Customer Success Efficiency Unleashed: How to achieve more with less using customer hubs

Why efficiency matters, specifically these days

The world is currently experiencing a tech-slowdown, with many companies feeling the pressure to do more with less. As a result, customer success teams are being forced to operate with limited resources, and the responsibilities of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are increasing at a rapid pace. With the changing landscape of customer success, it is imperative that teams adopt a more efficient approach to their work.In a world where the customer is queen, customer success teams are the gatekeepers of customer satisfaction and retention. The role of the CSM has become even more critical as customers expect more from their relationships with companies.

CSMs are expected to have a deep understanding of their customers' needs and provide proactive and personalized support to ensure customer success.

However, with the increasing responsibilities of CSMs, it has become challenging for them to manage their time effectively and provide high-quality customer support. This is where the concept of efficiency comes into play. By streamlining processes and maximizing their time,CSMs can provide better support to their customers and achieve more with less. One key way to achieve efficiency in customer success is through the use of customer hubs.

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What is a customer hub

A Customer Hub (also known as a customer portal) is the single source of information for everything the customer needs throughout the lifecycle. It is typically located within the product itself and is used to share and collaborate with customers on tasks ,timelines, meetings, readable resources, training materials, data dashboards and much more. When a company uses a customer hub, it no longer has to spend hours trying to prepare for customer meetings, sending customers relevant information at specific milestones, and so forth. Other than the benefit of increasing capacity, the biggest benefit of a customer hub is the frictionless customer experience - Customers can access everything they need from one centralized spot.

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CSMs can build and design Customer Hubs on their own using no-code widgets. With their branding capabilities, the hub will be seamlessly integrated into the product.

How to leverage customer hubs to achieve greater efficiency in customer success.

Reduce preparation time for customer meetings.

In a high-touch engagement model, CSMs spend most of their day on Zoom meetings with customers. CSMs need to prepare well in order to come up with great recommendations for how customers can achieve their expected business outcomes rather than just hop on a call and ask “how can I help you today” (which is less of a strategic discussion and more of a support call). During the preparation time, the CSM will explore its customer success BI systems, understand their usage patterns, then go into Salesforce to see what they want to achieve from the start, compare results to goals, and so on. This process may take 30 minutes to an hour for each customer.

Using customer hubs, allows CSMs to save most of this time. Here’s why: Customer hubs serve as a single source of truth for all customer information. CSMs can access all the relevant data about their customers in one place, including their own action items, their existing usage patterns, expected business outcomes, and summary of all previous conversations. In this way, the CSM can spend five to ten minutes reviewing the customer hub, and then use slides mode during the meeting itself to have the hub at the forefront.

This means that CSMs no longer need to spend hours searching for information in multiple systems and can instead quickly and easily access all the information they need in one place.


Reduce back-and-forth email communication with clients.

Customer Success Managers often spend hours responding to customer emails. The reason is that clients become overwhelmed by the number of places they must go in order to find the relevant information, and end up asking lots of questions over and over again. This can either be questions related to information they’re missing in order to progress within their journey, or even information around their existing plan usage and utilization, as they don’t have access to the info on their own.

With a customer hub, CSMs can not only provide all the relevant information about a client in a personalized hub, but they can also ask the customer for information that is needed from them. Through automation, many aspects of the customer journey do not need a human touch, even when they are managed through a high-touch model.

“We found that the customers who were given access to EverAfter,  the email back and forth between the customer and the CSMs was 10 times less than ones who did not have access to EverAfter”.

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Automate Quarterly business review sessions

It's probably familiar to you. The QBR season is approaching and you find yourself dreading the moment when you’ll need to spend hours preparing each client’s presentation. Each time, you log into your customer data platform and begin looking for relevant graphs to show each customer during the next QBR. Then you copy and paste screenshots. Putting hours into beautifying each presentation.When the QBR presentation is ready, you can decide if you want to present it face-to-face or over zoom to your client, or if you want to share the presentation by emailing the client a direct link to it for them to review on their own. Customer success teams often use a hybrid approach, presenting the QBR in a meeting to their high-touch accounts and sharing the link directly with their low-touch accounts.

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EverAfter customer hubs allow you to use pre-made QBR templates created by CSMs with extensive experience, and then connect EverAfter to your data sources to present personalized customer information.

Streamline the onboarding process for high-touch customers

Onboarding new customers is a critical part of customer success. It sets the foundation for a successful relationship and helps customers achieve their desired business outcomes. However, without the right tools in place, the onboarding process can be manual, time-consuming, and repetitive. That’s because CSMs must gather all necessary information about the customer, including their goals and desired outcomes, and then manually track their progress through the onboarding process. This can be a slow and labor-intensive process, especially if the CSM needs to switch between multiple systems to access the relevant information.In addition, the onboarding process often involves repeating the same tasks for each customer. For example, CSMs may need to complete the same forms, send the same emails, and provide the same training materials to each customer.

By using the hub to collaborate with customers on the onboarding plan, you can reduce unnecessary frictions and streamline the process. The hub can be branded to match your company's image and messaging, making it a more positive and cohesive experience for customers. Additionally, the hub can include reminders and collaboration features to keep customers on track and engaged throughout the onboarding process.

With the use of customer hubs, the onboarding process becomes streamlined and more efficient. The hub serves as a central hub for customers to access all the information, resources, and action items they need to get started with the product or service. Instead of a manual, piecemeal process, the customer hub offers a clear, beautiful, and actionable plan of action.

Free up 5 hours a week per CSM by eliminating repetitive tasks and file searches

Customer success managers (CSMs) often spend a significant amount of time on manual, repetitive tasks that aren't directly connected with their overall mission. These tasks can range from looking up ticket numbers to finding documents, taking screenshots of visualizations, and sending Gong recordings. These tasks can eat up a lot of time and can take CSMs away from more strategic conversations with their customers.However, with the use of a customer hub, much of the information that CSMs need is already stored in one place, and many of the tasks become automated.

For example, customer hubs can automatically log tickets and cases, and they can also provide access to all relevant documents, so CSMs don't need to spend time searching for them. Hubs can also integrate with other tools like visualizations and recordings, so CSMs can easily share them with their customers.Hubs can also help CSMs to be more proactive by automatically flagging potential issues or opportunities for improvement, so they can take action before problems arise.