How bookingkit turned customer success from a gut feeling into provable impact

The challenge before ImpactPilot

Laura leads customer support and customer success at bookingkit, the leading European booking and management platform for attractions, enabling zoos, museums and theme parks to digitize bookings, manage operations and scale distribution.

Her team owns the customer relationship from onboarding through to retention and contract negotiation: six customer success managers, one onboarding manager, Success Lead Giovanni and Laura, working a tiered book of roughly 600 accounts across enterprise, mid-market and SMB.

When Laura took over, the team had no customer success tool and was barely using the CRM. bookingkit ran on Salesforce, but Salesforce was never designed for customer success, so the team lived somewhere else entirely.

"The team was operating across a lot of spreadsheets and Google Docs. There was no space where they felt, this is our tool. It was a very scattered way of working, and the data was very fragmented across many different tools."

Laura Gorlero, bookingkit

The cost went beyond messy files. There was no shared history of an account and no way to measure the team against it, which made the one thing every CS leader wants, strategic customer success, effectively impossible. The team knew what they should be doing; they had no place to plan it, prioritize it, or prove it worked.

The search for a tool

Laura took her time. Her first year went into understanding how the team was set up before deciding what to fix. When she started evaluating, she looked across the whole spectrum, from HubSpot's own customer success beta up to the large dedicated platforms, with conversations across Gainsight, Planhat and Vitally.

They all promised the same destination: a more proactive, signal-based team. What separated them were Laura's non-negotiables. She needed a tool that could use the data bookingkit already had, from emails to call notes to recordings, and she needed it live fast, because she had no CSOps or RevOps to run a months-long implementation. Above all, she was not going to unpick the year her company had just spent making HubSpot its single source of truth.

"We had made HubSpot the system of record for sales, marketing, and customer success. To lose that and retrain the team on a separate platform, separating customer success from sales, I didn't think that was a good decision. I very much support revenue teams working in one platform, with one set of data, in one central place."

Laura Gorlero, bookingkit

HubSpot's own customer success beta got a close look too, but at the time it was mostly health scores and the service side, and it did not add enough.

Why ImpactPilot

ImpactPilot came recommended more than once, by people who consult across the whole go-to-market motion. In a referral-driven industry, that repetition earned a conversation. The philosophy is what earned the decision.

"Pieter told me customer success should be based on the impact that customer success managers have on customers. This whole idea of activities that drive impact, where we are all aligned on what success looks like. Let's not track the calls and emails, let's track the impact. It's simple, but simple and effective."

Laura Gorlero, bookingkit

Against the alternatives, the fit was obvious. The larger platforms felt too complex and hard to maintain. ImpactPilot sat on top of the HubSpot stack bookingkit had just invested in, kept customer success and sales on one set of data, and was running fast without a heavy setup project.

The results

The first thing to change was how the team worked day to day.

"With the whole portfolio in one place and a shared agreement on the right actions per tier, prioritization stopped being guesswork, and our one-on-ones became faster and more objective, built on a shared view rather than a recap of last week."

Giovanni, Success Lead, bookingkit

The bigger shift was being able to prove the team's impact instead of asserting it. In 2025, bookingkit shipped a wave of new features and leaned hard into adoption, and ImpactPilot let Laura show, with data, that her team was driving it.

"We always had the suspicion that customer success managers are very influential in feature adoption, but I could never prove it without data. Since we've had ImpactPilot, we can confidently say exactly how many times a customer success manager has pitched a feature, and how many times they successfully had the customer adopt it."

Laura Gorlero, bookingkit

That evidence does not stay inside the CS team. Because everything done in ImpactPilot is reflected at company level in HubSpot, the same data reaches leadership and product, who can see for themselves why a feature was pitched fifty times but closed lost twenty, and dig into what is not working. Reporting upward changed shape too: planning starts from the company goal, cascades into customer success, and uses the point system to weight the actions that matter most that quarter, so Laura can show closed won, closed lost, and the reasons behind both.

Some of the most useful insight came from a goal the team missed. They hit their impact targets across the portfolio but fell short on the number of accounts impacted, which surfaced a real ceiling.

"We are very manual and high-touch, and if we rely only on that, we'll have difficulty impacting the number of customers we want to. It's one more reason to scale tech-touch and digital touch."

Laura Gorlero, bookingkit

Just as important, the team actually adopted it, with high usage from the start. As Laura puts it, you don't want to pay for a tool the team doesn't end up using.

What's next: signals

With year one spent getting the team focused and measurable, Laura's 2026 focus is signals. ImpactPilot already surfaces risks, opportunities and product feedback as a weekly update, and the early value is clearest for CSMs carrying large books: a team member who inherited a couple of hundred SMB accounts used the risk signals to triage, reaching out first to customers flagged with a termination or competition risk. From there, Laura plans to build tasks off those signals and use them to steer tech-touch customer success.

The recommendation

"It's a lean software that complements the infrastructure you already have, a bridge between your data and the customer success work. If you have a small to medium-sized team and you don't know where they're focusing their efforts, it's a perfect way to get started and steer the team toward the actions you want, whether they drive revenue, product adoption, or churn prevention. I would definitely recommend it, especially for a team of seven to ten people that wants to move quickly without getting lost in a long implementation."

Laura Gorlero, bookingkit