HubSpot recently announced the addition of a fifth hub to its CRM platform – the new Operations Hub.
The idea behind the new Operations Hub is to bring all customer data together in one place. As opposed to having a long list of different platforms and tools that don’t integrate particularly well together, the Operations Hub is designed to bring an operation team’s entire toolkit into HubSpot. This should mean a business using the Operations Hub will become more efficient and aligned.
The three core features of the new hub are data sync, programmable automation, and data quality tools – which are all powered by HubSpot. These features will allow your business to have a unified view of every customer interaction and therefore be enabled to deliver a friction-free customer experience. We go through each of the core features below in more detail.
Data Sync
Data Sync is a new, native way of connecting business apps with HubSpot which allows you to keep all your HubSpot records in lockstep with the rest of your tech stack. This means you can save time on spreadsheets and imports, while still ensuring your customer data is always up to date.
It allows you to seamlessly integrate your apps and have all of your customer data unified and centralised, keeping your team aligned and efficient as you scale.
The Operations Hub will come with access to 25 brand new HubSpot-built integrations. The list includes popular apps such as Mailchimp, Outlook 365, Google Contacts, Microsoft Dynamics, Mindbody, and Bullhorn. Even if you’re not using HubSpot as your CRM, you can connect any type of app to HubSpot from email marketing apps to customer service tools. You can find the whole collection of supported apps here.
If you're wondering what the difference between data sync and traditional integrations is, then let us explain. Traditional integrations sync data in one direction e.g. you can sync contacts from your CRM to your email platform, but not the other way around. Data sync, on the other hand, allows integrations to work two ways, passing information to and from any system.
Data sync also passes both future and historical data between systems, as opposed to traditional integrations which only pass data that’s been added or updated after the integration is set up.
As opposed to being trigger-based like traditional integrations, data sync is real-time and keeps two databases consistently synchronized. Furthermore, data sync integrations are customisable - unlike traditional integrations – which means you can limit the information which is passed back and forth between apps and change this information at any time.
Data sync doesn’t require any coding at all. You just select the app of your choice, pick what information you’d like to include, then save your sync, and let HubSpot do the rest.
Programmable Automation
Programmable automation allows you to execute code directly from HubSpot workflows. As you grow your business, the number of customer touchpoints also grows. Maintaining a consistently good customer experience at all of these different touchpoints calls for strong automation. HubSpot has recognised that the automations that suit one business, don't necessarily suit another. The new custom options allow the operations team to adapt automation to fully suit your business, ensuring a smooth scaling process.
Programmable Automation encompasses three automated actions in HubSpot:
• Custom code actions in workflows
• Webhook actions in workflows
• Custom code actions in bots
You may have noticed that the two last options aren’t new, as they’ve previously been available in other hubs. Going forward, webhook and custom code actions will now only be available in Operations Hub. However, existing customers don’t need to worry, as the features will retain with them moving forward, even if they don’t purchase Operations Hub.
With Operations Hub, you'll be able to create custom workflows or bot actions using JavaScript or any Node.js library using custom code actions. The possibilities are endless!
In terms of security, API keys and such can be added as secrets, which will ensure they are encrypted and safely stored by HubSpot. Secrets can be referenced by any other custom code actions within your account, which means you can create actions that access information from other systems, and use them to power other business processes within HubSpot.
If you’re comfortable with code, you can go try out Operations Hub now. If not, there are still a host of powerful automations without code you can take advantage of. If you’d like to find out what’s possible with programmable automation but would need help with the coding aspect, get in touch here.
Data Quality Automation
Data Quality Automation automatically cleans your data for you. It entails a new set of workflow actions that format property values in certain ways: capitalising letters, fixing date properties, updating phone numbers, and more.
Reliable qualitative data allows teams to stay efficient and improves customer experience. When scaling a business, you don’t want your operations team to be focused on clean-up projects as opposed to encouraging growth.
The data quality actions should free up time for your operations team as they will no longer need to manually work through spreadsheets full of data. Keeping the data clean up automated will also bring great peace of mind to the wider business.
Data formatting actions will be executed via workflows. Create or edit an existing workflow, turn it on and the data quality automation will take care of the cleaning.
In our opinion, the best part about data quality automation is that it doesn’t just help with the data already inside your HubSpot account. When you use integrations powered by data sync, the cleaned data will flow into all of your other apps creating a consistent data environment across the board.
Conclusion
Operations Hub is a welcome addition to the HubSpot platform. The four main use cases that have been identified are as follows:
• Integrate all of your systems and establish HubSpot as your source of truth
• Migrate to HubSpot with ease
• Clean up your dirty data
• Create custom automation for more complex business processes
If any of these sounds like something your business would be interested in, please get in touch with us to discuss your requirements at chris@enquirylab.com or on 01327 368378.
