How HubSpot Personalized Our Chatbots to Improve The Customer Experience and Support Our Sales Team

This post is part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal series of thought leaders where we learn from experiments done by our own HubSpotters.

You can’t talk about the future of marketing without chatbots. People are increasingly interested in communicating more with brands personal, talkative way – and chatbots can help.

By inserting chatbots into your website, visitors can find what they’re looking for and connect them instantly and smoothly to your team. Chatbots also follow the inbound messaging framework.

So what are the secrets to building one Chatbot strategy?

In the HubSpot marketing team, we want to offer a first-class customer experience. We consistently ask: how can Chatbots Better for our various target groups (visitors, leads and customers) to make them aware of the right resources for their needs? How can we use chatbots to support our sales team and achieve our goals?

Use HubSpot’s free Chatbot Builder software to easily create and start chatbots on your website – no coding required.

A customer-oriented bot experience

Chatbots work when they are contextual and relevant to certain problems. Through talking to our sales team, we found out that 15% of the chat questions on the website were about getting technical support. We created friction for our customers because our sales team (who answers local chat questions) is not as well equipped to answer these questions as ours support Team is.

That’s why we created a bot to direct our customers to the right resources for technical support (our support team, our knowledge base and the community). If you weren’t looking for technical support, we passed your questions about HubSpot features and pricing to our sales team.

We distributed these bots on the pages of the primary site and saw one 80% more Efficiency of our sales team: A measure of success based on the number of meetings we booked divided by the total number of chats handled. And it was a much better customer experience because our customers had easier access to technical support.

It was a big win, but our work was barely done. When we took a step back, we found that this “support bot” experience did not serve all of our users. over 70% of our audience are visitors and leads, compared to 30% who are users and customers. This first bot experience was only developed for 30% of our audience. Ignoring 70% of our audience means leaving money on the table.

A personal experience for all visitors

We had to create a personalized experience for the visitor and the leading audience.

With the experience of the “support bot”, it was strange to ask visitors and leads if they need support when we know they are not yet using our tools. Instead of directing visitors and leading them to chat or support, we wanted to give these visitors their own option to help themselves. Why not give them the opportunity to start using HubSpot CRM for free? This way you can use our free tools or chat with our sales team about features and prices for advanced tools.

Now we had designed two personalized experiences: one for those who already use our software (customers) and those who had never experienced it (visitors).

We thought this was a better experience for every audience because it was offered Context options based on their relationship with HubSpot. However, we wanted to test it first with an experiment.

Set up experiment

To test our hypothesis that this would be a better experience for both users, we set up an A / B test on one of our product pages so that we can see exactly how the bot behaves for visitors compared to the current bot experience ( designed for customers).

First, we defined our success metrics. We looked at:

• Efficiency of the sales team: number of meetings booked by our sales team ÷ number of chats they worked on
• Number of registrations for the CRM

We also compared these for each bot (control vs. variant) and for every audience (visitor vs. customer).

We selected one of our product pages and directed 50% of website traffic to a cloned page with the new bot experience. The test was live and operational for a month while we (somewhat) patiently waited for the results.

I am waiting at my desk

Test results

We isolated our results for the audience that the test focused on: visitors. We looked at how the control (support bot) behaves against the variant (lead bot).

• Efficiency of the sales team: increased by almost 70% in the variant
• Number of CRM registrations: increased by 7%

The increase in CRM signups showed that visitors found the right option for them (start for free) and dived in to try our software for free.

As a result, fewer chats reached our sales team, but we saw a similar number of meetings booked to continue the sales conversation after a chat. This meant a couple of things:

1. The sales team was able to spend more time and focus on higher quality chats that are more likely to turn into sales
2. We didn’t lose demand because we still saw a similar number of meetings booked. We still captured those who are interested in a sales pitch, only in a more efficient way.

Better segmentation makes life better for everyone. By personalizing a bot for visitors, the customer bot could also perform better. We have learned that the customer bot works very well for the audience for which it was developed – a 52% better performance if it is only shown to customers than if it is shown to all visitors.

Snack stands for your company

It is important to recognize that different segments of your audience have different problems and what works for one audience is not the best for another. By understanding our visitors’ problems and personalizing them Chatbot On-site experience can help you create a better perspective and Customer experience. If you expect help that people need better, your measurement data will also improve.

And you might think, “OK, that sounds pretty good for HubSpot, but what about my business? How can I create a more contextual bot experience for my company? “Here’s how:

1. Make a list of the different target groups you serve on your website.
2. Describe the type of questions that each audience may have.
3. Identify the resources or people who can best answer these questions so you can help them find what they’re looking for faster and more smoothly.

Then implement it! The HubSpot conversation tool offers you the opportunity to align your chat flows with segmented lists based on data in your CRM so that you can also create a personalized experience.

Chatbots work shoulder to shoulder with our sales team to provide an excellent, personalized shopping experience that allows us to identify visitors who may be a good fit for customers.

Chatbots can do the same for your company and your target audience.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in July 2019 and has been updated for completeness.