HubSpot’s Story
Discover HubSpot's unique formula for peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing through their community and how their efforts have resulted in significant support cost savings.
Summary
HubSpot’s Community team focuses on providing human touch at scale using the superpowers of community: scale, perspective, and passion. They believe that community is an amplifier and that layering human connection on top of their customer-facing efforts makes them better. Their ultimate goal is to educate, connect, and inspire the HubSpot community.
Today, the HubSpot online community is the go-to self-service platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, advocacy, and ideation amongst its customers, partners, users, and developers.
COMMUNITY SCALE
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400 K
all-time members (2024)
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> 1 million
monthly page views (2024)
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3 K
new new monthly conversations (2024)
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25 K
monthly active users (2024)
BUSINESS OUTCOMES
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96 %
of solutions are provided by peers (2024)
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98 %
of posts are replied to within 24 hours (2024)
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$ 300 K
in support cost deflection (2024)
“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.”
— Gabrielle Herrera, Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth at HubSpot
About HubSpot
HubSpot is a leading CRM platform that provides software and support to help businesses grow better. This platform includes marketing, sales, service, and website management products that start free and scale to meet customers’ needs at any stage of growth. Today, thousands of customers around the world use its powerful and easy-to-use tools and integrations to attract, engage, and delight customers.
Rationale for change / Business use case
In early 2024, the HubSpot Community team shifted its innovation approach and strategy for the community. The challenge was integrating community strategies across HubSpot's diverse portfolio of teams. They also saw the opportunity to leverage the Khoros Communities platform as the centerpiece of a comprehensive plan to drive product adoption and user engagement.
The community soon evolved from being a support community aimed at answering single, point-in-time questions to a recurring, lively success destination. Previously, there was no centralized location for customers. Customer success content lived in emails, ephemeral events, and other cobbled deliverables. Now, customers can access all the resources they need, helping 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 customers efficiently and effectively apply HubSpot’s tools to their needs.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
“Khoros provides us a platform for discussion forums, affinity groups, Q&A, blogs, events, email functionality, and custom signatures for users.”
Gabrielle Herrera
Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth at HubSpot
“Since incorporating Khoros Service 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 Khoros Service, 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.”
Gabrielle Herrera
Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth at HubSpot
COMMUNITY JOURNEY
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Inception
Inception
The HubSpot community launched in 2016 on Khoros Communities as the solution for free user support. Since then, the community has grown in both visibility and use cases. It now boasts over 400,000 members (all time), >1 million monthly page views, 3,000 net new monthly conversations, and 25,000 monthly active users. The community team can also proudly associate community usage with healthier customers.
Technology: HubSpot launched its online community on Khoros Communities in 2016. The team utilized the Salesforce CRM integration to extend community reach and impact, and connect their tech stack.
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Growth
Growth
Between 2021 and 2022, HubSpot put initiatives in place to ensure the community continued to be a reflection of its members. This included a member spotlight on the homepage, an upvotes leaderboard, and the Humans of HubSpot board for sharing members’ stories. The team also launched self-service support, study groups, a new website redesign, and a customer advocacy program.
Technology: The community team at HubSpot utilized key tools from the Khoros Communities platform, including forums, groups, blogs, and ideas to encourage customer engagement and drive a best-in-class customer experience.
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Maturity
Maturity
In 2024, HubSpot launched federated search, including knowledge base articles, HubSpot Academy (customer education) videos and certifications, and API documentation from its Developer Changelog. The team also redesigned the navigation, ensuring customers have a centralized location to find the right solution. Additionally, HubSpot has been able to improve relevancy and, in turn, adoption of the community by developing personalized landing pages based on a customer’s product tiers.
Technology: HubSpot expanded its community capabilities by bringing Khoros Service on board. With Khoros Service, HubSpot’s community managers and moderators are able to efficiently moderate the community forums and quickly accept replies on the forums, equally helping both the person who raised the question and the person who responded excel in the gamification of the community, encouraging them to continue to engage.
Lessons learned
Peer interaction fuels participation
Efficient use of time is critical for growth
HubSpot strived to work smarter, not harder. The team learned to utilize the many capabilities and tools from the Khoros Communities’ platform to scale their time and resources. For example, their customer success managers (CSMs) were spending their time on menial, repetitive tasks instead of on high-leverage moments and stakeholders. Now, the HubSpot community helps generate peer responses, public answers, and knowledge sharing, saving the organization potentially millions of dollars per year in support costs, while also lifting partners up. The community empowers HubSpot to be more efficient and scale success while still keeping a human touch.
Community as a business enabler
Structure supports scale
Clear organization using Khoros’ nodes — discussion, groups, TKB, Q&A, blogs, events — made it easy for users to find what they needed and stay engaged.
Results
HubSpot has reaped the benefits of its hard work and commitment to building a community that is the center of excellence for HubSpot customers and enthusiasts, as well as the heartbeat for HubSpot’s software. Here are some highlights:
Cost savings
Improved peer-to-peer resolution rate.
Improved time-to-answer rate.
Why Khoros Community software
The Khoros-powered HubSpot community has enabled the company to build and scale a network of HubSpot customers, partners, users, and developers. This community has helped drive peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing and ensure questions are resolved with fast, consistent, and invaluable expertise. The company highly values the Khoros Communities platform for:
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Community engagement and content types
With Khoros Communities, HubSpot is empowered to cultivate two-way dialogue with members. It can use a host of built-in styles to fuel interaction, including blogs, discussion forums, Q&A, ideas, private messages, and more.
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Painless community content management.
HubSpot is empowered to produce high-quality community content quickly, craft visual posts or articles with ease, as well as tag, review, edit, and schedule to go live fast. The team can also archive content to remove noise.
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Unmatched expertise.
Khoros provides the most modern community architecture with the longest history of enterprise-level scale, security, configurability, and uptime.