Customer Discovery Hub
Summarize
Summary of Customer Discovery Hub
The Customer Discovery Hub enables ServiceNow customers to capture and transfer detailed customer business context from pre-sales to post-sales teams. It addresses a common challenge where customer success managers (CSMs) receive engagement records lacking insight into the customer's reasons for purchase, business challenges, and success criteria. This tool provides a structured method to document and carry forward this vital information, ensuring CSMs have immediate access to comprehensive customer context after deal closure.
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This feature is available only if the Customer Discovery Hub (com.sncustdischb) plugin is installed and requires the Product Capability Core plugin for full functionality.
Key Features
- Structured Customer Context: The hub organizes customer information into four related objects:
- Customer Business Need: The strategic problem or core reason for purchase, which can exist independently or be supported by challenges.
- Customer Business Challenge: Specific pain points or gaps linked to a business need, representing symptoms or frustrations.
- Customer Business Expectation: Measurable success outcomes tied to business needs, including criteria and target dates.
- Customer Use Case: Scenario-level descriptions of how the product addresses business needs, aligned with supported product use cases (default, extended, or custom).
- Pre-Sales to Post-Sales Continuity: Account executives and solution consultants document business needs, challenges, and use cases during pre-sales linked to lead or opportunity records. Upon deal closure, all related records automatically transfer to the engagement record, enabling CSMs to continue managing customer context throughout the customer lifecycle.
- Manual Data Entry and Accessibility: The hub provides tables and forms accessible via related lists on engagement records, allowing manual capture and review of customer context data.
- Product Capability Integration: Customer use cases can be linked to supported use cases from the product catalog, enhancing alignment between customer scenarios and product functionality.
Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers
By implementing the Customer Discovery Hub, ServiceNow customers can:
- Ensure customer success teams have immediate and comprehensive insight into customer business needs, challenges, and expectations after deal closure.
- Maintain continuity of customer context from sales through ongoing engagement management, improving customer satisfaction and success outcomes.
- Structure and centralize customer business information, reducing fragmentation across notes and documents.
- Align customer use cases with product capabilities to better tailor solutions and measure success.
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. They have 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.