Increasing customer retention with HubSpot's Customer Success Workspace

Customer retention is a key focus area for many companies, and HubSpot's Customer Success Workspace can help you improve it. This article examines how the workspace enables Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to manage their portfolios effectively and proactively.

This article walks you through the key considerations for setting up the workspace effectively, aligning it with your processes, and ensuring that CSMs can truly benefit from what it has to offer.

Let's dive in.

Aligning ownership and CRM Data on HubSpot

The Customer Success Workspace functions are based on record ownership. Each CSM sees only the companies or contacts for which they are responsible. While sales teams typically use the standard `Company Owner` or 'Contact Owner' fields, CS teams can utilise a dedicated` Customer Success Manager' property tied to HubSpot users. This way, the right companies are tied to the right customer success managers. If the customer success manager's information is missing or outdated, the workspace will fail to surface accurate information. A consistent, well-maintained CRM data structure is essential for the workspace to deliver value.

During the workspace setup, you'll define both the owner field and the primary object to use with the workspace. The most commonly used primary object for customer success is companies, though some organisations may prefer to use contacts instead. This varies based on the business.

When setting up the workspace, it is recommended to define the yearly renewal date for your clients. You can use any HubSpot date property for this. This field not only supports portfolio visibility but also opens up meaningful automation opportunities, such as task reminders ahead of renewal windows, segmenting accounts by renewal status, or triggering renewal-related workflows. This small configuration step can create the difference between reactive and proactive account management.

Last but not least, for customer success managers, the revenue tab can be a game-changer in handling revenue-driving tasks, such as contract renewals. By setting up the right pipelines and background details, which can now be configured directly within the workspace, CSMs gain a clear, centralised view that helps them prioritise key processes and ensure no revenue opportunity is missed.

A daily control panel for Customer Success Managers

Once implemented, the workspace becomes the daily control panel for each CSM. When users sync their calendars with HubSpot, they get a clear view of their day's agenda, including tasks due today, overdue items, and upcoming priorities. Users can directly access their tasks in the workspace, just like they do with tickets or other service entities they own.

If your team hasn't been using HubSpot Tasks yet, this is an ideal opportunity to consider them. Automated reminders and structured task management can significantly support your CSMs. Tasks tied to lifecycle events, such as onboarding, NPS follow-ups, or QBRs, can be automatically generated and assigned. This ensures a consistent customer experience and makes responsibilities clear and transparent.

With this setup, HubSpot becomes more than a tool; it becomes an intelligent assistant helping CSMs stay on top of the right actions at the right time.

Customer portfolio, custom views, and activity monitoring

Customer Success Managers can easily access and filter their portfolios in the workspace. With centrally built views, they can quickly focus on high-priority accounts, clients in onboarding, customers with an upcoming renewal, or customers likely to churn. These views help standardise how your team manages their accounts and ensure that everyone's looking at the data through the same lens.

The workspace also includes a real-time activity feed showing what contacts are doing, from email opens to website activity. This visibility allows CSMs to spot engagement spikes or silences and take action where it matters.

Additionally, you can embed dashboards and custom reports into the workspace. These are helpful tools, especially when the workspace lacks information that would be valuable for your CS team to see daily.

Supporting adoption and centralised setup

While individual users can adjust parts of their interface, for example, reordering the workspace's layout, a centralised implementation approach is highly recommended. This ensures consistency across the team and simplifies training and adoption.

A well-designed setup supports the entire customer journey, enabling customer success managers to focus on the moments that matter, rather than just automating renewal-related processes.

Consider onboarding: Are you using tickets to manage each step? Are reminders automated? Are check-ins standardised? The more you automate and structure repetitive tasks, the more time your team has for meaningful customer interactions.

Boosting customer loyalty: leveraging the new health score in HubSpot's Customer Success Workspace

HubSpot has recently released the Company Health Score. The feature lets you define custom health scores based on properties and activity data. This helps customer success managers to track account health and proactively manage risk. This addition is a concrete step toward more data-driven and scalable customer success management.

HubSpot's customisable Health Score for companies helps the customer success team to monitor customer health and proactively identify risks. The feature is available to all Service Hub Professional and Enterprise users. The tool allows you to define scoring criteria based on customer properties and activities, with scores totalling up to 100 points. These scores are automatically calculated and displayed in customer records, providing users with a quick insight into account health and engagement trends.

Optimising your customer success with HubSpot

When implemented carefully, the Customer Success Workspace becomes a central dashboard for your CS team. It helps prioritise tasks, promotes proactive account management, and most importantly, manages customer relationships.

By focusing on the right building blocks, accurate ownership fields, automated lifecycle workflows, consistent use of Tasks, centralised rollout, and custom views, you'll dramatically improve your customer success operations.

The impact is tangible: improved retention, increased customer satisfaction, and a more proactive and accountable team.

Are you ready to unlock the full potential of your Customer Success operations with HubSpot? Get in touch to start building a workspace tailored to your goals and deliver measurable retention and growth.