Today’s customers want instant answers, anytime. AI chatbots can help your business meet that with automated conversations, lead qualification and customer experience without overwhelming your team.
If you’re on HubSpot, you’re lucky. The HubSpot AI-powered chatbot tool has chatbot functionality that can be tied to your CRM so you can deliver smart, contextual and timely experiences. In this post we’ll show you how to build AI chatbots in HubSpot step by step.
Why Use AI Chatbots on HubSpot?
Let’s quickly go over the benefits of using AI chatbots in your HubSpot before we get started:
24/7 Availability – Your chatbot never works overtime so you never lose a customer question.
Lead Qualification – Collect data from visitors automatically and segment leads based on their answers.
Better Customer Experience – Minimise friction by giving visitors fast answers and useful tips.
Scalable Support – Support more enquiries without having to scale your team at the same rate.
Step-by-Step: How to Set Up a Chatbot in HubSpot
1. What Does the Chatbot Do?
Decide on your chatbot’s purpose first. What does it help with?
- Answering frequently asked questions.
- Routing questions to support or sales.
- Reducing support tickets for questions that have answers on your website.
2. Go to Chatflows in HubSpot
Within your HubSpot account:
- Go to Conversations > Chatflows
- Click Create Chatflow and choose Website
- Select Customer Agent
3. Configure your knowledge base
Your knowledge base within HubSpot will allow the AI bot to understand more about your business and its operations. Ensure this information is up to date and that it contains frequently asked questions from your customers.
What can you include in your knowledge base?
- Website articles and pages
- FAQs
- Case studies
- Pricing guides for your products or services
- Provided you want to share this information
- General company information such as your history and where you are located or what regions you service
4. Customise Your AI Chatbot Settings
Once you’ve configured your knowledge base, its time to handle assignments and personalisation settings.
Assignments
Within assignments, decide on what happens if the AI chatbot can’t answer the question posed by the user. This allows a service team member to hop in and support on questions that require a more detailed engagement with a support member.
Key tip: Identify questions and answers that your AI bot frequently hands over to a service team member and slowly build up your knowledge base over time to handle these queries.
Personalisation and Display Settings
You can personalise your AI chatbots in the following ways:
- Configure a welcome message when your bot pops up
- Customise your chat’s avatar using a real team member or an alias
- Set up display conditions for desktop and mobile users
Custom branding within the display section allows you to create a real character behind your brand and even allows this alias to be used to hide real life agents that take over the chat. Providing for a seamless handover from AI to customer support.
5. Set Targeting and Triggers
Make decisions on where and when your chatbot will appear:
- Which site pages should it appear on?
- Should it appear immediately, on scroll or after a delay?
- Should it appear to new users, repeat visitors or logged in users?
Correct use of these chatbots should improve conversion rates and website engagement rates.
6. Test Everything Thoroughly
Before you set your chatbot live, you need to check the following:
- Test the AI Chatbots capabilities and identify any knowledge gaps found in the process.
- Update or add content to your knowledge base in order to plug these gaps.
- Understand if your chatbot provides true and accurate information.
- Check if the handover process between chatbot and customer service agent is seamless.
7. Publish and Improve
Once you’re done, press Publish and, after going live, Conversations > Chatflows to see data points like:
- Chat traffic
- Drop-off points
- Conversion rates for leads
Go back to this data to refine your content and improve your AI chatbot over time.
Summary
Bots are no longer just nice to have, they’re a must have for sales and support teams. Get started with HubSpot’s built in Customer Agent tool.
Start simple, focus on your goal and build up. You’ll be qualifying leads, booking meetings and helping customers 24/7 in no time.
