Account 360 is dead. Long live Account 360.

Last summer, I wrote a blog post about Account 360 — the customer health hub that we built where anyone on the Hex customer team could understand the state of any account, at any time.

At the time, Account 360 felt like being in the future. Our team — like so many customer teams —had been working with data scattered across different platforms and warehouses.

Even though we made it work, we were putting a ton of burden on our data team. And on top of that, our customer team was unable to quickly assess how a customer was doing and, most importantly, why.

So, when Account 360 was built — we all felt that, finally, we found something that worked.

Fast forward not even 10 months later, and Account 360 isn't what it used to be. Even though the data and work behind it is more valuable than ever, it's viewership has been at an all time low, despite our GTM team continuing to grow.

The reason? Two things: the way we work with data changed, and the bar for what "good" looks like changed with it. It’s not that Account 360 was a failure, it just got replaced by something better, Threads.

But to understand why, let's go back to the beginning.

The problem with Account 360

After a few months of working with Account 360, one thing was certain: it was slow and unwieldy, which was partly our fault. Any time a question came up about a customer, the answer was always the same: ask the data team to add another tab.

And on a customer team, that compounds fast. Before long, the app was hard to load, hard to navigate, and hard to quickly get insights from.

The reality was, each of those requests, each one of those tabs, was just one simple exploratory question: “Have they reached out to support recently?” “Have they adopted a new feature effectively?” “Has their usage pattern changed?” We were turning every passing question into a permanent fixture in the dashboard, and creating a ton of work for our data team.

Even though Account 360 was faster than the fragmented workflow we had before, we still couldn't answer questions in the moment we had them. We were spending more time hunting for the right insight than actually acting on it, and more often than not, ending up back in the data team's queue asking for yet another insight. The information was in there, but you had to know to look for it, and remember what it looked like the last time you checked.

Account 360 also had a ceiling it could never break through: it only worked for one account at a time. Need to look across your whole book of business? That was a different ask entirely — one it was never built to answer.

From Account 360 to Threads

So when Threads launched in the fall, how we were working with Account 360 instantly fell to the wayside.

Why? Because Threads lets you talk directly to your data. It’s great for less technical teams like ours because you can ask direct questions and get real-time, trusted answers.

And immediately, the way our team worked with customer data changed. Instead of opening a dashboard and hunting through Account 360, anyone on the GTM team could just ask their question directly and get an answer.

It went beyond charts and graphs and confirming data points. It gave us a real narrative — such as what was happening with a customer, and why — which is so much more valuable to customer-facing teams.

This is also where I landed on a cleaner mental model for when to use a dashboard versus when to just ask. Dashboards are great when you're looking across many things at once — your whole book of business, your team's pipeline, the state of the business — and trying to identify trends and projections.

The moment you're zooming into one account and asking why, that's investigation and calls for an exploratory conversation, not a graph.

The good news is that the data, context, and modeling that powered Account 360 didn't go anywhere, it's actually one of the key sources powering our team's work in Threads. When someone asks a question about a customer, all the work we did on support tickets, product usage, revenue data, and account health is what makes that answer possible. We just no longer need a dashboard sitting on top of it.

The Threads impact: How the Customer teams works faster and more strategically.

The impact of Threads on our team has really boiled down to two key things; getting information when it matters, and depth of knowledge.

Before Threads, the barrier to information was too high. If you wanted an insight, you would have to find data points, fill in the gaps, and if you couldn’t find any information, submit a ticket with the data team. Most of the time, the moment had passed before you had what you needed. Now, because it's easier to get information our team is able to get trusted answers pretty instantaneously.

The second part is the depth and quality of information. Our customer team is going into calls just knowing more. They’re not just showing up with a number, but actually understanding a history and a journey with each customer they interact with. There's something intangible about walking into a renewal conversation knowing everything that's happened with that customer in the last six months, and being able to speak to it.

Because the true magic of Threads isn’t that everything gets faster — it's that curiosity and exploration is now free — and trustworthy.

What we learned from Account360

If you’re asking if Account 360 was worth it. My answer is, of course it was.

Not because we still use it with the same frequency — we don't — but because it taught us exactly what knowing your customer actually means, and where it falls short when you try to freeze it into a dashboard.

Here's what I’d tell any customer team building something similar today.

• Start with the basics. What are the most common questions your team needs answers to? Find where that data is and make sure it’s modeled. Then build a solid account page Identify factors like who a customer is, how much each customer is spending, what's happened recently with an account. Even though the bar has moved, if that's what you can get right now, get it.
• When you're ready to go further, make sure your system has the right ingredients: call data, product usage, support history, revenue data, and internal context like account ownership. Without all of those, you're only working with a partial picture. With all of them, you can start to answer and identify the questions that actually matter.
• Your end goal should be that your system and process has to be fast enough to use live: If it takes three minutes to load during a 30-minute customer call, that's 10% of your call gone. As a customer team the bar for a customer health tool isn't that it "has the data." The bar is "can it get me the answer right now, in the middle of a conversation."

Looking back to when we first launched Account 360, it already feels like a different era. The new standard for customer information is fast, governed, trustworthy, and accessible to everyone who needs it. Not to mention that with the advent of generative apps, it’ll be easier to spin up an Account 360 now more than ever.

But the good news is, Account360 will always continue on in some form and fashion now that the foundation has been laid. And it’s for the better. Because customer intelligence isn't a dashboard you build once. It’s an ever evolving thing you keep raising the bar on.

Account 360 was our version of raising the bar at the time. And utilizing Threads is our current one. And whatever comes after that, we'll build towards it too (and I’ll write about it again, probably sooner than 10 months.)

If you’re interested in building what’s next in customer and product experiences, we’re hiring! Check out open roles here.