HubSpot Conversations Features

• HubSpot Conversations chat widget: The HubSpot live chat widget is well designed and works well in both desktop and mobile browsers. Users are given the option of leaving their email address in an inline field in the chat, rather than in an old-fashioned pre-chat form. Customization is somewhat limited, but with an upgrade, you can edit the color of the chat widget and remove the HubSpot branding.
• Instant reply bot: The instant reply bot allows you to send a response after users start a chat. These are simple, generic responses such as, “Hi, thanks for messaging us. We try to be as responsive as possible. We’ll get back to you soon.”
• Qualify leads bot: Find out if visitors are qualified before sending them to a sales rep.
• Book meetings bot: This bot allows visitors book meetings using a link.

• Support bot: Show knowledge base articles to visitors or let them create a support ticket. HubSpot’s Support bot requires you to upgrade to the Service Professional plan or higher.
• HubSpot Conversations for teams: To create multiple teams you’ll need to be on the Professional plan, and for teams with hierarchical relationships, you’ll need to upgrade to the Enterprise plan.
• Conversation routing: Automatically route chats to the person or team that’s most qualified to help. This requires upgrading to the Sales Starter Plan or higher.
• Triggers: You can trigger chats by creating "Chatflows." You can, for example, create a chatflow that is only seen by contacts tracked in HubSpot CRM. Another example is creating a Chatflow based on the website URL.
• Shared inbox: You can create a shared team email address for each Inbox. One Inbox is provided in the free account, but if you need separate inboxes for support and sales, that requires an upgrade. HubSpot provides a hosted email address or you can have a custom email address, which requires you to upgrade. If you use the hosted email address from HubSpot, you will need to setup up email forwarding from a public email address. Additionally, you can add rules to incoming emails in order to assign them to individuals or teams, and/or set up actions like creating a ticket.
• Tracking user data: The only way to track user data for HubSpot Conversations is to use HubSpot CRM and create CRM contacts for your chats.

HubSpot Conversations Pros and Cons

Pros - HubSpot Conversations

• Seamless integration with HubSpot: If you’re already using HubSpot, HubSpot Conversations may sound quite appealing because you won’t have to learn a new user-interface.
• Easy to use user interface: For a wide-ranging platform of different tools, HubSpot has done a great job with its user interface, as most of it is easy to use and navigate.
• Unified inbox: You can respond to all chats via the HubSpot Conversations inbox, Slack, or the HubSpot mobile app. By taking notes on user profiles, you can remind yourself to follow-up with certain contacts and create support tickets. Every conversation gets automatically saved and stored in your inbox and on the contact’s timeline so your team has context and a view of every interaction. Although the unified inbox is one of HubSpot Conversations ‘pros’, it also happens to be one of its ‘cons’ due to the manual segmentation and non-automated nature of the feature.
• HubSpot Integrations and API: HubSpot has hundreds of integrations built for the platform. Chances are that an integration exists for most of the popular tools in your tech stack. Additionally, the HubSpot API is robust and is accompanied by lots of documentation.

Cons - HubSpot Conversations

• Limited number of features: HubSpot’s chatbot software does not have a lot of chatbot features that the best live chat chatbots possess. The basic elements are there, such as quick replies, buttons, text input, emojis, and email validation. However, there are no advanced tools, automation is very limited, and it lacks any type of intelligence. You can build a basic chatbot, yes, but nothing advanced.
• Easy to miss conversations: If you do not route the end of every chatflow to a user, team or inbox, you will not receive notifications, and therefore you need to monitor everything manually. Essentially, you are not automatically notified of all conversations that are started with your bot. Plus, if you’re familiar with other, more advanced chatbot builders, you might assume that if nobody replies to a visitor, that the chat will remain open for you to respond. Instead, HubSpot Conversations ends the chat.
• No chat broadcasting: With HubSpot it is not possible to send broadcast messages, which is a common type of campaign you can run with most of the best chatbots built for marketing purposes. This is a huge drawback because this is one of the main benefits of chatbot software in general. In addition to not being able to send a bulk message to your audience, or a segment of your audience, you also cannot send a sequence of messages. Again, sequences are another very common type of campaign option with the best marketing chatbots. Marketing automation tools for HubSpot overall, however, is included in the Marketing Professional and Marketing Enterprise plans. As for HubSpot’s chatbot, automation tools are almost completely absent.
• No AI, NLP, or NLU: There is no artificial intelligence or natural language processing (NLP) utilized by HubSpot’s chatbot. For a company as large as HubSpot, you might assume that their chatbot could be found among the best AI chatbots, but you would be mistaken.
• Limited marketing channels: Unlike the best marketing chatbot platforms available, HubSpot Conversations is limited to live chat on your website, and Facebook Messenger chat. And in regards to Facebook Messenger, there’s no auto-reply or Facebook Ads options available on HubSpot Conversations, which severely limits the marketing capabilities of the bot in general.
• No keyword recognition: The only type of ‘intelligence’ you can gain access to for HubSpot Conversations is the ability to match certain keywords with your articles in the HubSpot knowledge base. The knowledge base extension will require you to upgrade. However, matching keywords and delivering a response to that keyword is not possible with the HubSpot chatbot.
• Analytics not available for HubSpot chatbot: Another major drawback to HubSpot Conversations is the complete absence of chatbot analytics. Without chatbot analytics, you severely limit your ability to improve the quality of your chatbot.
• Page targeting options: It does appear, at first, that there are a lot of options for page targeting for HubSpot Conversations, however, you’ll quickly find yourself stuck when trying to create service or product-specific HubSpot chatbots. You also cannot target or exclude certain countries or IP addresses with your chatbot. Therefore, if you only do business in certain countries or regions, this can cause a lot of issues and extra work for your live agents.
• Messages cannot be used in different chatflows: Quite possibly the most frustrating aspect of HubSpot’s chatbots is that the user cannot go from one chatflow to another. For example, you can qualify a lead with a specific chatbot, but you can’t also provide support with that same chatbot. This means that you can qualify leads, provide support, and book meetings, but not all at the same time in one workflow. This is a major flaw that we haven’t seen in any other top-quality marketing chatbots.

HubSpot Conversations - Final Analysis

Ultimately, the only way to make HubSpot Conversations useful at all is to own HubSpot’s tools for marketing, sales, service, and CRM. Even then, HubSpot’s chatbot falls well short of the best live chat software tools available in 2023.

Bottom line, by choosing one of the many other great chatbot platforms out there and integrating that solution with your CRM (even if that’s HubSpot), you’ll gain many additional features and save your business a whole lot of time and money.

HubSpot’s chatbot is as basic as it gets.