Customer Discovery Hub
Summarize
Summary of Customer Discovery Hub
The Customer Discovery Hub in ServiceNow enables capturing and transferring detailed customer business context from pre-sales to post-sales teams. This ensures customer success managers (CSMs) gain immediate insight into why customers purchased, their challenges, and success criteria, which is typically unstructured across notes and documents.
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This feature is available when the Customer Discovery Hub (com.sncustdischb) plugin is installed and integrates with the Product Capability Core plugin to align customer use cases with supported product use cases.
Key Features
- Structured Customer Context: Captures business needs, challenges, expectations, and use cases as related records linked to leads, opportunities, and engagements.
- Customer Business Need: Defines the strategic problem driving the purchase.
- Customer Business Challenge: Details specific pain points or gaps linked to business needs.
- Customer Business Expectation: Specifies measurable success outcomes tied to business needs, including target criteria and dates.
- Customer Use Case: Describes how a product addresses business needs, with alignment values (default, extended, custom) linked to product catalog use cases.
- Pre-sales to Post-sales Flow: Pre-sales teams create these records during lead/opportunity stages; upon deal closure, all related data transfers automatically to the engagement record for CSMs to continue managing throughout the customer lifecycle.
- Manual Data Entry: The Hub provides tables and forms accessible via the engagement record's related items for capturing and reviewing customer context manually.
Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers
By using the Customer Discovery Hub, ServiceNow customers can standardize how customer business context is collected and maintained across sales and customer success teams, eliminating information silos. This leads to better-informed post-sale customer engagement, improved alignment of product capabilities to customer needs, and clearer definition of success outcomes. It enhances customer satisfaction by providing CSMs with comprehensive insights into customer motivations and challenges as they manage ongoing relationships.
Use the Customer Discovery Hub to capture customer business context during pre-sales and carry that context forward to customer success teams at the post-sale handoff.
When a deal closes, customer success managers (CSMs) receive an engagement record with product information but no insight into why the customer purchased, what problems they face, or what success looks like to them. Context about customer needs, challenges, and expectations is typically scattered across work notes, opportunity records, and documents with no structured path to the post-sale team.
Customer Discovery Hub provides a structured set of records for capturing business needs, challenges, and expectations during pre-sales. Those records transfer automatically to the engagement record, giving customer success managers immediate access to the full customer context.
Key concepts
Customer context in Customer Discovery Hub is structured into four related objects.- Customer business need: The strategic problem a customer must solve. A business need is the core reason a customer purchases or uses a product. It can exist independently or be supported by one or more customer business challenges. Business needs are captured in both pre-sales and post-sales contexts.
- Customer business challenge: A specific pain point, gap, or enhancement request that surfaces a business need. A challenge describes a symptom or frustration the customer experiences. When qualified, a challenge is linked to a parent business need. A challenge requires a parent business need to be actionable.
- Customer business expectation: A measurable success outcome tied to a specific business need. Expectations define what success looks like for the customer, including target values, success criteria, and target dates. Each expectation is a child record of a business need.
- Customer use case: A scenario-level description of how a product addresses a business need. Customer use cases document the customer's current process flow and their alignment to supported use cases — default, extended, or custom. Each customer use case is linked to a parent business need. The alignment value defines the relationship between the customer use case and the product's supported use cases and capabilities.
Pre-sales to post-sales flow
Customer Discovery Hub is used by pre-sales personas (account executives, solution consultants) and post-sales personas (customer success agents). During pre-sales, account executives and solution consultants create customer business needs and challenges against lead or opportunity records. They document customer use cases to describe the customer's current process. When a deal closes and an engagement is created, the business needs, challenges, expectations, and use cases linked to the opportunity carry forward to the engagement record. The customer success manager can then continue capturing new business needs and challenges directly against the engagement throughout the customer lifecycle.
To view the Customer Discovery Hub tables, navigate to , open an engagement, and select the Related Items related list.
Expand the table you want to review and select the Number or Account link to view the record page.
Product Capability Core integration
Customer Discovery Hub requires the Product Capability Core plugin. Customer use cases can be aligned with supported use cases from the product catalog.
When you create a customer use case, you specify an alignment value: default, extended, or custom. For default and extended alignments, link at least one supported use case from the product catalog to the customer use case.
For more information, see Product use case catalog.