How to succeed with Chat: Tips and Tricks

[jennysowyrda]

Hi all,

We know that chat is one our most popular tools, and we know you want to learn from the experts - and your peers - about how to successfully use HubSpot's chat tool. 

My ask: If you have any tips for beginners, any suggestions for pros, or anything you want others to know about chat, can you please share them here?

Let's get started!

[CParmiter]

Hi 

I am trying to create a conversations report on hubspot to track CTR and Views to the chatbot and live chat, to see how many people enaged vs how many clicked/viewed.

Is this possible?

Thanks

Christina 

[Bharti_17]

Hey, I've got a helpful tip that I actually just tried out myself. It's all about integrating chatflows with an email verifier tool, Clearout. Basically, it checks the email addresses of users right when they enter them. It's a cool feature that was missing before, and it helped me weed out all those bad email addresses mixed in with the good ones in my data. If you want more details, you can check it out here. Pretty neat, huh?

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @Bharti_17,

Thanks for sharing this integration with us!

Best,

Kristen

[AFematt]

Hola ¿Alguién ha trabajado chatbot en hubspot con integración de comando de voz?, si es el caso ¿me podrían apoyar en darme una idea de cual es el proceso?

gracias de antemano.

[PamCotton]

Hello @AFematt, thank you for posting in our Community.

Since this is an old thread I would recommend to please create a new post in our Community, this specific board here is in ES and will help you with this matter./ 

Gracias por publicar en nuestra comunidad.

Dado que este es una conversación antiguo, recomendaría crear una nueva publicación en nuestra Comunidad, este tablero específico aquí está en ES y lo ayudará con este asunto.

Thank you,

Pam

[GJaros]

Hi all,

Does anyone know how to change the color of the chatbot? We just did a rebranding and I need to change the color so it fits with our new branding. I was looking under Chatflows - Display but wasn't finding anything under color. 

[TitiCuisset]

Hi @GJaros 

Thank you for reaching out. 

You can do that by following these steps. 

Hope that helps.
Have a lovely day,
Tiphaine.

[KeyWestScott]

Don't have a tip, but do have a question.

Our bot is primarily for informational purposes, with aquiring leads secondary. My problem is in regards to the "request email question".  While the process works fine for those that DO want to give an email address, there is no bypassing this step, if someone does NOT  want to give an email, and just wants to look for answers.

Has anyone found a workaround to this?  Called support they were stumped and had no answer.

Scott.

[Jake_Lett]

Do most you you keep a desktop browser window open with your chats so you can get notifications? 

If I rely on the mobile app, I have noticed a 2-3 minute delay in getting a notification. So by the time I start to reply they are gone. 

[ChristianM]

Is there a way to track the page the chat is happening on ?
I would like to track the landing page they entered on, since I create a lead from the chat flow.

Any idea on how to do this ?

[DAnaGuiloff · Accepted solution]

So much great advice on this thread. The best thing I can add would be....TEST & OPTIMIZE EVERYTHING.

Test, test, and when you think its perfect, test it again with a fresh mind-set. You would be surprised how many "oops" moments are caught with a fresh test.

PRO TIP: Ask some of your target audience to test it out and provide feedback. If you are using HS Service, use the Feedback survey tool to make this process easier on yourself. This can serve as a great engagement point AND it shows your audience you are willing to listen (remember you are asking them for a reason, just be willing to make changes).

After you have tested, continue to optimize. Once you go live with it, set some milestone dates and go back and see how things are performing and pivot where appropriate.

[Crystal_Hopper]

To add to the tips: Plan on getting it wrong in the beginning. It's ok to learn as you grow.

I launched a chat after much review with the team. Within the first few interactions I had to change it quite significantly because we learned how our audience wanted to interact with it. And our intentions were not the same as what actually happened. 😉

But that's ok. Our audienced loved the new feature and wanted to use it. We just had to make it fit their needs. Now the chat requires almost no maintenance and is used by customers and prospects alike. 

[joshua-paul]

Great topic. HubSpot's chat bot feature is a goldmine if you build it right and have enough traffic to support it. Here is my advice for creating a chat bot that turns website visitors into qualified sales opportunities in your sleep.

Start with these rules:
Rule #1: Your Chat Bot Strategy Is Part Of Your Overall Flywheel Strategy
Live chat and chat bots are not isolated shiney objects. It is part of your plan for converting visitors into leads, turning leads into paying customers, or creating customers for life or customer advocates.

Rule #2: Chat Bots Require Traffic
Chat bots can be very effective with various types of traffic - from unknown visitors and on specific resources pages to known leads in your system and ABM strategies. However, if you don't have enough traffic to these pages or Facebook CTAs, it is probably not the right investment at this time.

Follow this simple chat bot planning framework:

• WHO will this chatbot target?
• WHAT actions would like this audience to take? (goal)
• WHEN would you like this chatbot to appear?
• WHICH pages would you like this chatbot to display?
• HOW are you going to use the chatbot options and structure to get people to achieve this goal?

Avoid these pitfalls:

1. One-Size-Fits-All - Create different chatbots for different points in your flywheel/funnel.
2. Chat Botting In a Vacuum - Weave chatbots into your existing marketing and sales funnels.
3. Going Live Too Early - Set up qualification, routing questions, and options to book sales meetings before connecting people with a live agent.
4. Dead Ends - Once people have made initial microcommitments and their trust grows, create additional engagement opportunities until they choose not to take them.

A few more HubSpot chat bot tips:

• Start simple
• It is all about the hook
• Add human elements
• Branches add complexity fast

Following this basic advice will get you on the road to creating a chat bot that will 5-10X your booked sales calls in a short period of time.

[Jackrabbit]

This is really great info, Joshua-Paul. We recently launched chatbots on our website and would like to set realistic conversion goals for these but I'm finding it hard to find a good set of benchmarks or industry standards. Do you have any recommendations or suggestions?

Thank you!

Graham

[joshua-paul]

Great question, Graham. I don't pay much attention to industry benchmarks with chatbots because there are too many variables -- from traffic volume to the structure of the sales chatbot to how you are driving people to the chatbot.

You are going to have to benchmark against 1) the goals and purpose of the chatbot 2) the performance of that particular chatbot. For the first one, if the goal of the chatbot was to generate leads to nurture or for the sales team to follow up with, is that happening? If the goal is to get qualified, booked sales meetings, is that happening? The main ratios you are going to look at here are:

• View to chat rate
• Chat to lead rate
• Chat to booked sales meeting rate

When it comes to benchmarking against this particular chatbot, after the first 50 chats, you have enough data to set the benchmark and optimize the chatbot's performance. In your analysis of the conversations, do you see areas where more people could be completing the chatbot, converting into leads, or booking sales meetings? If so, make those adjustments and re-benchmark. It is just as much a qualitative customer experience review as it is a quantitative metrics analysis.

I created a quick video recently about what you should expect immediately after you launch your chatbot. It doesn't cover industry benchmarks but focuses on expectations, adjustments, and people using the chatbot the way it was intended.

[Jackrabbit]

Thank you very much, Joshua-Paul. This is very helpful, as was the video and other resources on your website. I've shared all this with my team. 

[AM8]

I agree with the points discussed in this thread and all are good points to keep in mind, in addition to these what worked for me was to collaborate with the sales team and have the chatbots present the option to " Talk to Human" upfront. 
If no one was available to chat then the decision tree would trigger and the bot would ask minimum qualifying questions. 

[JessicaH]

Hi @Josh @Phil_Vallender @tjoyce @Krystina @Kim_HM @warrendavey @ajchapman20 @Crystal_Hopper @danielruby @DAnaGuiloff, I wanted to bring this thread to your attention. I'm sure you have some great tips and recommendations to add. 

Take care!

Jess

[PamCotton]

Hi @jennysowyrda  Thank you for posting this!

My recommendation would be starting by checking the following knowledgebase articles that we have available about chat:

• Create a live chat 
• Chat with your website visitors 
• Get started with conversations 
• Chatflow not appearing on your pages 

And I was also able to find a Community post that would be helpful also:

• Leveling up the Customer Experience with Chat 

To our top experts on this matter @ndwilliams3 @Krystina, @joshua-paul, @BrianCarter, @louischausse, @StefaniUAT, @Phil_Vallender, @Ben_M, @AM8 would you like to share any tips and tricks in how you succeed with our chat?

Thank you!

Pam

[LumiProv]

I'd like to see a feature where the live chat makes anyone attempting to start a chat fill in their name and/or email before the live chat finishes creating the conversation and notifying the team.  We went down the road of making a Chat Bot flow (which was quite cool), but because we have aggressive AdBlocking and Security Policies - the ChatBot would not show up for any of our internal team nor for most of our clients. 

Any other ideas around this would be appreciated. 

Thank you!