Customer Relationship

Management
Case Analysis: HubSpot and Motion AI: Chatbot-Enabled CRM

Group Members - Group 1

 Anindya Basu 18A1HP081

 Ankita Pal 19A
 Swapnil 19A
 Sanath 19A
 Soumili Das 19A3HP675
 Sai Anjana 19A
 Harish Vangara 19A

Assignment submitted to: -

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 Prof. RAM BALAK YADAV

Case Summary
In 2006, HubSpot began as a SaaS provider for its clients and over the years helped companies
develop online content, attracting traffic along with converting of potential leads to customers.
The companies would rely on HubSpot software to host, disseminate and analyze digital content
propelling execution of inbound marketing programs. A new technological invention known as
Chatbot was a means to improve customer support and interaction making the process time and
cost efficient. For certain companies, handling larger volumes of support requests would surpass
the capacity of their support teams resulting in delays in providing adequate and timely support.
Trying to solve this issue with recruiting more employees in the support team would only cut
down on the profits of the company. In 2017, HubSpot acquired Motion AI; a software program
that permitted companies to build and deploy chat bots for customer interaction.
HubSpot viewed a great potential for integrating chat bots for its B2B customers and integrate it
with the companies’ platform for an effective CRM initiative.
The aim was to integrate the Motion AI technology with the HubSpot product over the next few
months. There were a number of challenges in going forward with the process. The case delves
into the challenges with respect to technology, the market potential of chat bots in the industry,
the best practices that need to be adopted in making the transformation, and the impact of the
bots interaction with customers as against human-human interaction. One of the most important
take-away from the case is that technology has certain limitations when it comes to human
interaction and it is best used as a tool to compliment what is already in place.
Q1. Should HubSpot replace its human chat representatives with chatbots? Why or why
not?
Ans. Chatbots have come a long way and have become quite popular. One reason that we can
vouch for this success is live customer service chat, where customer can directly communicate
with a chatbot that can solve issues in routine services. The bot can also refer to a live human
agent if the problem is too complicated for it to solve. So, HubSpot should definitely replace its
human chat representatives with chatbots. There are certain benefits that HubSpot can gain from
this process:
 The customer service representatives can utilize the time spent in answering basic
questions on the phone with the customer by engaging the bots in this process and free up
time in some other useful process. These simple questions can engage a human
representative for up to 70-80% of his routine work time. So, if chatbots take up these
quick fixes, customer can be happy to avoid phone calls and customer service
representatives can dedicate more time for proactive customer support.
 Another benefit of adopting the system of chatbot is that the customers would be able to
get faster response to their problems. When dealing with simple problems, it becomes
quite difficult for the humans to beat the lightning fast processors of a computer that can
sort huge number of keywords in a few seconds. That is where these bots can play a huge

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 role in order to expand the knowledge base, deal with FAQs and community forums
where they can resolve the queries by filtering the comments of the customers.
 When chatbots are implemented in the system in an effective way, it helps the businesses
to save a lot of money. Chatbots don’t need any payment to work, so the management can
expand the role of the chatbots to increase the reach of the team without hiring additional
representatives. Hence, chatbots can be utilized as an attractive, cost effective alternative
especially for understaffed teams.
Q2. Which activities in HubSpot’s marketing and selling process would you turn over from
human to bots? Why? In which phases of funnels (ToFu, MoFu, BoFu) would bots do
better (or worse) than humans?
Ans. HubSpot’s selling and marketing process include activities like inquiring the customer at the early
stages of the buying process, providing information about the customers and the competitors of
HubSpot in the process of selling to the salespeople. All these activities involve very minimum human
interaction and are more inclined to gathering of information, thus they doing them with the help of
bots will aggregate the marketing and selling of HubSpot. On the other hand, some activities include
complex human problems which may be difficult for Artificial Intelligence to comprehend and solve, and
these activities are best and more efficient, when done by human interaction. Artificial Intelligence helps
in gathering of information which can give insights in the decision making, but while making the decision
many factors have to be kept in mind like the perspective of the customers or the effect that the
decision will have on the company. So, these things are best done with human interaction and not with
bots.
Bots at the top of the funnel (ToFu), Bots at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu) have the chances of giving
better performance because, at the top we can attract the customers or the users by portraying
different types of content by the company. While, at the bottom we have to provide demonstrations of
the products and the offerings which can help the customers the customers understand that how they
will integrate their desired product in their system. Bots in the middle of the funnel (MoFu), would not
be such a good thing because convincing a customer and explaining the offerings in a difficult task. Each
customer is different, they have different behaviour and different perspectives and the company has to
treat each customer in a different way and this is something which cannot be handled by bots. It would
create a very bad effect for the company to fail at this level of the funnel, and thus customers have to be
handled carefully and tactfully.

Q4. Was HubSpot acquisition of Motion AI a smart move for the company? How might it
affect its relationship with its own customers?
Ans. HubSpot’s revenue was mainly from small and medium sized business customers. In 2016,
its revenue increased 49%, up to $271 million. Their new platform offered free CRM system that
allowed companies to collect and analyze deeper insights on every contact, lead, and customer.
The feature of ‘conversations’ improved the CRM tool. It collects conversation of customers
from Facebook messenger, web chat, social media, email and other messaging outlets. By
acquiring Motion AI, HubSpot hoped to have an efficient and effective customer conversation
for its client. By introducing chatbots, they can make a better engagement, convert, close, and
delight their customers at scale. HubSpot always had the mission to build technology that helps
SMBs grow and evolve. With the changing customer behaviors, this acquisition of Motion AI is
a great step.

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Chatbots were an integral part of a wave of new artificial intelligence tools. These were changing
the way people interacted with technology. Chatbots were less sophisticated. They tended to
specialize in executing simple tasks rather than providing omnipresent and wide-ranging
functionality. Chatbots are programmed to prompt a conversation by delivering a series of
queries to a customer and then to answer the customer with canned responses triggered by simple
if-then statements. The market for chatbots was up to $1 billion and by 2020 it was expected to
double. It was estimated that almost 60% of customer service support issues can be resolved by
chatbots. Chatbots completed customer interactions at twice speed and at less cost.
Motion AI’s powerful technology enables users to build, train, and deploy AI robots to do almost
anything imaginable – from booking meetings and qualifying leads, to running customer service
chats and diagnosing problems, all without needing technical skill. The acquisition deploys
Motion AI bots to take HubSpot CRM contacts through a journey specifically built for them,
offering a more personalized, always-on buying experience than what consumers would typically
see in traditional email communication. The team has generated six times the number of
marketing qualified leads using Motion AI bots as it has using email. The Motion AI technology
was incorporated into the HubSpot platform, and the team worked to create tools that help users
automate important tasks, scale conversations, and proactively engage and acquire new
customers. 
Bots provide instant responses to customer needs, reduces stress of waiting in a call queue or
having to call during business hours. Calling and emailing is falling behind of interest with
consumers. Chatbots were deployed within messaging app platforms, like messenger, WhatsApp,
WeChat, etc. customers could speak with a company and resolve their tasks.

Q5. How would you assess the potential for chatbots for managing B2B and B2C
customers’ relationship in general? Under which conditions do have the most and least
potential?
Ans. The way we interact with customers plays a huge role for success of any organization; be it
B2B or B2C. HubSpot identified a huge potential for chatbots. The other alternative for chatbots
is Interactive Voice Telephone Response IVR. IVR generally has a robotic voice developed by
software’s which generally serves the purpose of solving quires of customers, but one drawback
of this system is everyone around the globe hates that robotic voice. To maintain a good
customer relationship, it is advisable to add human touch in every aspect where there is an
interaction between businesses and customers and with IVR it is not possible because customers
know they are talking to a robot. The main motto of HubSpot is to add Human Touch to
customers via Artificial Intelligence and hence they have acquired Motion AI. After this
acquisition Hotspot revenue grew to 49% which equaled a total revenue of 271$ Million. This
revenue was generated from 23226 small and medium sized customers.
They build excellent customer relations for businesses. Hotspot provided three product offerings
for its customers which are:
Marketing Hub: Concentrated more on increasing the traffic to the business website and
converting potential lead into final customer.
Price Range: 50$/Month to 2400$/Month

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Sales Hub: Focused mainly on improving productivity and close as many deals as possible with
less effort.
Price Range: 50$/Month to 400$/Month
Customer Hub: Connect with customers better.
Price Range: Free when purchased other two products mentioned above.
Potential for Chatbots:
 Provides instant response to customers.
 Calling or Mailing a company is becoming outdated because customers want immediate
responses.
 Chatbots can be integrated with popular applications like Facebook Messenger,
WhatsApp and We Chat.
Based on research conducted it is evident that
 63% of people said chatting with business has shifted their perspective of that
business to positive side.
 55% customers are likely to trust the business that had a conversation through chat.
 53% were likely to shop with a business that they could interact with through
messenger apps.
B2B or B2C? Which has more potential?
According to the case it is believed that B2C has more potential because they were efficiently
carrying out transactions with customers without any hassles. The two major advantages for B2C
due to chatbots are they do not have to devote human resources to interact with customers and
can avoid forcing customers to visit their website or mobile app. B2B customers are more
demanding when compared to B2C customers and hence chatbots might not suit B2B customers.
B2B customers expect personalization and empathetic interactions throughout the buying process
and hence it is complex to implement chatbot service for B2B customers when compared to B2C
customers.