Bring back big auto-expansion of chatbot in chatflow display options

[RocketDollar]

The chatbot is a great and low friction way to pull in customers into our website. After developing a good chatbot for our business, we had 76 leads get pulled in for a closing conversation last quarter. After more marketing efforts, this was consistently pulling in about 20+ hot leads a month as well as directing non-lead and client visitors to many helpful parts of our website. 228 visitors used it the chatbot last quarter, about 60+ a month and going up with traffic.

After the Jan 22nd update to include chat flows, unfortunately, the biggest display option, the auto-expansion of the chatbot on our homepage is now not possible. It seems there is only one option, for the much smaller and easier to ignore targeted message to guide people to the bot.  We auto-expanded the biggest option on the main pages and then used the smaller expansion options on mobile and our knowledge base as to not bother visitors with clickbait.

Obviously, there are many factors to our traffic, but we are about down to 1/3 of the traffic of last month with a week left to go, on a short month. Our overall traffic has been going up in the last 8-10 weeks during this drop. 

Please bring this feature back, so the chat can auto-expand to full size. 

big expansion is now gone as an option in chatflows and targeted messagesHere is usage last quarter for various actions. Talking to sales and then asking for a customer's email has been a vital function.The chatbot used to expand to this full view on the homepage.Short month, but by Feb 21st our traffic is way down in the bot while overall traffic has been increasing

[cdewey22]

Hi @RocketDollar - 

Thanks for the feedback. 

You can do this now by appending #hs-chat-open to the end of your URL to trigger the chat widget launch in the Chatflows URL targeting. For example, link a CTA in a marketing email to www.yourcompany.com/pricing/#hs-chat-open. The chat widget will open immediately and your visitor can start chatting with a member of your sales team as soon as the page loads. 

We are looking to also expose this as a setting in the experience as well, but this should work in the meantime! Let me know if you have any issues. 

Cassie

[RocketDollar]

Cassie,  @cdewey22 

Are there any plans to bring this back to a main feature from the chatbot message options? If not we might have to look at other chat options. Our website traffic and sales have continuously improved, but our overall chatbot traffic is a shadow of what it once was and it's not serving our website in the same way as late last year. It's not that practical to keep adding different chatbot URL enders to all of our URL content, as the majority of our web traffic comes in from direct or organic search traffic. Redirects could harm our search results as well. 

Some of our team will be present at Inbound discussing this and other features with Hubspot team members. 

[cdewey22]

HI @RocketDollar, 

Yes! We are working on a lot of new features for targeting that we will release in the fall of this year. One of them will be having the chat to fully open either on page load or we will be adding in features around the chat to display based on time on page/scroll % and this will be a proper setting in chatflows. 

I will be at Inbound and would be happy to walk through the new functionality if you have time! Feel free to email me at cdewey@hubspot.com and we can catch up and go through this in more details as well as any other feed back you have about Conversations and Chat.

Thanks! 

Cassie

[LBurke]

I'm looking for this feature too. I'm basically just adding a comment to stay up to date with announcements on it.

One other thing is the reporting, it is a bit clunky. A funnel set up is would be better in my opinion.

[RocketDollar]

Saw the recent chat update pushed for FB Messenger and some other features. Is there a general timeline expected for the final release?

[cdewey22]

@RocketDollar for this request of being able to pop open the chat. Also, being able to select the ability to pop the chat, either fully open or just display the welcome message, based on scroll %, time on page or exit intent are currently in development. I will post as soon as we have a the beta available for these features, but it should be in the near future. 

[RFrankel]

Has this been updated by the Hubspot team?

[Alexander007]

Yep, we're also looking for this functionality for the chat bot. Specifically, the auto-expansion after a ## second delay.