The Changing Face of Customer Experience

in and filling up your seats a couple of housekeeping things first of all um three people ordered coffees from the espresso room and forgot to pick them up um if that's you and you're suddenly like oh my god i forgot my coffee they are out in the foyer but if you ordered it at nine o'clock this morning it's probably a bit cold um iced coffee is good i think throw some ice cubes in it and we'll just kick on um the other thing is we've ended

up with quite a few delegate satchels spare so if you didn't get your bag this morning make sure you pick that up on your way out um i'll take this opportunity to plug the um scout digital training competition again we've been collecting quite a few nominees for our our three uh our three posts of the day um i'm not sure whether we're trending on twitter because most people don't use twitter anymore or what's going on but there's been some some really good tweets and insta things

coming out so um yeah looking forward to going through those at the end now while we've got people filling in i'll introduce our next two speakers so all the way from sydney uh nick and elliot from hubspot are going to be talking to us about the changing face of customer experience creating a conversational strategy now this has been coming through in a few of the presentations this morning about chat bots and talking to your customers in a more human way so these two gentlemen are going

to be taking us through that so elliott is a channel consultant at hubspot and works with hubspot's agency partners to help businesses grow better with a background in digital advertising elliott helps develop and implement growth strategies for small businesses on a daily basis he works with hubspot partners on their clients content strategy acquisition models and sales funnels to power their businesses growth meanwhile on the other side we have nick nick is a channel account manager at hubspot where he consults with hubspot's agency partners and their

customers on digital focused growth strategies hailing from the us which is why he talks a bit funny uh he built his career in sales and marketing within the startup tech space in san fran before following his heart to sydney did you did you write that yeah this is what happens americans meet australian girls they fall in love they get married they move to australia it's good um if he's not answering his emails you'll likely find him bobbing around in the surf or starting a new renovation

project at home so thanks for coming all the way to adelaide guys take it away thank you ryan i didn't realize you're going to be reading that out i thought that was just for the website copy so i'm feeling very special now um nice to see everybody thanks for for coming out to our chat i'm i'm assuming everyone's feeling well fed we're into the afternoon on on friday so the weekend is uh is coming quickly um as ryan mentioned we are going to be talking a

little bit about chat today messaging and your conversational strategy uh one of the things that elliot and myself are very lucky or i guess how we're very lucky is we get to talk to customers every day about how they think about these things and one of the things that we've found is is very common and probably an area for growth for a lot of businesses is how to incorporate chat or how to incorporate chat automation in your marketing strategy um you can jump right in all

right let's go so i'm going to leave you guys with some pointers towards the end but before we get right into it i think it's important to set the stage as to why chat is something you should be thinking about why it is important so i guess if you're not already comfortable settle in i know you're already settling in post-lunch lull but we're gonna have a bit of a chat and i'm probably gonna be a little bit honest with you guys and we're gonna have a

bit of a real talk i'll start here we live in a world of contradictions i don't know if you guys would fully agree with this but i would say that there's a lot of contradictory things happening all around us i'll give you a couple examples it's never been easier to start a business i think most of us would agree technology has made things cheaper it's made things more accessible if you have an idea and a credit card you can start a website get your social account

up get your email going you might be drop shipping products across the world in a week right likewise with that ease it's never been harder to succeed that really unique idea that was yours might also or may not be all that unique or even worse that unique idea you had might get scooped up by somebody else and they might do it a little bit faster than you or a little bit better than you so the i guess the skill today is not only in starting your

business it's in growing your business and growing it better we might say than than others contradictions expectations from consumers have never been higher people are more educated there's more information at their fingertips they expect you to have an answer to all their questions at all times in fact a recent poll that we ran we found that 90 of consumers expect an immediate response to any customer support inquiry immediate so while those expectations are sky high trust on the other hand is at the bottom of the

barrel people are uh not trusting of us um they're skeptical right they're they're very skeptical in fact if you look at this it says here that sales people and marketers only three percent of people actually trust us which is a bit staggering that's two points lower than your local barista uh which apparently people don't trust the people that make their coffees i don't know what that means but um so i guess with trust being at uh a bit of a low it's making it much harder

for us especially as marketers to have or run successful campaigns if people aren't trusting the information that we're putting out there um and i think where people are actually turning to to get answers is other people of course all right so while our ebooks and our guides and our blog posts are a really great way to educate people to a certain point it's generally the referrals and recommendations and reviews and listening to the customer as we learned from dave this morning that's what's actually getting people

over the line and buying we say we're i when i say we businesses say most of them say we're customer obsessed but i think in honesty we're probably a little bit more self-obsessed right we talk about case studies on our website are they really about the customer are they more so just to i guess market ourselves um because you know as businesses we love to say that we're customer first um but really we're probably customer eventually we'll get to it when we can right so i

guess you guys get the point things have become a little bit more immediate people's expectations or everything is a little bit more urgent and people are obsessed with now especially our customers i guess the biggest contradiction that we're probably contributing to is that businesses are falling behind right we're staying static we're a bit slow in our response and we're not that personal in the way that we respond but what we do know and the good news is customers want to hear more from us they want

to hear from more a more personal touch they expect us to be there to answer their questions at all times and at any time in fact 89 percent of consumers say that they would prefer to use messaging or to have the ability to message with brands directly but less than half of businesses are actually equipped to have those conversations so that's the bad news that i've had to share on a friday afternoon with you guys um for the good news you know this can sound quite

overwhelming it can sound like you know how am i gonna start a chat strategy um that's not reasonable for my business uh don't worry it's not as complicated as you think because um you know although things have changed people still want to have helpful you know information from businesses they want to have helpful conversations with you they want you to be helpful they want it to feel personal that hasn't changed and they want the conversations to be authentic and real so the nature of human interaction

thing um the only difference is now we have the technology to do this at scale whereas before it had to be done by the phone or you know face to face new technology allows us to deliver these personal experiences at scale which is exciting and it shouldn't be too intimidating some great examples you know you can have live chat where you collect customer information and it's natural and instant and personal in another example someone's looking for a new apartment and the agent can reach out right

away use their information and kick off the conversation it's actually pretty exciting it shouldn't be that intimidating um and these kind of interactions are the power of not just conversational marketing but also conversational sales and conversational customer service because the thing with live chat and messaging is actually a channel which can kind of break down barriers across different parts of your business it doesn't just have to be for lead acquisition and moving forward businesses will increasingly need to have a comprehensive growth conversational strategy for all

parts of their business so that consumers can interact when they need and you provide them the right information throughout their consumer journey so we know it's important we heard it earlier today as well and we're going to launch into some tips so that you can get started in a yeah in an easy and effective way so i'll kick it off with the first potentially most important tip of all which is to define your goal um if you work with a marketing agency or you're running a

marketing team you'll know that without a goal for any campaign you're not going to go very far and conversational conversational strategy is no different it's super important to define your goal and it can sound like you know we'll come up here and talk about how important goal setting is but it really is um not just saying it for no reason so i've i've seen examples where people try and launch a conversational strategy just by popping you know chat on every page of their website with no

really clear goal um and it doesn't go very far unfortunately because consumers don't know what they should be asking um the people manning the chat don't have any clear kind of path or answers so it's really important to start out with a goal and at hubspot we kind of break down the consumer journey into three phases that we call attract engage and delight so i'm going to talk through some different kinds of goals and examples of how businesses chat to meet those goals for each stage

in the attract phase this is about getting new leads or finding out more about the leads or people who are interested in your business so some common goals here would be a certain number of leads being generated each month or how much more information about these contacts can we collect what information do we need so that we can then engage them hopefully they'll become customers an example that sephora used as an alternative to just sending out a form and asking people to fill it in or

just asking more questions on their website forms they actually came up with quite an interesting kind of quiz so that people could interact with their chat bot uh answer a few questions and get personalized recommendations back and the point here is that sephora was adding value before they were extracting it so when people are interacting with this chatbot they're getting really helpful recommendations up front that meet their immediate need and at the same time before is getting additional information that they can use to provide additional

resources down the line whether that's via email or another chat and if they identify that a consumer is really looking for a product that they want us that's or is selling they can actually move them from attract they know that they're in the engage phase they can follow up so this is a way that you can collect more information in a natural way that's helpful up front i think there's another example here very similar asking questions collecting information like what's the goal what do they want

to do names and email and i think in one of the first chats today that we had um it was brought up that we shouldn't have you know super long questioning chat bots and that's absolutely true you want to collect enough information so that you can pass it on and engage them naturally so yes we want to collect information but just don't go overboard with it the second phase of the customer journey is gauge and a couple of common goals around this would be conversions so

this is where you want to get leads interacting with maybe a sales team or moving them onto e-commerce the things that you're looking at here is conversions and reducing time to purchase and maybe even re-engaging people who came to your website but didn't check out in the end something cool that ebay did was their chat bot was very convergence focused understandable for an e-commerce platform when you interacted with their bot it actually directly pulled from available listings and gave recommendations based on the keywords that you

put in so if you're looking for shoes it would recommend maybe three or four top listings with that keyword and you could add in more information sizes colors and it would get more personal the third piece which is actually a really common use case of chat and messaging is customer service so if you're looking at that delight phase that's how you can maintain your customers longer how you can help them grow with you stay with you upsell cross-sell increase the lifetime value and also reduce the

impact on other support channels maybe you've got a phone line um that gets swamped with sport inquiries for example live chat can be an alternative yesterday i was calling an airline and i was on hold for ages and they keep like blaring at me like our chat agents are ready to serve okay okay by the third time i actually decided to go chat and got it fixed like within two minutes so if you work with asia miles just chat way better improve a process from the

customer experience exactly so i was able to interact with their agents by the way something cool beyond just answering people's questions uh asos actually did a kind of a delight uh moment with their personal stylist so they use chat in a different way to actually help their existing customers pick out new products and this is where you can really get creative and think about what's going to bring the most value to your existing customers so that you can yeah help them grow with you awesome um

so i will dive into one of those specific goals in a little bit more detail which is how you can use chat for conversion so chat is actually a fantastic way to think about converting leads if you guys are in like a b2b space you're thinking about how we can convert more leads on our website chat's a great way to do it how many i guess show hands how many people have one of these on their website i hope all of you at least one form

on our website right um show hands again how many of you have actively avoided filling this out or given false information on one of these forms on someone else's website 100 of all of you have done it don't lie um there's nothing wrong with forms and i'm not saying you shouldn't have forms on your website they are a gateway for conversion um but there's nothing really personable or personal about asking someone this information and i guess we can start i guess what i'm trying to frame

is you can start to use chat and messaging as kind of a new age way as an alternative or as a complement to the existing forms on your website so i guess think about all the pages that you guys have that have form on them today and think about where chat or messaging might yeah i guess work alongside that form the best example i can give is is we actually did this somewhat recently in the last six months this is a product page on hubspot's website

for our email marketing tool which is one tool of many tools that we offer and our kind of platform and traditionally what we would do is we would have a pop-up form that would come up on one of these pages when someone had spent a certain amount of time like if they've been on the page for more than 30 seconds a pop-up would come up and say hey if you want to talk to our sales sales reps about what email marketing can do for you you

can book in a time we've actually done away with that and you can see here on the bottom right we've kind of added a nice little greeting to one of our representatives or to one of our chat bots and we found that we're much we have a much more successful uh conversation or we're much more effective in not just conveying how or what our email marketing tool can do but also how it fits into the greater kind of platform and with that we were actually able

to create much more qualified leads people were much more interested in our brand and our products they sell more than just an email marketing tool right and so obviously as you can see that's become second highest close rate of all conversion types on hubspot's website which is just after inbound calls when people actually find our phone number and give us a call directly those are our number one converting ones to elliot's point and i had a recent experience i won't bore you with my nbn uh

telstra to optus exchange but um 35 to 50 of sales go to the business that responds first right so by incorporating chat it's a quicker way to get to the person who's considering your product or service and you're just increasing your odds of closing that customer so talking a little bit more about how you can use live chat as a customer support channel uh we found that because chat was so popular on our website a lot of those chat inquiries were actually customer support related so

we had sales reps ready to answer your questions about coming on board with hubspot and a lot of the people who are engaging 10 to 15 percent we're actually asking existing customers asking questions about our product so it's very important that if you do engage with or you do decide to use live chat on your website be ready some people some existing customers are likely to ask for help and it's important that you have a strategy or an approach ready um for the people manning the

live chat so that they feel equipped to you know help people who are coming in with questions some simple things that you can do are having help documentation a knowledge doc works really well with all of your support channels and you can direct people to that for self-serve support you can also if you do have support agents on chat have a system where you can reassign across to one of those agents to help um and if you are able to automate it with a bot maybe

you can ask questions up front and direct people to a faq right away so that they don't get directed to the wrong person so yeah just be aware that if you're launching live chat likely that you're going to start getting some customers inquiries and it's important to think about if you are getting customer support inquiries or conversion inquiries we we want to make sure that we can actually support the demand so we'll get into the demand bit in a little bit but i think one really

great great way to manage demand on your website is to think about who is actually going to see the chat so like elliot mentioned putting chat on every single page of your website is a disastrous plan you're increasing the likelihood that you're going to let somebody down essentially if you're not there to man every single conversation so we can kind of limit that pool by just making sure that only a small percentage or small groups of our database are actually able to interact with chat so

a couple examples here and if we kind of go back to those goals that we discussed perhaps the goal of the chat is just to take anonymous visitors and turn them into new contacts in our database well then we should only make our chat available to people that we don't recognize anonymous visitors right perhaps we're trying to take existing maybe subscribers to our email list or subscription existing leads in our database and we want to maybe qualify them a little bit more and book in meetings

with our sales team um well then we should only show chat to existing members of our database um the way we're doing this is with segmentation obviously you want to think about a chat tool that fits tightly into where your database lives whether it's your crm or another tool but this is essentially allowing us to kind of slice and dice your contacts in your database and making sure that chat is only available to those individuals again a couple examples on the second one there like if

you're looking to convert leads and get them over to your sales team perhaps you might use like lead scoring so if a contact's been to the website and they've i guess demonstrated some intent and some interest we can kind of score those activities and kind of accumulate them and we might only show chat to individuals that have over a certain score or maybe only individuals have that have looked at certain high intent pages like our pricing page or our service page um to elliot's point around

service if we can't answer service inquiries like if our team isn't skilled or trained to do that we should probably suppress existing customers because they're probably going to be asking a lot of questions around that are customer support related and we want to make sure we don't get ourselves into any trouble there in addition to segmenting by what you know about the customer you can also segment by where you place the live chat widget on your website it's okay to have it only available in certain

places we have different kinds of experiences whether it's chat or bot appear on different parts of our website so that we can get people the help that they need if you were thinking about you know a conversion focused bot having it on the pricing page or features page makes a lot of sense when the product page is even if you're looking to help existing customers maybe it's your support bot it's okay for that just to live on the knowledge base or the contact us page for

example um yeah it's it's something that most tools can do now is by targeting by the url so it's something you can do in hubspot other tools have it as well um highly recommend it tools it's a good segue what's the best tool for the task um i guess it is important to think that um customers or consumers aren't looking at your brand in a silo they're looking at your brand across a number of different channels they're on your website they're on your emails they're on

your social media pages and so we want to think about where we can have i guess authentic conversations with them across all of those channels and there are different tools out there that support that so for live chat when we think like one-to-one conversations that are manned by humans on the other end obviously hubspot offers a tool that does that most crms like zoho have a chat product zendesk and other kind of service support tools intercom all have really great one-to-one chat functionality built into their

their products if we want to think about how we can automate some of those conversations which we'll talk a little bit more about here in a minute in a further tip um but there's also some really great tools out there to automate those conversations drift is a good one manychat chat fuel all are able to not only take those kind of one-to-one manned conversations but then you can start to kind of automate them and ask certain questions for a number of different reasons this is an

example of how we're using our own chat bots to essentially route people to different parts of our pages that we think they might be interested in or kind of shortcuts to different different parts and different information on our website and then we talked uh simone actually mentioned facebook messenger is something that there's uh there's a lot of we're seeing a lot of growth within australia specifically so uh i think the i think it's eight billion messages are exchanged between um individuals and brands each month on

facebook messenger so if you guys aren't on facebook messenger something to take a look at um some really interesting and kind of cool things you can do um one that i didn't mention here actually that is also interesting it's kind of a separate channel in itself is slack obviously a great tool for internal communication but slack is a chat product i work with a lot of agencies i think there's a really good play in service-based businesses where they're using slack and they're actually introducing their their

customers to slack and they're creating threads within slack so they can actually have more collaborative and kind of creative conversations without having to jump on a phone call so looking at slack and how you can use that um or those service-based businesses might be might be a value meet the demand um we talked about some cool things that you can do creating live chat channels have them all over your website support bots conversion bots um but what happens if you don't have enough people to man

the chat what if you suddenly got you know 100 000 people trying to chat with you it is a concern that gets raised um i'm i work at hubspot so a lot of questions i get are around what happens if we get too many leads or what happens if too many people chat with us it's a valid concern and it's really important that before you launch your chats chat strategy that you do think about that um because the only thing worse than not having live chat

on your website that is not responding to live chat and it does happen um this is an example of a chat which just ended because there was no one available and uh i i've stayed in a hotel where they had this really cool uh live chat with the reception to ask for a toothbrush or something um and no one responded for like a day um by that time i'd already gone to reception got a toothbrush and gone back to my room they later hi do you

need a toothbrush um so it's really important that that you meet the demand one of our founders says the key is to remember that conversational marketing should be designed around the needs of the customer not the needs of the business we're having this whole chat around because we want you to have a great experience for your customers we want them to have a great experience with your business um yeah and not meeting the demand can really ruin that so some things that you can think about

is starting small very exciting giving you a lot of different ways that you could use chat you could use bots but it's okay to start small and pick a few goals that you want to focus on and a couple of pages that you're going to put your live chat on start out and if you do have google analytics or some other sort of data about how much traffic you're getting to your website you can use that as the basis to estimate how many chats are potentially

going to come also consider the intent of the pages make sure that uh you're not putting a support bot pricing page for example and that you've got the right people in the back end to answer the questions that are likely to come in and think about office hours and time zones of your customer i know for myself like i'm not going to interact with the chat bot of telstra or jetstar while i'm at work most of the time maybe at lunch time so if you're in

that kind of business where you are expecting to get expiries outside of your customers working hours maybe it means having you know some people come in an hour early or some people leave an hour late so you can catch that window outside they're working out and consider campaigns that may increase traffic and live chat for a certain period of time you've got ads running and there's live chat on that page maybe you know looping in a couple of your colleagues plan the live chat or having

a different strategy in place maybe using a bot that's going to kind of help you out a bit there and the last point is before you suddenly launch it have a conversation with your team and put together some training so that they feel well equipped uh to handle the chat we had uh an unfortunate situation where we launched live chat um it was great gotting getting a ton of inquiries but to increase our capacity we actually outsourced some of that to temp staff who didn't have

the same training as our internal staff and we saw a dramatic decrease in the number of deals which were created off the back of live chat so 31 drop in opportunities created is huge for our business uh and it's it's great we could test it um i think yeah like the guys earlier are talking about how there's no big mistakes it's about learning from it and we have we've increased training and made sure that we're only scaling up the capacity so train yourself thoroughly use past

chat transcripts use past emails to find frequently asked questions create some snippets some can responses that they can use and also have some processes in place for them to approach uncommon question provide access to your team to help documentation it's really important that they can find the answers to questions and also you know have a discussion a workshop and teach them how to use funnel resources because you might be familiar with it but not everyone on your team might be and make sure that your team

is aligned on their objective why are they uh why are they responding to live chat what's the goal that they're working towards so they know when things are falling outside of their scope they can help you with your goals to bot or not to bot this is my favorite named slot this is actually an interesting one people are quite intimidated by the idea not just the idea but even the name bots and the reason i say that is when we introduced chat automation into hubspot as

a platform we called them chat bots and we surveyed our customers and we found that most of them were like scared or disinterested in in the name chat bot so we recently changed them to chat flows and all of a sudden people are much more interested so i think people are i think it's like a sci-fi movie thing where people are scared of robots but um how do we want to think about if we should be using bots or not this is i think pretty straightforward

but the idea is like if we're going to be creating a automated experience i think first and foremost don't try to pretend it's a human that's always going to let people down they're going to find out real really quickly and then they're going to feel like you're trying to fool them make sure it's helpful and you know it has to have a utility don't add you know 50 60 70 different kind of branches to how this conversation might go or don't give it too many variables

too many opportunities for it to to kind of let somebody down don't recreate a form and just make your bot ask the exact same questions as a form give it some personality you know allow it to kind of speak the same personality that your brand has and make sure it's kind of has an authentic voice does the bot actually serve a specific purpose or is it at least streamlining an existing process um here's a couple common examples that we would use for how it can do

i guess either of those one common example is one that we've already used today where we talked about directing users to different information on the website so if we have a bot that is built to help support our existing customers we should make sure that it can send them to knowledge-based articles or faq pages that are based on the keywords that they're typing in in the bot right so we're essentially routing them to the information that will be most helpful for them if we know that

our sales team is limited and they only have so much capacity you might think about using a couple simple questions to better qualify someone via chat bot before you actually route them to a salesperson or even rather than writing them to a salesperson you might ask them what the the status or the their interest is or who they're what they're trying to solve we might send it to a different team so whether it's sales or support so you can ask a couple simple questions up front

as a way of kind of screening before determining how you want to service that chatter also i know simone mentioned this one as well keep it simple don't introduce too many variables don't give someone the opportunity like at checkout to like complicate the process this was an example i found you know if you're about to purchase this jacket and you decide to chat it's then going to ask you like 12 questions to figure out i guess maybe what size it is i'm not really sure all

this information they're going to get in check out anyways there's too many steps here so so don't use this make make sure it's very simple as i guess the gist of it and build it into your current systems if you've got a crm which i highly recommend uh yeah get get your new tools to work with your existing tools i think it can it's a common example where people like to try out something new especially on a new platform but that creates a siloed inbox where

you know you have to manage that in addition to your existing channels the ideal situation would be using a tool a chat platform which integrates with your existing crm so if someone is chatting with a support sales rep on your pricing page it could automatically create a deal in your crm or if they're chatting with the support rep it automatically creates a ticket in your ticketing system like zendesk or hubspot segment based on life cycle stages if you've got this information internally you can use that

to provide a more personalized experience based on your existing data and you can only do that if it's integrated with your existing system some retail customers would want to notify people if their wishlist items are back in stock or if there's a promotion on them and providing personalized experience with their contact details using things like their name writing information which is relevant to their location if you've got their address and make product recommendations based on previous purchases if you are selling something it's great if you

can kind of follow up from the next uh the next step in their natural buyer's journey maybe they bought a bike and you want to sell them some equipment to go along with that tip number 10 is try facebook messenger if you haven't already um i think we've already we and some of the other speakers today have touched on its importance i think this is kind of the channel where a lot of consumers are expecting or hoping to chat with you um it can actually do

some really powerful things i have a couple kind of fun examples of how we recently used facebook messenger to engage with event attendees to an event we ran in singapore we actually used like geolocation to understand when visitors checked in and when they arrived at our event and we kind of greeted them with a little bit of information and thanking them for coming out we were sending them information around ways that they can speak to one of our team members or learn a little bit more

about hubspot throughout the day we provided slide decks and information from the event throughout the day as well so people can kind of engage with some of the content that they were watching and during the presentations and then obviously when they were leaving we asked them about their experience we thank them for coming and ask that they give us some feedback so this was all done just by a facebook messenger and we got some really great results and a lot of great information for our upcoming

events so if you're not already using facebook messenger give it a shot so those are the 10 tips obviously we can take more questions but as a bit of a recap and probably the most important takeaways if you take anything away from the session is make sure it's goal oriented right everything should be built backwards from from a specific goal you're trying to solve for a specific friction point or a bottleneck in how you guys are managing conversions or how you're managing lead generation or your

customer support process always start with that goal and work backwards meet the demand don't open up across all website pages that's that's definitely something you should take away make sure you have the team um if you're outsourcing it make sure they're skilled up if you're you if you don't have that capability look into bots but make sure that you're able to meet the demand and you're not leaving people hanging with no one there to chat with them and then obviously pick the best tool for the

job you know think about the channels that you're engaging mostly with your customers with your prospects and make sure that you have something that's built in can speak to your existing databases whether it's your crm or other tools your due diligence there and you guys should be pretty sweet for your conversational strategy that's it thanks for that i think the the interesting thing there though um well two interesting things there first is the resource that goes into getting this set up the way that looks from

your deck how feasible is that for like a two or three person team yeah i can speak to that uh cool so different tools are available they vary in complexity i know um like jetstar uses a super complicated tool which is ai behind it and everything um that could take a big amount of effort to set up but there are other tools like drift like hubspot like chat flows which realistically can be set up in in like less than a week including planning technical setup testing

it's very feasible and what about the the budget side for small clients small organizations are the platforms affordable ours is free i think ryan's fishing for that um our our crm and and chat and chat automation comes as a part of our free crm um but yeah i think like starting simple don't try and you know not trying to put it everywhere in introducing chat to you know one page maybe your pricing page and seeing how you go is a great place to start try it

for free if you determine that it's something that can be wildly successful probably do your due diligence think about ways that you can grow that channel and then maybe look at ways that you can use more paid tools to to fit the scope thanks yeah one example i really like there when you're talking about specific pages is um if anyone's seen the drift site and played with the driftbots sorry guys i know they're like your arch nemesis and everything but um if you visit the site

for a second or third time and you go to the pricing page it actually says to you hey so we see you've come back and you're on the pricing page so we know this is getting really serious um and then they offer so similar to what nick was talking about before with lead scoring they know that you're a higher priority at that point for them they can smell a deal so that they want to try and close that straight away um i'm just going to share

a little anecdote if that's okay so we work with a lot of different businesses and we're a gold hubspot partner and a drift partner so we use both platforms but we had a couple of customers in the last couple of weeks both business to business clients and both of them wanted to try a conversational strategy the first one thought look we really want to see how feasible this is before we go down the rabbit hole so what they wanted to do was just put the live

chat on the site put it on several key pages and see what kind of responses they got the other one two weeks later i haven't made a decision the interesting thing about that though is the business that just gave it a go had their um one person within the organization who was prepped to answer the inquiries that came through they knew that they were going to come through didn't know how many weren't real sure but were prepped so that they could they could make sure they

stayed on top of it now this was a business where they do reasonably large deals so a client to them could be worth a couple hundred thousand dollars so they closed half a million dollars worth of work in two days based on five chats through the chat bot whereas the other business still hasn't even given a go and are still trying to discuss whether it's worth worth trying or not and i i think the big takeaway for me with with everything conversational is obviously the hubspot

guys are here they'd really like you to use their tool but there are so many free tools out there that you can use facebook messenger keeps coming up that's a really simple tool that you can add to your website and enable free live chat on that hubspot have obviously got a free option plus they do they do paid upgrades drift have a free option doesn't have any bots which is kind of a shame so we would typically put a client who needs bots onto hubspot's free

option because well it's free and you get bots and with drift you don't but there's a lot of different options that you can do there we use drift bots on our site and the pain point we're trying to solve there is no one anyone show of hands because no no no one will put their hand up unless they are just trying to mess with me who really loves phone tag jane who really loves phone tag anyone nah good yeah so if we can drive a response

through our driftbot to either leave a message that we can respond back to or book a call um so you can jump on there and you can actually pick time in a team member's calendar and get straight into a call that just eliminates that pain point of having to sort of dial and dial back and and call back and do those kind of things um i'll open the floor for for other questions anyone might have or any experiences you've had with your chat they know one

up there right there right quick oh i don't even see andrew there he snuck in hey i was just wondering we have quite a large database of past customers i'm in an industry where our customers only come back every seven to eleven years sometimes so we need to keep in contact with them a lot but um are you trying to are you exciting because i'm not too familiar if you have a database your client our client management system can that be connected to a chat bot

or a live chat and if they put in you know who am i speaking to and their name would that pick that up from our database and then personalize it or they'll be like oh you know welcome back hello how's that is there any can there be any connection there i mean there's probably a conversation to be had around what you're using for your customer management system today but to answer your question shortly yes like what we would typically do is look at how you can

sync say your customer management system with your chat system so that the properties on any contact records you have like whether they're a customer or a lead or whether when was their last purchase what date all of that lives on that record i'm assuming we would want to sync all that information over to your chat tool and then you can use things like personalization tokens so that when you're designing the way that that chat automation might look like you know you're using things like hi you

know insert first name you know we know that your last purchase was insert date and we're actually because we're syncing with the all the data that lives in your existing customer system you can pull that kind of like a little bit more of a personalized conversation that's also like i talked a little bit about segmentation um you want to make sure that when someone's on your existing website if you're using like cookie tracking on your website you can usually kind of determine is this person looking

at my page someone who's purchased from us before or is this someone that i've never seen before and so if you have the power to do that you can do some really interesting things around who you display chat to as well most chats most chat tools would allow you to do that so you're saying like your product could look at our client management system and integrate the two i'm not going to say we 100 can integrate because i don't know what the system is but yes

we can look at how your existing system could integrate directly with hubspot okay so that we would essentially like mirror all of the information on a customer record you have back to hubspot which is actually powering that kind of conversation you're having okay thank you i think this person has that question cool um it's kind of the same double down on that if say for example i ran a car yard and we had a website um and someone 10 years ago had bought a car off

of a certain sales person if you had a live chat system that said hey does you know john smith still work for you because you'd want to deal with him is that something a chat box could pick up on and could it then direct to you know john smith's email or mobile number yeah absolutely so if you had let's say on the record of sale in your existing system that john smith was the sales rep that closed the deal you might kind of ask the person

do you remember the name of the person that sold you your car and they say oh yeah it was john smith um you you would be able as long as those properties live somewhere we could sync them over and then you can use automation to essentially maybe route directly to john smith's calendar so they can book in a follow-up conversation with john himself and get an upgrade right it really just depends on like you know does the data exist in a system somewhere and then really

like how clean or organized is that data which is probably a whole other conversation but if it's something that happened 15 years ago you want to make sure that the information from 15 years ago is still relevant today you just want to be the reason i mentioned that you want to be careful that it is clean data because if you use it to power that conversation and then it gives the customer a really bad experience it's probably due to the fact that the information wasn't updated

properly so it just depends on how adventurous you want to be with uh with your chat strategy i guess yep should be working just not with me i i'm i'm really interested in in how these live chats work for the customer's time how we relate to customers so you had a slide that says um have conversations with your customers when they want so what's your advice for minding that people now have lives that have no hours you know in a lot of ways how what was

your advice for teams to manage chats out of a normal working time hour i can speak about a bit um so depending on your organization but for hubspot we have offices in different time zones so we are able to trade 24 hours based on our workforce for other businesses maybe you can extend it a little bit but it really depends on your own capacity and beyond that you can use things like automation um so out of hours chatbots can be really helpful so that maybe someone's

not available to do live chat but they might be able to say hey let's book in a call for first thing tomorrow morning and you'll get a call back or if they can answer some questions automatically that could be helpful um so it's kind of balancing your capacity based on your team and then maybe using some automation to augment that yeah a really common um use case would be like as a chat bot you're trying to figure out what question are you trying to answer can

i answer it for you first you know and so you'll ask a couple quick questions and you'll say actually this blog that we wrote directly references what you're trying to solve or this faq on our on our page actually answers your question and if you get to the point where the person's like this is not answering my question then you say all right well then why don't we go ahead and get you speaking to one of our reps at 8 am tomorrow when they're in the

office here's a look at their calendar what time works best for you right so you can start to i mean if there's a high volume of those types of inquiries happening after hours you might try to help them self-service themselves first before you then actually have them speak to a person um we use oh sorry we use a lot of um workflows on our website um we actually use hubspot um and i'm just wondering is that still as relevant using the email workflows if you've got

a strategy for the live chat as well how do you work that yeah they work really well together so some of our customers will trigger workflows off the back of a live chat so if you've set up a someone's asking a support inquiry you could trigger a workflow which sends them a personal follow-up confirming whatever's happened or if it's speaking with a sales rep a personal email from the sales rep could be sent to them so uh chat can be a trigger for workflows yeah it's

almost like a just another like a new age form right so if someone fill out a form on your website that would obviously trigger a chain of workflows and emails internally and externally a chat's the same right um any information that they share in that chat can be synced back to a contact record and then obviously that could trigger a workflow hi um thanks guys really interesting presentation um i'm just wondering if you could speak to maybe a bit of a future sort of um where

there are so many challenges that you have mentioned and that people are probably thinking about which are stopping businesses from using chatbots if you don't mind just speaking to some of those issues that are coming up that you notice and what what is hubspot trying to do to overcome these challenges tell me to start or okay i'll start um i think the biggest biggest challenge that i've seen um is having the time to put a real strategy base and having the capacity to deal with live

chat um not all businesses have massive support or sales team actually and phone or email and then live chat so i think the capacity to deal with it is going to be an ongoing challenge because it can be very expensive to hire talent and to train them but those are two things that that i see and i think an ongoing issue i would second those ones no i mean there's probably i mean as the technology grows and as like some of the more advanced chat systems

out there that are using ai and collecting information there's probably something to be said about like privacy and data concerns and things of that nature um but i i can't speak to the future of chat in in too much more detail than that i guess probably not the answer you're looking for i've got one i'll jump in here because we actually do this day to day whereas these guys just sell stuff um biggest challenge we're starting to see is the number of different chat platforms and

how fragmented the marketplace is but also then how that adapts to follow up the person when they leave the site for example a lot of these systems if they're not built to route somebody into a into a call or or some kind of comment they're just designed to hey everyone's unavailable at the moment we'll grab your name and grab your email and we'll send you an email afterwards but half the reason that people are starting to use the the chat is because they don't want to

send an email um so what we're starting to see is some of these tools integrating with uh facebook messenger so that your facebook messages come into your central chat platform your instagram messages come into the central chat platform your crm data is fed in there so that we know whether they've been responded to or not but then the next thing is starting to implement sms as part of that so instead of grabbing your um your mobile number or your your email address we'll grab your mobile

number we can continue the conversation if you leave the site and no one's been able to respond to you in time so he's still avoiding those cluttered email mailboxes every time i look at mine i have a slight heart attack um but taking it out of that having that conversation and still being able to respond in real time and there's some really good examples of systems now where you can do just that any more questions on that i had to make one shameless plug here i

have one more hidden slide that elliot didn't know about we are hosting an event uh ourselves i don't know if any of you guys plan to be in sydney in the first week of august um but we're going to be continuing this conversation we'll be talking about chat we'll be talking about your marketing strategy your customer or your sales strategy your customer support strategies in a little bit more detail a lot of practical examples not really hubspot tools related more kind of strategy specific but if

you want to learn a little bit more about it or are interested in tickets come have a chat with myself or elliot and we can we can help you out and last time i checked somebody's giving me a microphone so i can do my own shameless plug as well yep um if this all looks a bit complicated and you'd like somebody to just walk walk you through it we do a free conversational marketing assessment we take you through the framework to actually develop which pages your

key pages on your site how you'd go about your chat workflow as well we do that for free and we're also doing um free implementation of the hubspot and drift chat tools at the moment so if you'd like jump on our website and click the button that schedules the call and you'll actually get to experience the chatbot yourself um or just talk to one of the people with the fancy blue lanyards and they'll be able to sort something out for you thanks guys for coming over

that was really good i think everybody's got lots of practical takeaways from the the questions uh i have a small token no you cannot drink these on the plane but it is good south australian wine thank you thank you thanks guys my favorite thing there is you left without the computer so thanks for donating that back to us yeah good so excited by wine so easily bought off thank you