Community Growth at HubSpot

HubSpot has been a Khoros Communities customer for almost five years.  Their community is incredibly active and dynamic.  It has evolved from being Support-focused to now focusing more on customer success and marketing by driving more customers to join and engage in their community.  It is a broad effort across their employees as well, with Support, Marketing, and Product teams all working in the community regularly. 

Hubspot Community Home Page

Slack is also a critical tool at HubSpot- like it is for hundreds of thousands of companies around the world.  Slack and other team collaboration apps like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex Teams, and more enable faster, more efficient communication than email, and have climbed to the top of the employee productivity tech stack for many (like me). However, Slack spaces and Communities have always existed in separate silos - until now. 

Khoros released the Communities-Slack integration in November of 2020, and HubSpot started using the integration to connect their employee Slack space to their customer community in January.  So far, the results have been exciting, but there is a lot more benefit to realize. 

Community is the "hub" of engagement at HubSpot

Better Visibility of Community Activity

“Khoros's Slack integration has made visibility into our HubSpot community effortless. Our support team is looking to provide an even greater depth of service through answering community questions directly and in real-time with the new integration.”

Jenny Sowryda - Senior Community Manager at HubSpot

Community is all about human communication and connection. Relying on a single communication channel to provide that connection is no longer viable in the diverse and rapidly changing world that we live in (I’m giving myself points for not using the u-word to describe the present times). 

One key to making connections and being able to communicate efficiently is to know what people and conversations need your specific attention.  Whether we like it or not, notifications are necessary to stay on top of all our various tasks, but notifications HAVE to be easy to view and Do/Delegate/Delete. 

Putting community notifications in Slack is one big way to make it easier to review the conversations that need your attention and also get a consistent pulse on the activity in your community.

Increased efficiency for community moderators 

“The combination of RSS feed style and notifications have made it easier to know what is happening in the community. I can immediately respond and customers and employees notice that.”

Dennis Edson - Community Support Manager at HubSpot

When you work in a community every day, it can sometimes become overwhelming to deal with a deluge of email notifications or comb through your notification page in the community.  The Slack notification style makes it much easier to review a large volume of activity in a short amount of time and then respond and engage with posts much easier directly from Slack.

The Future of Team Collaboration and Community Building

The great news is that this integration is free for all Khoros Community customers.  The other great news is that we are working on extending this integration to more team collaboration apps in the near future. 

Collaboration and community are separate things, but they cannot exist without each other.  By connecting the primary internal collaboration tool with their community, brands will drive more engagement, increase efficiency, and gain benefits across support, customer success, and grow. 

Let us know if you have any questions and feel free to ask questions in the comments!