also, just that brings clarity, knowing exactly where you have to go and not having to juggle several places to go between.
– Noa Lupu, Customer Success Lead at Planable, speaking about using Custify as her customer hub
Customer Hub vs Customer Dashboard vs Customer Portal
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of all three similar concepts to help clear up any confusion:
Hub vs Dashboard vs Portal
| wdt_ID | Aspect | Customer Hub | Customer Dashboard | Customer Portal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Definition | Centralized hub for customer interactions, data, and engagement | Success hub for viewing real-time customer metrics, KPIs, and analytics | Shareable, custom portal for customer engagement, service, and support |
| 2 | Primary Purpose | Customer Success | Customer Success | Customer Success and Support |
| 3 | Typical Users | Internal (Support, CSMs, Sales) | Internal (Support, CSMs) | Internal and External (CSMs, Clients) |
| 4 | Scope of Data | Complete customer lifecycle data | Real-time customer data and operational metrics | Customer service and support throughout their journey |
| 5 | Key Features | Ticketing KBs Automation Engagement Analytics Collaboration | Analytics Automation Reporting Monitoring Engagement Collaboration | White-label Reporting Engagement Tracking Support Monitoring |
| 7 | Proactive / Reactive | Both | Both | Reactive |
So, is a CSP a Customer Hub?
And so we come to the obvious question: considering the definition of a customer hub – a place designed to centralize customer communications, engagement, and analytics – is a customer success platform a customer hub?
Yes. Mostly. Typical customer success software, such as Custify, contains dashboards that, for the most part, meet the requirements of being a customer hub. That means they contain the key elements of a hub and serve largely the same purpose.
The biggest difference, however, is that CSPs typically contain many other features that are adjacent to the customer hub. These extra features often serve to broaden the actions CSMs can take based on the data in the customer hub. So in the end, CSPs work great as customer hubs and also help teams make use of them in novel ways.
Future Trends and Evolution
As with every software product amidst the AI paradigm shift, customer hubs are also evolving. The biggest evolutions are in:
- AI and automation integration. More and more customer hubs come with built-in AI functions and the ability to manage automation flows directly within the dashboard.
- Predictive customer success. Predictive CS is also becoming more powerful – with machine learning and AI assisting CSMs in identifying common trends and acting on them.
- Enhanced personalization capabilities. According to the most recent State of Customer Experience, 77% of customers are more likely to recommend a brand if it offers personalized service. Customer hubs are increasingly becoming more customizable and allowing CSMs to tailor their success tactics to specific customer details and requirements.
Note: If you’re looking for more of an interface where you can ensure customer visibility of current tasks and projects, you might need a customer portal, not necessarily a customer hub. As illustrated in the table above, customer portals act as shareable, brandable pages where you can display important information the customer needs to see. Custify also offers some of the most useful customer portals, which can help keep customers on track with regard to shared tasks and work items.
Unleash the Power of Customer Analytics
Whichever way you look at it, in the end, customer hubs are a net positive that can help any customer-facing role fulfill their tasks and serve customers to the best of their ability.
If you’d like help setting up Custify as your go-to customer hub, reach out for a demo, and our team will be there to assist you every step of the way, thanks to our concierge onboarding.
