Today, chatbots and virtual assistants are indispensable tools for companies that want to offer agile and personalized customer service. If configured correctly, they can transform the customer experience and increase the efficiency of your team.
In this article, find out how to set up and use chatbots on HubSpot, one of the most complete marketing and sales platforms, to improve the customer experience on several levels.
What you'll see in this post:
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What are chatbots?
Chatbots are virtual assistants developed with artificial intelligence to interact with users in an automated way. They can answer questions, offer quick solutions and forward demands to people when necessary.
As well as saving teams time, chatbots increase efficiency by providing automated customer service that works 24 hours a day, every day of the week (24/7). This not only improves the customer experience, but also allows your company to focus on more strategic issues.
In a marketing strategy, they are essential for capturing leads, qualifying contacts and maintaining consistent customer communication.
HubSpot has a series of solutions and tools that can be used directly from the platform and free of charge. Here's how its main tools work.
What are the main features of HubSpot's chatbot?
As you already know, HubSpot offers a robust solution for creating and managing chatbots directly within the platform. This functionality is integrated into the HubSpot account and allows companies to configure chatbots intuitively. The main features include:
- Visual editor: a simple and intuitive interface for creating conversation flows;
- CRM integration: stores interactions in the CRM to provide context to teams;
- Personalization options: allows you to tailor messages to different types of audience;
- Advanced automation: redirects complex interactions to human agents based on predefined rules.
In other words, from configurations designed to best serve your leads, you can develop efficient chatbots and achieve maximum efficiency, at low cost and with optimized results.
All of this also depends on the communication channels you use in your company to obtain information from your customers. However, these channels alone are not capable of creating value for the company, and it is necessary to focus on the channels most used by your customers.
Communication channels and chatbot: understand the relationship
Every company has a set of communication channels used in customer relations. Take a look at the channels your company uses the most, so that the information you need to configure your chatbot isn't too fragmented.
According to data collected by HubSpot, companies communicate with their prospects and customers mainly through the following channels:
|
Communication channel |
Percentage of use by customers in general |
|---|---|
|
Live chat |
22% |
|
Messenger |
29% |
|
E-mail/newsletters |
84% |
|
Phone |
75% |
|
Community platforms |
37% |
|
X |
35% |
|
Other social networks |
35% |
Caption: Channels used by customers
Thus, the channels that connect employees to clients and/or prospects contain information about the client, where it is necessary to gather it in order to understand the needs and the full context of the situations that need to be resolved.
It is therefore very important to gather as much information as possible on the channels most used by your customers and prospects, which may vary between companies in the same sector and also according to the product or service you sell.
For example, if your audience is young, with an average age of between 18 and 35, it's very likely that they don't often use community platforms and it's therefore important to know which social networks they use. You need to do this analysis before continuing with the chatbot configuration process.
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How to set up chatbots in HubSpot?
Setting up a chatbot in HubSpot is a simple and intuitive process, especially given the way the tools are available on the platform. Here are the steps you need to take to ensure that you set up your chatbot effectively and in line with your company's objectives and to better serve your customers.
Step 1: Access HubSpot:
To get started, go to "conversations" on your platform and then "chatflow".
Very important note: if you don't see this screen, it's probably because you haven't connected your inbox to HubSpot yet. In this situation, the platform itself will direct you or, if you prefer, you can access the knowledge base and find the tutorial that talks about the inbox.
It's worth mentioning that both the chatbot and the live chat can be available on the page of the website that has the HubSpot tracking code. So make sure you have this code installed on your pages to make the chatbot work well.
Step 2: Select where the flow will appear
In this step, you will select where the chatflow will appear: whether it will be on your website pages or on Facebook Messenger. If you choose the website, you can browse the pre-configured bots that are already in your account or create one from scratch. Remember that even bots that are already configured can be customized.
Now select the inbox that will receive the messages and then select the language that will be used in the communication and start creating.
Step 3: Select the chatbot's actions
At this point, you will select the chatbot's actions. To find the actions, simply click on the [+] button and browse through the available actions. Some of the actions you can choose from are:
- Sending a simple message;
- Question;
- Branching;
- Set property value;
- Send a ticket;
- Send to team members; and
- Book a meeting.
Explore all the options to make sure that the bot is taking actions that meet your objective. Once you've done that, everything you put in will be in this view, so you can navigate to "go to action" to see details of each action. Whenever you want, click on the action box to avoid the current configuration.
Step 4: Defining pages
You now go to the "target tab". In this tab, you will define which pages this chatbot will or will not appear on. So you can say, for example, that you want it to appear on all the pages of your site or only on a specific page.
If you want to exclude chat from certain pages, it's possible. Next, select some aspects of visitor behavior that will determine which profiles the chatbot will appear on.
For example, you can show this chatbot only to contacts who are already on your specific list or only to users who are visiting your site via a certain device.
Explore these settings to make your chats specific and strategic for certain types of audience. Now, go to display to define the title of this bot, as well as the avatar that will come with it. In addition, you will determine how the message will appear:
- A pop-up as in the image on the right;
- Just the bot icon; or
- That it opens as soon as your visitor enters the site.
You can also determine whether the chatbot will appear when:
- The user is trying to leave the page; or
- After scrolling a certain amount of the page.
If you want to customize the chat, you can change the highlight color, edit the positioning and much more. Also remember to make the settings for the mobile device, so it looks exactly as you expect.
Step 5: Fundamental settings
Finally, click on the options to enter some fundamental settings for your chatbot:
- Select the session timeout and restart at the time you indicate;
- Set the delay for sending each chatbot message;
- Set a message if the chatbot has an error; and
- Set the language in which you are configuring this bot.
Next, set the chatbot's availability. It can be set according to the availability of the team, based on business hours, or if you prefer, it can be configured so that the bot appears full-time on your site.
Finally, configure data privacy and consent by checking the button that collects cookies and processes the data of your site's users. Setting up HubSpot's chatbot is very easy and you can do it even without programming knowledge.
Once the configurations are complete, use your chatbot to improve automated customer service. It takes a lot of attention to ensure that your tools optimize your resources and maximize sales, always thinking of the customer's well-being.
How can I use a chatbot to improve my company's customer service?
Chatbots can be used in various situations in a marketing and automated service strategy.
- Lead qualification: use the chatbot to identify whether a website visitor is ready for a sales approach;
- Scheduling meetings: also facilitates direct scheduling with company representatives, enabling problems to be resolved as quickly as possible;
- Answeringfrequently asked questions: answer common questions such as "What are your opening hours?" or "Do you deliver?". And with this, you can identify what can be improved in various sectors of the company;
- Promotional campaigns: promotes offers and products in personalized interactions, increasing the company's average sales ticket, which aims to meet the needs of its customers;
- Technical support: solves simple problems or refers complex cases to a specialized team, with rigor and practicality.
Setting up chatbots in HubSpot is a powerful strategy for improving customer service and optimizing the user experience. In addition to reducing costs, chatbots make customer service more agile and personalized, benefiting both the company and its customers.
By following the tips in this article, you'll be ready to create an efficient virtual assistant in line with your business needs. Get started now and take your marketing and customer service strategy to the highest possible level.
To improve your service, the automation of your resources and tools, consider finding free platforms to create chatbots that are aligned with your objectives.
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