The journey of designing, building, and shipping beautiful, high-quality custom stairs and railings requires a lot of technology, automation, and customer-centric operations. Located in northern Indiana, Viewrail, a tech-forward leading manufacturer of custom railing and stairs, understands how important it is to synthesize all customer touchpoints to meet expectations and satisfy demand. This is why they have invested in the technology, talent, and strategy to optimize their operations with HubSpot customization.
From its beginnings as a small parts manufacturer 20 years ago, Viewrail has evolved into a tech-savvy manufacturer of custom stairs and railings. With over 400 employees and an ever-growing customer base, they've had to regularly adapt to meet changing demands
As a five-year HubSpot Enterprise customer, Viewrail's CRM is the source of truth for over one million records and 160 users.
“HubSpot has allowed us to not only power marketing but all aspects of the organization tied into our customer journey. Extending the flywheel approach beyond customer data into project data allowed us to scale and respond better to customer needs. HubSpot allows every part of our team to be part of that journey.” - Colin Johnson, Viewrail Revenue Operations Specialist
Custom stairs mean custom operations
Early on, using HubSpot functionality out of the box was fine. But to support their rapid growth and the unique demands of a manufacturing business, they had an ongoing need to integrate other custom tools, support custom data elements, and have easy access to their high-touch customer journey.
“With manufacturing projects and custom products that can take weeks to months, even years to complete, we needed a solution that scaled with that complexity.“ - Colin Johnson, Viewrail Revenue Operations Specialist
Throughout the process, from awareness to design to delivery and installation, Viewrail is on the hook to maintain high-quality engagement. This includes regular contact with their customers, contractors, and strong alignment with how a particular project is progressing. The ideal way to ensure this is to start from the moment a customer record is created in the CRM. As their operations have scaled, Viewrail has increasingly needed to customize HubSpot to scale with them, making the company an early adopter of any new customization capabilities.
Ascending from static and disconnected to real-time and integrated
One such feature was the 2022 launch of a new way to create custom cards via JSON code. It was a great stepping stone into an integrated environment but needed more of the extensibility and breadth Viewrail needed long-term. While the power of these new custom cards was a step in the right direction, Viewrail needed UI extensions that were more responsive to their end-user needs.
“The JSON-based cards had some limited user experience customization; thus, we were limited in the solutions we wanted to build. With the new custom cards with React as front end, we can build with far greater flexibility than before, which opens the doors for us to revisit more creative solutions.” - Killean Johnson, Viewrail Revenue Operations Developer
Stepping into real-time
HubSpot heard what Viewrail was saying, embracing a comprehensive approach to extensibility and customization. In 2023, HubSpot launched a new system for creating more robust custom cards using React, a popular front-end developer framework.
“I had been doing React development already for a year. It was effortless to jump into a project. The CLI environment is really nice, and the Git integration for automatic building made development more efficient. The React approach is lightyears better in configurability, real-time, and gives options to build more concise interfaces.” Killean Johnson, Viewrail Revenue Operations Developer
“With React-based custom cards, I am empowered to build solutions that work for my business. I love the ability to mold and shape something that works for my users. When I got wind of this, I poked everyone I could to get into the early beta program. React custom cards allow me to envision and build solutions in HubSpot based directly on our objects, keeping our reps responsive to customer needs and seeking data in one less tab. “ - Colin Johnson, Viewrail Revenue Operations Specialist
Revenue Operations at Viewrail can now rapidly respond to business-specific needs and business scale by creating real-time comprehensive custom cards that integrate with existing HubSpot API-created objects, such as Custom Objects, associations, deals, and tickets.
The future is connected systems and customizable interfaces
Viewrail looks forward to a more connected experience for their reps in the customer journey and manufacturing process. They expect the demand for custom cards to increase and have confidence that the platform will meet their needs and support the velocity.
Being a tech-forward manufacturing business, Viewrail understands the power of connected operations. They also know that it takes a platform with user-friendly interfaces and the right customization points to support their unique needs.
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