Focusing on the quality of the customer experience (CX) is key for modern businesses, but it's easier said than done. Offering a well-curated and connected customer experience requires a great deal of planning on the backend with teams supported by clean, connected, and accessible databases. Unfortunately, there are countless sources of unexpected friction that can hinder your ability to offer an excellent CX.
A disorganized data model, inconsistent properties, and apps that don't sync properly can all get in the way of your team's ability to service customers as best they can. Oftentimes, these issues go unnoticed until a business starts to scale, and when you're facing rapid growth, it can seem impossible to make internal changes to remedy these problems without completely pausing your business, which simply isn't possible.
These issues lead to operations challenges that sink efficiency and harm the customer experience, weakening relationships and potentially causing you to lose business. In these instances, companies invariably turn to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which are supposed to unify customer data to give your teams a single source of truth for interactions. The trouble is, CRMs take a ton of manual effort to work and they often end up being a patchwork solution, only creating bigger issues down the line.
Recognizing these common pitfalls, HubSpot set out to alleviate them by offering a CRM platform that unites a company instead of creating complexity within its backend. Operations Hub is a powerful tool that's clean, connected, and allows your team to access valuable customer information from anywhere to help you recreate your business processes and improve the customer experience through and through.
In this whitepaper, we'll explore how Operations Hub works and why it's a game-changer for rapidly growing companies. We'll also dig into the feature set, explore the top use cases, and look forward to discussing the future of RevOps.
Scaling businesses are bound to experience some growing pains, but having the wrong technology can amplify issues to the point where a company just can't keep up with demand. That's why every business tries to prepare for potential challenges, but that requires you to ask a long list of questions.
For instance, are your current systems adaptable enough to scale with your business? Are they able to scale with more internal users and external clients? Are they hindering your growth with manual work and operational risk? Do you have processes in place to navigate system limitations? Are your apps configured to support your processes? Do you know where you stand relative to your competitors? What are the trends in your customer acquisition costs and lifetime value?
Setbacks are unavoidable, but failing to plan for them, prevent them when possible, and come up with a recovery strategy in advance all represent surefire methods to hurt your business. So, how does Operations Hub come into the picture? It's simple. The three things you can do to protect your business as it scales come down to unifying your data, streamlining processes, and defining a clear strategy for growth. Operations Hub can support all three of these goals.
First off, Operations Hub will help unify your data, and it can do it without stepping on any toes or getting in the way of your existing processes. Oftentimes, marketing teams, sales teams, and service teams work on different platforms. Each team is comfortable with the platform they know, so the last thing they want is for you to switch it up on them (especially as you begin to rapidly grow and they're dealing with increased demand in other areas).
Operations Hub doesn't require you to change how your team works overnight. Instead, Operations Hub allows you to sync to your existing platforms, sanitize the data, and then sync it back out to the original sources. As an example, Operations Hub can help create rules for matching records with existing systems.
So, if you have an eCommerce or SaaS offering where customers can sign up online, Operations Hub can ensure that a lead not only gets transformed into a customer in HubSpot, but that the appropriate records are created in external systems using API requests via coded workflows. Clean up tasks—like reformatting names; validating emails and phone numbers, and using various data enrichment services to ensure data is accurate in the CRM—can be performed automatically.
Next, Operations Hub will help you automate your processes and connect your workflow platforms together. This results in improved communication across teams along with better information sharing and all-around improved productivity. As a result, the customer experience improves as well.
Lastly, with all of the information you need in one place, Operations Hub enables you to unlock insights that can help you set realistic expectations and achieve them. By analyzing your processes, you find opportunities to automate. That frees up more time for clients and reduces overhead. From there, you can set better goals for growth, get to know your clients more deeply, and use accurate data to gain a better perspective for business decisions.
For all of these reasons, Operations Hub is a game-changer for scaling companies, but, in case you're not convinced, let's dig deeper into the features.
Operations Hub's two newest features make data curation easier for those using HubSpot's CRM. Growing companies can make use of these features to scale up without losing control.
Scaling businesses have to deal with proliferating data--objects, fields, and metrics seem to multiply. It gets increasingly more difficult for a growing business to understand and use its data because there is simply so much of it. Oftentimes, businesses have to turn to the ops team just to get a one-off report, and that causes businesses to use their data less and less because of the slow, inconsistent processes. Meanwhile, the ops team will struggle to keep up, getting in the way of other pressing responsibilities.
In response to this problem, Operations Hub now offers datasets, which the ops team can use to curate reusable, clean tables. These reusable tables can then be sent downstream for users to effortlessly create their own reports. The result is that the ops team has more time to handle other problems, but they remain in control of the data, allowing everyday business users to access insights more quickly and easily.
Credit unions provide a good example use case, as they can store the daily transactions of customers and refresh the data using information from internal banking applications. That would give the credit union's financial advisors up-to-date information on every client before their next meeting, empowering helpful and personalized service.
Another example use case is for SaaS companies, which can store subscription-specific information for each user by synchronizing with an internal database. That information can help the customer success team support clients and give way to better follow-up, marketing, and upsells.
If you're concerned about curating customer information for reporting purposes, but you don't use HubSpot's CRM solution, you can still make use of the powerful tools inside of Operations Hub thanks to Snowflake Data Share. Snowflake Data Share is a native integration with Snowflake, which is a data warehouse solution that leads the industry.
Using this integration, you can sync customer information between HubSpot's CRM and your Snowflake instance, allowing you to maintain clean and connected data, even if it doesn't live on HubSpot. This integration passes information along quickly and securely, allowing you to curate and analyze HubSpot data without leaving your current data stack. Thanks to Operations Hub, you'll have all of your data in one place, inside of your Snowflake instance, so you can unlock powerful new insights.
Operations Hub can also pass data to any number of Business Intelligence (BI) platforms with ease. That data previously required manual file transfers or a specially built application to handle, but Operations Hub allows for automatic transfer that will reduce technical debt, save your team time, and unlock new insights for your business.
In addition to datasets and Snowflake Data Share, Operations Hub users also benefit from an ever-improving custom report builder along with custom behavioral events and a complete reporting solution that can fit any business.
Additional features, like comprehensive data sync for over 60 SaaS applications, along with programmable data quality automation tools, make it easy to manage and utilize your customer data so you can build a better CX and a better business.
The features found inside of Operations Hub are incredibly valuable to ops teams, but the use cases go far beyond that. Operations Hub solves the most common challenges scaling companies face, like disconnected apps, disorderly processes, and disconnected and unclean data. Operations Hub can empower any team, not just an ops team, to solve these problems effectively.
To explore the use cases more closely, take one of Operations Hub's most powerful features: Programmable automation. Using programmable automation, you can make use of customer workflow actions to create a flexible, tailor-made solution to help you keep up with the changing needs of your customers. For instance, you can use custom code actions to run SQL queries, model objects, make API calls, or handle just about anything you can imagine.
One of the most popular use cases for custom code actions in Operations Hub includes enriching HubSpot records using third-party data. So, when a new lead fills out a form on your site, you can query a database and add that data to your record in HubSpot, and even automatically create a task for someone to follow up on the lead.
When it comes to prioritizing opportunities, you can even use custom code actions to calculate lead score properties, no matter how complex. Using data from HubSpot, along with inputs from third-party systems, you're able to manipulate and transform the lead score value based on any method you choose and populate it inside of HubSpot.
Other example use cases include renewal management, allowing you to create a new deal automatically when an old deal closes, removing (or even adding) a discount to the price, if needed.
Operations Hub datasets simplify and speed up reporting for any department, so it makes sense that power users of Operations Hub have created a dataset for every go-to-market function imaginable. As a result, monthly and quarterly reporting is quick and easy, plus each respective team (i.e., marketing, sales, and service) can handle the reporting all on their own, without the need to call and wait on the ops team to conjure things up.
One of the most common use cases for datasets is creating a dataset to represent crucial sales data. As a result, your sales team will be able to generate reports with ease. So, you might have a table of properties relating to a sales deal, like the owner, amount, and stage. Add some custom calculations, such as time in stage, MRR/ARR, and commission, to tailor the experience to the team. From there, any user can use this sales deal table to begin compiling a report.
The most powerful thing about datasets is that it provides a template, which means users don't have to start from scratch every time they need a report. It also means that reports can be easily standardized across your organization, keeping the focus on the metrics that really matter.
Snowflake leads the industry when it comes to data warehouse solutions, and with the ability to seamlessly combine it with an enterprise reporting tool like Looker, you can effortlessly unlock powerful business intelligence tools. HubSpot acknowledges that many users handle all of their reporting inside of HubSpot, but they also recognized the need to handle reporting inside of an external data warehouse, making this integration extremely valuable for advanced users.
Snowflake Data Share is a secure solution for seamlessly connecting HubSpot to your main data source, allowing you to dive into Snowflake and make use of advanced manipulation and transformation tools. The biggest use case here is for the advanced user who would prefer the power (and potential complexity) of handling reporting inside of Snowflake over the convenience of HubSpot's in-built tools.
Data remains the biggest asset for today's growing companies, but as a business faces rapid growth, data is often the first thing they lose control of--and yet the most crucial thing they need to stay on track. The wrong tech stack and processes can lead to slowed growth, negative customer experience, and even a scarred reputation, all of which can reverse the momentum of a growing company and send it into a crippling spiral.
To alleviate the modern growing pains, companies are increasingly turning to RevOps to help streamline workflows, automate processes, reduce overhead, and give their teams more time to manage and nurture opportunities. The features we're seeing evolve inside of Operations Hub show a clear direction towards making data more accessible across departments and unlocking business insights to support insightful, split-second decisions.
Any business experiencing rapid growth, or on the path to getting there, should seek to leverage tools like Operations Hub sooner rather than later. By keeping teams inside of the platforms they're comfortable with while synchronizing and sanitizing data on the backend, Operations Hub offers the best of all worlds for companies that are trying to get ahead of massive datasets and all the challenges they represent. With Operations Hub, data will once again mean opportunity instead of a hindrance.