Author Details:
- Name: Gabrielle Herrera
- Title: Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth
- Company: HubSpot
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
Community is an amplifier. Layering human connection on top of any of our customer-facing efforts makes them better. Our mission is to educate, connect and inspire the HubSpot community. In 2023 we showed that through hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, spreading HubSpot advocacy across the web, and by driving access and engagement to some of the hardest audiences to reach. In 2024, we're turning this amplifier up to 11.
Our focus is to provide a human touch at scale using Community’s superpowers - scale, perspective, and passion. Our teams include Success Community, Communities of Practice, Identity based Communities (The Spot) and ensuring we’re spreading our advocates (Champions community) love throughout the community.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
Using experimentation and scalable approaches, the Community Strategy & Operations team helps HubSpot identify hot pockets of community interest and value, and then scale those opportunities into valuable and sustainable communities for our ecosystem members.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Customers want to be guided and get personalized examples & advice (often preferably from a human). We have no shortage of great resources for our customers, but they don’t always get utilized. We need to spend our highly-talented CSMs’ time on high-leverage moments and stakeholders, not gathering links for front-line reps - but as we continue to succeed, there are even more people vying for CSM time.
Through Community, we can scale success so reps can focus on leverage points, without removing the human touch from the experience by transforming into a Community Success Center. Peer responses and public answers save us potentially multimillions per year in support costs (and lift Partners up).
Community is the go-to self-service platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, advocacy, and ideation. The Community Team is responsible for building and scaling a network of HubSpot customers, partners, users and developers on the HubSpot Community to drive peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing and ensure questions are resolved with fast, consistent and invaluable expertise. The Community Success Center allows HubSpot to become more efficient while keeping a human touch.
What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved.
Evolving from a support community aimed at answering a single, point-in-time question to a recurring, lively success destination has been our major innovation and strategic shift in 2024. Before, Customer Success content lives in emails, ephemeral events, and other cobbled deliverables; there was no home base for customers. Now, customers can access all the resources needed to drive product usage and retention in a single space. Solutions are self-serve or provided by peers and partners whose unique perspectives are able to help customer apply our tools to their needs efficiently and effectively.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
The HubSpot Community sees 4 million visits per year and 14k posts annually. 96% of solutions are provided by peers and 98% of posts are replied to within 24 hours. In collaboration with the Product Marketing team, we’ve facilitated 30 product Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions YTD, providing customers real life examples and access to the Product team in a cost-efficient manner. The Product Success Community deflects over $300k in support costs for HubSpot.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
In 2024 we launched a federated search including Knowledge Base articles, HubSpot Academy (customer education) videos and certifications, and API documentation from our Developer Changelog. We also redesigned the navigation, ensuring customers have a one-stop shop to the right solution. Over 50% of members state the peer-to-peer solutions provided them the answer they were looking for.
We’ve been able to improve relevancy, and in turn adoption of the Community, by developing personalized landing pages based on a customer’s product tiers. Example of our Professional tier Community: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Welcome-to-the-HubSpot/ct-p/professional
What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved?
The HubSpot Community (community.hubspot.com) launched in 2016 on Khoros (formerly Lithium) as the solution for free user support.
Since 2016 the Community has grown in visibility and use cases. We have over 400,000 members (all time), > 1 million monthly page views, 3,000 net new monthly conversations, and 25,000 monthly active users. We can also associate community usage with healthier customers.
Khoros provides us a platform for discussion forums, affinity groups, Q&A, blogs, events, email functionality, and custom signatures for users.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Since incorporating CARE into our team, we’ve been able to streamline processes and ensure we’re putting the right resources into the right initiatives and biggest value-adds for our customers. Before CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators spent a lot of time in moderation, completing duplicative tasks and trying to clear up confusion around the division of work. This inefficient process negatively impacted how many Accepted Solutions - those peer-to-peer responses that deflect support tickets - they were able to accept each month. With CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators are able to efficiently moderate the community forums and quickly accept replies on the forums, which help the person who raised the question and help the person who responded excel in the gamification of the Community, encouraging them to continue to engage. This efficiency win also allows the Community Managers to spend time on strategic initiatives such as our Workflows Library and build high-impact cross functional relationships with internal stakeholders.