High-quality customer service is a magnet that attracts and retains clients. At the same time, customers increasingly expect immediate and precise answers to their questions. With the advancement of AI, the use of chatbots is becoming an essential element of many companies' strategies. Automating customer communication can bring many benefits, from increasing operational efficiency to improving customer satisfaction.
In this article, we will discuss the benefits of using chatbots and how to create a chatbot with the HubSpot Chatbot Builder. We will also explore the possibilities offered by a custom chatbot built in collaboration with a HubSpot Solutions Partner.
Automation in customer service is now a reality. More and more organizations are adopting it to address scaling challenges. It helps extend a company’s availability to 24/7, respond to an increasing number of inquiries, and gather preliminary information before directing customers to the appropriate staff. When used effectively, it can streamline service and enhance customer satisfaction.
Chatbots can operate 24/7, providing immediate responses to customer queries at any time of the day or night. This reduces the waiting time for a response and increases customer satisfaction.
Chatbots can automate many routine tasks, such as collecting contact information, qualifying leads, and scheduling meetings. This allows employees to focus on more strategic tasks, increasing the overall productivity of the company.
Thanks to advanced algorithms, chatbots can personalize communication with customers based on collected data. They can provide product recommendations, respond to specific inquiries, and tailor the conversation to the individual needs of the customer.
Hiring and training customer service personnel is expensive. Chatbots can significantly reduce operational costs by taking over many tasks that previously required human intervention.
Chatbots can handle an unlimited number of simultaneous conversations, which is especially important during peak periods, such as seasonal sales or marketing campaigns.
HubSpot Chatbot Builder is a tool that allows you to easily create and manage chatbots without advanced technical knowledge or coding skills. Chatbot Builder is available in all HubSpot plans, including the free plan, though specific features depend on the license. The created chatbot can be embedded on a website, including those built on platforms other than HubSpot.
Importantly, chatbots created in HubSpot can seamlessly integrate with HubSpot CRM, enabling better management of customer and lead data. This ensures that all customer interactions are recorded and can be analyzed for further optimization of marketing and sales activities. For example, an email and name provided in a chat can automatically be saved as a contact record in the CRM, with the query content in the notes. This makes it much easier for a sales or customer service representative to follow up with the customer, as all the necessary information is available in the CRM.
Like other HubSpot tools, Chatbot Builder offers a simple, intuitive interface. Users can use ready-made templates or build bots from scratch. All templates are fully editable, making it easy to customize them to your needs. Advanced features such as conditional branching, if/then branches, allow for creating more complex and interactive conversation scenarios.
The tool allows for full customization of the chatbot's appearance and behavior to match the brand's image. You can also set display and data privacy options to ensure compliance with legal regulations and company policies.
To get started, select the "Automations" tab in your HubSpot account, then "Chatflows." In the upper right corner of the dashboard, you will find the "Create chatflow" button.
You will be taken to the configurator view, where you can choose whether you are building a chat for a website or Facebook Messenger, designate the inbox associated with the chat, and select the language. Then you can start building the bot from one of the ready-made templates or from scratch.
Next, configure the chatflows, which define how the chatbot should respond to various inquiries. With the if/then function, you can create complex scenarios that address specific customer needs.
Finally, customize the chatbot's appearance and behavior. You can set how the bot displays on the website, what data privacy options to apply, and how to collect user feedback.
HubSpot’s chatbot allows for creating not only simple mechanisms but also more complex, branching conversations.
For example, for one of our international clients operating in over 100 countries, we had to prepare a sophisticated automated bot that not only collected information from visitors but also directed users to a sales representative based on their country of residence and the product they were interested in.
One of the biggest challenges was creating over 20 conversational threads based not on a single choice but on two choices simultaneously. This required not only combining responses to questions but also saving responses in the HubSpot database at the appropriate time.
HubSpot is somewhat limited in displaying response choices, so there is no option to add predefined choices for country selection. However, this can be circumvented by asking the user to enter their country. Considering that the chatbot is prepared in six languages, it becomes clear that in each language, the user may enter the country name differently.
An interesting solution in this situation is to divide by country codes, which are mostly unique (though there are countries with shared country codes, such as the USA and Canada):
Therefore, in this case, we need to add an additional step with an explanation:
The main challenge was to break down user flows to direct them to the appropriate salesperson, and the HubSpot chatbot successfully accomplished this.
Moreover, an excellent feature of the chatbot is the ability to add the user to a static list based on their selected responses. This allows for further engagement with users based on their interests, enabling a more personalized approach for each of them.
HubSpot Chatbot Builder is a simple and effective tool that allows you to create a chatbot for your website. In many cases, it will be sufficient to provide basic customer service – scheduling meetings, directing them to the appropriate representative, or answering questions based on a knowledge base. However, if you need custom solutions for your company, the help of a HubSpot Solutions Partner may be beneficial to prepare a chatbot tailored to the specifics of your business.
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