HubSpot and Motion AI: Chatbot-Enabled CRM

By Group: - 9

 Aswin C M016-21
 Ayush Taneja M018-21
 Mallam Ravikanth M050-21
 Manisha Choudhary M051-21
 Nirmal Kumar Roy M059-21
 Harika Rayagiri M242-21
 Jyotsna Gupta M246-21

Introduction:

On September 20, 2017, HubSpot, sales, inbound marketing, and CRM (customer relationship
management) software provider, announced that it had acquired Motion AI. This software platform
enabled companies to quickly build and deploy chatbots to interact with customers. Chatbots were
pieces of conversational software powered by artificial intelligence and fueled by pre-programmed
algorithms, natural language processing, and/or machine learning. Chatbots conversed in ways that
mimicked real human communication.

HubSpot saw huge potential for chatbots for its B2B (business-to-business) customers, who could use
chatbots to automate many of their customer interactions that humans staffed at the time of the
acquisition. Chatbots had the potential to enable a company to manage one-to-one customized
relationships with prospects and to manage large number of customers efficiently by making artificial
intelligence the new frontline face of their brands

Previously, HubSpot had 'practiced what it preached' to create the company with its own goods. The
team had to make a decision to use chatbots to nurture and service its customer relationships and
monitor its sales funnel's efficacy and performance. A squad of chat members was actively partnering
with marketing to apply for HubSpot's distribution team and prime prospects. Can they be replaced with
chatbots? Was HubSpot ready for bots to interact with prospective consumers and make it the face of its
brand?

HubSpot's product portfolio

Marketing Hub: Increases traffic and converts the visitors into customers.
Sales Hub: Increases the productivity and closing more deals with less work
Customer Hub: The product helps in serving the customers better and is free of charge.

Analyzing the acquisition of Motion AI by HubSpot-

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 ● Motion AI- It is a software platform that helps companies with chatbots deployment to make
the customer interaction more efficient
● Chatbot Market - (According to a 2017 report)
● The estimated chatbots market was $1 billion and was expected to become two times by 2020
and triple in a decade
● Around 57% of firms were actively using chatbots or planned to begin doing so shortly, and 80%
of businesses were planning to deploy chatbots by 2020
● Businesses to use Chatbots-
● Customer service (39%)
● Marketing and sales (35%)
● Managing non customer external relations (28%)
● Chatbots can resolve around 60% of customer service support issues and that number can
increase to 90% by 2020
● Chatbots saved $20 million of businesses per year in 2017, and expected to help cut costs
around $8 billion/per year by 2022.

HubSpot’s acquisition of Motion AI

it would be a good move by HubSpot because the acquisition would provide HubSpot the further power
to efficient and effective conversation for the company’s clients because chatbot could perform tasks like
engaging and closing the deal very efficiently. People also want a kind of communication, where they
start a conversation at one platform and may end up at some other platform. And also, people expect to
remember the previous context. It would be tough for any human to keep track of all these for many
customers simultaneously.

As it also estimated that by 2017, 60% of customer support issues would be completely solved by the
chatbot itself, and this number was supposed to be increased to 90% by 2020.

Moreover, the speed they were providing was twice faster than any human-provided support.
Companies were also able to reduce the costs by $20 million per year in 2017, and this reduction was
further expected to cut in the coming years.

According to the CTO of HubSpot, the chatbot could speak the voice of brands, making a stronger
connection. Since chatbots were very efficient at dealing with basic questions and every 30 visits ends in
a chat, and the company receives 1000 of those visits every day.

Hence, the acquisition of Motion AI would definitely give them an edge as it would provide a new way to
reach the prospect, having a better conversation, which would ultimately lead to the growth of the
business. Acquiring Motion AI would lead to a better customer relationship with its own customer.

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 Because of digitization, buying behaviors were changing, so it could lead people to make the process
faster

Interaction with bots versus Humans

Customer behavior changes significantly if customers interact with bots versus humans. While having an
interaction with humans has so many advantages. With the advent of chatbots, clients plan to connect
with the company wherever they are. This means customers on multiple channels such as Social Media,
Emails, App Store, or any other messaging service like communicating with the company. They also plan
to centralize the discussion, which implies that they will lift questions on one platform and proceed on
another platform.

● The choice of customers began to move from emails to chatbots due to delays in email
responses.
● Customers do not want to wait in the queues or call during business hours.
● Customers want a more user-friendly and convenient platform to interact that is as quick as
talking to a human being.
● Improved user interface and powerful chat-box recommendations helped clients quickly acquire
data without any hassle.
● Customers also removed physical sales by consuming the commodity with enhanced technology

Chatbots in B2B and B2C

Chatbots were part of a surge of emerging tools for artificial intelligence that transformed the way
individuals engage with technology. They were less complex than virtual assistants and appeared to
specialize in completing basic tasks instead of offering ubiquitous and wide-range features.

Nothing can replace a human, and for a while, maybe never, this is unlikely to change. A chat bot’s
primary aim is to create a conversational relationship with the user. As mentioned in the case, a
Forrester study in 2017 claimed that 57 percent of companies worldwide were already using chatbots or
planned to start doing so shortly, and 80 percent of companies wanted to have a chatbot in place by
2020.

Pros and Cons of using Chatbots:

Pro's of using chatbots for CRM are:

● Being able to handle a larger number of human clients in a shorter span of time as compared to
a human team,
● conduct a customer support interaction from beginning to end and eliminating or minimising the
need of human interaction by providing the customer with a working solution, as well as being

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 able to reach out to prospects that might not be considered cost and time efficient to reach out
to by humans and turn those prospects into customers.
● when it comes to cost and efficiency, relieving some of the pressure that is put on the human
team and allowing for more customer requests to be handled concurrently. which allows the
company to have a higher profit margin they could then allowing them to continuously innovate
and provide customers with the products they need

Cons of using chatbots:

● their difficulty in perceiving tone, meaning, or urgency as well as their tendency to sometimes
forget earlier interactions with the customer.
● Factor such as these can lead to customer frustration and anger and a perception of the
company as inefficient or incompetent.
● The statistics mentioned in the case study that point out that “chatbots failed to serve customer
needs 70% of the time” and that “only 12% of bot interactions in the health care sector were
completed without the need to pass off the customer to a human operator” are very
representative of the difficulties and obstacles encountered by the use of chatbot technology
● Limited intelligence of chatbot technology, which has the potential to greatly frustrate
customers, especially if they perceive that they are wasting more time than necessary to receive
the answers or support they are seeking.
● Bots don’t need to mimic the conversational style of a user. They merely need to understand
that style and its nuances in order to provide appropriate and accurate answers.

Chatbots in the Marketing and Sales Funnel

● Top of the Funnel (ToFu) :Two perspectives of using Bots at the top of the funnel (ToFu) would
yield better performance because at the top, we have to attract as many prospective customers
as possible with a different type of content. At the same time it is bit difficult to insert at the top
of the consumer funnel, because it’s difficult for a chatbot to accurately determine the needs of
the customers and determine the product or service that is most appropriate for them.

● Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) : Adding chatbots to the middle of the funnel was quite risky, since
at that stage customers tended to ask “more complicated questions and would expect more
sophisticated answers customized to their needs”, which was difficult to do for chatbots.

● Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu): Bottom of the funnel seemed the most appropriate stage for
adding chatbots, because this part of the process was the lengthiest, resulting in a conversion
rate of only 20%, with each human closing five customers per month. Adding chatbots would
ensure that more leads that were initially placed in the lower scoring lead pool would be

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 approached. Automating at least part of this process would allow the human team to have more
time to work with each of those leads, especially when approaching the closing stage of the
process, likely increasing the currently low conversion rate.

Conclusion-

● HubSpot should not replace its human chat representatives with chatbots completely as
chatbots back in 2017 were not human enough to handle customer interaction from start to
finish.
● It is also evident from the case study that chatbots were able to conduct only less than 20% of
customer interaction before they had to pass the call to a customer support representative.
● Sometimes situations arose when bots were unable to act in a more human way, then people
responded in a more revulsive manner rather than being empathetic.
● HubSpot can go for human like conversational UI rather than fully functional bots, which can be
more efficient in human interaction. A more human interactive conversational UI would engage
with customers more deeply rather than a chatbot that engages in a streamlined manner.

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