HubSpot debuts new AI-powered marketing and customer service tools – Business
HubSpot Inc. today introduced new artificial intelligence tools designed to boost the productivity of marketing, support and customer success teams.
NYSE-listed HubSpot is a major software-as-a-service provider with more than 205,000 customers worldwide. Its flagship product, Marketing Hub, provides tools that marketers use to create advertising campaigns, measure their effectiveness and perform related tasks. HubSpot also offers nearly a half dozen other platforms for professionals in fields such as sales and customer support.
“Marketing, sales and service teams are going through a major shift as technology and customer expectations evolve,” said Andy Pitre, HubSpot’s executive vice president of product. “If these customer-facing teams don’t have the right tools, businesses won’t grow.”
As part of today’s update, HubSpot is bolstering its portfolio of cloud services with a new platform called Content Hub. It’s designed to help companies more efficiently create and manage marketing copy.
One of the platform’s tentpole features is an AI tool for generating promotional content such as product descriptions. Marketers can input high-level parameters such as the topic a piece of copy should cover and have the tool generate text that meets the specified criteria. According to HubSpot, the underlying AI models are also capable of generating images.
Marketers sometimes require the ability to package a piece of copy into several different formats. A retailer, for example, may wish to use a blog post about a new product as the basis of a promotional email and a landing page. Content Hub ships with an AI tool called Content Remix that can automatically adapt copy to different marketing channels.
After they generate a piece of text, marketers can check if it complies with internal style guidelines using another AI feature called Brand Voice. Content Hub’s automation tools also promise to ease a number of related tasks such as generating audio versions of blog posts.
The platform is rolling out an updated version of an existing HubSpot product called Service Hub. It provides tools that customer service teams use to carry out their day-to-day work. According to HubSpot, the new version of the platform features an AI assistant that can automate some of that day-to-day work to make help desk agents more productive.
The chatbot is capable of automatically answering common customer questions to save time for support teams. Additionally, it can give help desk agents pointers on how to answer user inquiries. HubSpot says that the chatbot is capable of processing support tickets in multiple languages.
“The problem with help desk tools and Service Hub in the past is that nothing happens is until an issue occurs,” Paul Weston, general manager and senior director of product at HubSpot, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “There was a very important piece missing for B2B companies and that’s customer success and management. That’s where you get into retaining and growing your customers. That was a lightbulb moment for us about how we can delight those customers and the voice of the customer.”
The AI assistant is rolling out to Service Hub alongside a new dashboard called Customer Success Workspace. It’s designed for customer success groups, business units that focus on onboarding new buyers and ensuring they have a positive user experience. The dashboard provides centralized access to several sales-related metrics and highlights users who may be at risk of leaving.
Weston said that this helps close what he called the “post-sales gap” by giving account managers a chance to get ahead customer experience issues that might arise during a customer’s journey at a business. To complement that, there’s also a new Helpdesk Hub Workspace, built from the ground up for customer support teams where tickets and conversations converge to come together and helps bridge with the customer success side to help retain customers.
“It can be up to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one,” said Weston. “Another thing we’ve found is that 98% of customers find customer support interactions frustrating. Those two things together is the convergence of these two worlds between customer success and customer support.”
Service Hub is not the only existing HubSpot product that is receiving new features as part of today’s update. Commerce Hub, the company’s business-to-business commerce platform, has received an application programming interface for processing payments and subscriptions. The API is rolling out alongside a new integration that will make it easier for finance teams to sync transaction data between the platform and the popular QuickBooks accounting application.
With reporting from Kyt Dotson