CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY

VALERIE Varenina
LAM Zia
RALIJESY Lauren
TUCHBORN Eliane
VALERY Manon

Abstract

IT customer service tools have become an indispensable part of today's business

world. This report gives an overview of the current possibilities of the usage of
technological tools, especially Chatbots, in marketing and sales. It shows the
possibilities, how Chatbots and bots, in general, can be integrated into companies’
sales strategies and their everyday work. In addition, the opportunities and limits of this
technology are worked out and demonstrated. This report was drawn up to accompany
the article “HubSpot and Motion AI: chatbot-Enabled CRM '' from Jill Avery and
Thomas Steenburgh and thus relates in many ways to HubSpot’s company. As a
result, chatbots are not (yet) able to completely replace sales staff, but above all with
a view to costs, they can be an excellent tool to support the sales department and take
on basic tasks in customer communication. But managers should use it with caution
because incorrect use of this technology can damage customer relationships and thus
the company. This report is suitable as support in decision making for marketing and
sales managers who like to implement Chatbots or other technological sales tools in
their sales strategy.

This case study report was written for the course “Strategic Marketing Diagnosis”
taught by Andreas Munzel through https://courses.andreasmunzel.com.

Customer Management and Technology

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION 1
2. HUBSPOT AND MOTION AI 2
2.1. Motion AI 2
2.2. HubSpot 2
2.3. The fusion of Motion AI & HubSpot 4
3. STATUS QUO: THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT 4
3.1. Customer Management tools and their importance in general 4
3.2. Evolution of bots, used in companies 6
3.3. The ability of bots to replace humans 7
4. THE SALES FUNNEL AND ITS TECHNOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES 10
4.1. Top of the funnel 10
4.2. Middle of the Funnel 11
4.3. Bottom of the funnel 12
4.4. Suggestion referring to HubSpot’s usage of bots 13
5. THE FUTURE POTENTIAL OF THE USAGE OF BOTS IN COMPANIES 13
6. CONCLUSION 16
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY 17
8. REFERENCES 19
9. APPENDIX 20
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1. INTRODUCTION

The customer service industry has changed drastically in the last few years – and it is
still changing and developing. Back in the day, companies offered only phone support,
limited strictly by office hours. It was companies that decided how and when customers
get support. Nowadays, the customer service sector is mostly customer-driven. It’s
customers that are guiding the way of interactions and they have a lot of options to
choose from E-Mail, Telephone calls, Live Chat, etc. Most companies nowadays
realize the importance of implementing service tools, and they are increasingly moving
to provide round-the-clock service.

At present, it’s a must-have for companies to implement customer service tools.

Without them, companies are not able to manage a large number of customers
efficiently – in any case not that efficient as their competitors do. Furthermore,
technological tools are not only helpful in acquiring new customers – they can help to
keep them and build worthy customer relations. Nowadays, the loyalty and satisfaction
of customers are absolutely important for most companies, because this kind of
relationship generates a huge lifetime value for customers and so a safe profit for the
firm in the long run. Good customer care has also another big advantage: mouth-to-
mouth marketing. You can’t buy word-to-mouth marketing, and nothing is more efficient
than customers referring to other customers.

According to the shift from calling to chatting in the whole society, many firms prefer
using live chats as their preferred channel for customers to communicate with
customer service teams. Some (online-) companies already choose live chat as their
sole channel for customer service. Live chats are these small chat windows opening
on the edge of your screen saying something like “Hello, I’m Amy. If you have any
questions, just click here and ask me via live chat!” if you visit a website. Live chat
makes it possible for visitors and agents to interact in real-time via this chat window.
The technological upgrade of live chats is chatbots. Chatbots are bots that chat with
customers by themselves, without human help. So, you are not actually chatting with
the woman Amy, you may be chatting with a bot called Amy. The newest trend,
respectively the newest technical invention according to live chat is to implement
artificial intelligence to chatbots. This may increase the quality of the conversation and
the support the customer gets. But this invention is not 100% undisputed: there are a
lot of pro and con opinions according to chatbots with AI and still a lot of inconsistencies
in the system that need to be evaluated.

This report is dedicated to technological CRM tools, especially bots and chatbots with
AI. It is answering questions according to the potential and the chances of new
technology methods to improve the customer service of a firm. For example, the
question of the technological upgrade from live chats to chatbots with AI is a real
upgrade in CRM and customer acquisition is discussed in this report.

As the main reference for this report, we use the article “HubSpot and Motion AI:
chatbot-Enabled CRM” from Jill Avery and Thomas Steenburgh, released on October
22, 2019, and published by Harvard Business school.

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2. HUBSPOT AND MOTION AI

2.1. Motion AI
We all know that customers can be annoying and not very smart. They all tend to ask
the same questions. CNBC predicts that in the year 2022, companies using chatbots
are going to reduce costs by 30%1. Which is huge. Any company with a customer
service department will find this tempting. But to reduce cost, a big investment has to
be made, to get the return on investment. However, there’s a twist. Employing chatbots
is made affordable and easy to be understood by a company called Motion AI.

Motion AI was a top chatbot builder founded in the year 2015 in the United States by
David Nelson. They offer chatbot software that is easy to be built by anyone even
without any IT background nor skills. It works on various known social media platforms
that companies could integrate to and of course, no coding skills are required. Seeing
this product, all companies are eager to get into bed with them, one of which was their
client, HubSpot. Motion AI sells a product, HubSpot sells various products by acquiring
multiple companies (crunchbase.com noted 13 companies in total). So instead of
having to pay patents on products, (backed by a lot of investors of course), they
acquired a bunch of companies. The acquisition of Motion AI sure made a big splash
in the newspaper, with a very clear reason. Motion AI’s product is the future.

Their chatbots, like any Artificial Intelligence (AI), get sharper with time, with data. Our
data makes them smarter. Not only does it reduce cost but it also makes customers
happier with the fast response.

Companies always need to provide the best customer service, because only
customers that care give critics and complain. A survey by Hubspot 2 said that 93%
percent of companies are satisfied by the return after their complaint comes back to
purchase. This makes it more important for companies to make sure their front-liners,
the customer relationship staff, are serving their best. But with the repetition of the
questions asked, and the constraint of advice these staffs can give, companies are
starting to look for a way to replace them, even they, themselves feel like they can be
replaced by robots which is not a good sign for the job market (and the rate of job
opportunities) but it is great news for a company like Motion AI.

2.2. HubSpot
Named #1 in glassdoor’s best company to work in3, HubSpot is a public (NYSE: Hubs)
Customer Relation Management (CRM) firm that works mostly in the Business-to-
Business (B2B) scale. Founded in 2006 in the State by Brian Halligan, this company
has since then acquired 13 companies4, varying from different industries to complete
their offerings. This makes one wonder, makes me wonder, what do they even do
before the acquisitions.

To start, in the year 2006, HubSpot was an intermediary that sells suitable software to
businesses. They were a client of Motion AI. They were using Motion AI in their daily
interactions with their customers. Before getting deeper into the fusion of Motion AI
and Hotspot (the future), it is best if we dig the past first to cover the bases.

Before acquiring motion AI, HubSpot was offering services such as templates for
infographics, talk shows (like Ted talks) called “Inbound” and also software for other
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businesses to attract consumers in a form of digitalization. “This includes content
creation, social media sharing, workflow automation, lead capture, customer
relationship management, sales pipeline mapping, and performance tracking.”5 They
are focused on providing products that help companies maximize profits, attract new
customers, and use collected data to retain existing customers. They were aspiring to
be a one-stop for all marketing needs for companies.

Analyzing HubSpot as an outsider, through their website and how the market values
them through the eyes of media plus articles, they are very customer-centric. They
understand what customers want rather than forcing the company’s target which is
profit. The technology industry that has been booming for 20 years now always brings
up intangible products. And it is harder to believe in something that you cannot try, if it
is hard for tangible products what more those intangibles.

With that said, HubSpot offers free products to bait customers into their ecosystem.
Crazyegg.com wrote on October 3rd, 2021, just two weeks before I am writing this
report, the best free CRM company goes to HubSpot because they over-delivers their
free version making customers able to manage up to 1,000,000 contacts6. On the other
hand, I do agree with crazyegg.com, the difficulty to distinguish the difference between
their products could be very confusing. Below are the full extent of their offered
products (even more than provided by the referred article “HubSpot and Motion AI:
chatbot-Enabled CRM” from Jill Avery and Thomas Steenburgh, released on October
22, 2019, and published by the Harvard Business school.) since it was published in
2019. And with a tech company, they grew fast. Some of these products are available
to be used freely and some need to be paid, but of course, those that do not charge
could be upgraded.

Marketing Software (Free & Premium): Marketing strategy talks about sending an
advertisement through social media or even mass media at a specific time where traffic
is high, and their target consumers are online. This software allows them to turn visitors
to your platform into customers that will allow you to run your marketing campaign
simultaneously. This software would even give you predictions of how likely the visitors
would turn into consumers given the advertisement is going to be published at a certain
time (Figure 2.1)

Sales Software (Free & Premium): The sales software turns your mediocre emailing
system into an integrated emailing system with statistics and data on which shared
document closes your deals and they also help you customize your emails using their
provided email templates and many more. (Figure 2.2.)

Customer Service Software (Free & Premium): This section is going to be discussed
in part 2.3 as the acquisition played a major role in the features offered.

Content Management System: Websites. The Content Management System is talking

about building a company’s proper website with more ease. Marketers with no
background in graphic design or web design get to develop a website with the famous
drag-and-drop feature and of course, like every other website, you will get to know the
traffic it created and with that data, you can turn it into information to improve the
website which you can change easily. (Figure 2.4)
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Customer Management and Technology

Operations Software: Their Operation Software helps companies to classify their
volume of data to construct the needed information. The software will sync the provided
“messy” data and deconstruct it into little pieces labeled different categories that the
companies need to track information faster. For example: Send email to consumers
which are women and above 50+. (Figure 2.5)

2.3. The fusion of Motion AI & HubSpot

With their acquisition of Motion AI, HubSpot’s market share increased exponentially
which means they hold a stronger influence in the market of CRM. As they were a
client of Motion AI, we can see that they still are. We cannot say they are a client
anymore after the acquisitions but for sure they keep using the chatbots. The first thing
you would see after reaching their website is their chatbot on the bottom right asking
how he could help you.

They, of course, did not answer your unrelated question about their range of products,
but if you need help on differentiating the offerings, the chatbots would be there to cater
to your list of questions. Now, let’s put it to practice by looking at their product.

Customer Service Software:

At first glance, it looks like it goes only by giving access to chatbots, but in fact, no.
Customer Service Software offers (Figure 2.3) automated responses to customers but
also they provide surveys to help companies track the satisfaction customers are with
their products, service, etc. Those automated emails of you’re the company you did
business with asking how you would rate the companies offered products and services.

This is very crucial information every company needs to have. Feedbacks facilitate
companies to improve any aspect of their offerings or even processes of offerings.
Furthermore, surveys from this HubSpot software could help them know whether using
HubSpot is beneficial for their company, whether customers are satisfied with the
chatbots for example.

Their fusion adds more data to HubSpot and as explained above with an intangible
asset such as software itself, AI becomes smarter by gathering human data. Thanks
to the increase of data volume gathered from chatbots, HubSpot becomes more
effective in giving diagnoses to companies in order to help them know their customers
better and own the power to target them more accurately. Make sure they hit the bull’s
eye closer and closer every time or in this case the customer’s heart or wallet.

3. STATUS QUO: THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT

3.1. Customer Management tools and their importance in general

The key to customer service is to exceed customers' expectations. They do not only
want to be valued but they can also be part of the process by referring to other
customers. In this case, the goal of customer service is to do everything to make the
customer experience as unique as possible. There is nothing better than good
customer service to help grow sustainable revenue and differentiate from the various
competitors on the market. Indeed, as mentioned by Mikko Rindell in his article « The
Best Customer Service Tools in 2021: A comprehensive guide », 76 % of consumers
look at customer service as a test of their value to a brand.
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Customer Management and Technology

In order to achieve this goal, customer service tools become essential to forward
complaints and feedback to the right service, streamline the workflow and respond
quickly to customers. It can create tickets for the different issues encountered by the
customers which will be assigned to different departments later with the aim to solve
the problem faster. For example, while people on social media expect a response
within an hour, the average response time for companies is around a day. These
software and technologies would allow companies to be more effective in their way to
communicate with their customers.

With the intention of choosing the most suitable customer service tool for the company,
it is important to take into account criteria such as the friendliness of the software, its
strength to support the needs of the company, its integration with other tools used, the
planned expenditure and return on investment.

As a matter of fact, it is necessary to have complete tools to achieve specific goals and
that will allow the company to optimize human resources better, reduce the cost of
hiring staff and increase customer satisfaction. The customer service tools should also
help the service team to manage the work efficiently and not overburden them with
more red tape as well as work with all the other technological tools the company
already uses. Finally, check to make sure that the tool chosen is cost-effective is the
final step.

Here are various customer service tools that can be useful for a company and some
examples.

Customer service tools to collect customer feedback:

● While it is necessary to collect feedback in order to improve the customer

service operation as well as the performance of its agents, this tool allows
identifying the different customer expectations to improve the products and
services effectively.

● This tool includes setting objectives, collecting customers feedbacks, getting

insights, and making data-driven decisions of what should the company do to
improve taking into consideration the opinion of its target public.

● Nowadays, it could be difficult to choose a suitable customer feedback tool

because each uses different collection techniques, forms and provides various
types of insights and reports about the customer experience.

● For example, you can find AskNicelyt, which uses the Net Promoter Score
framework, or CloudCherry, which is a Customer Experience Management
platform; both being customer feedback software with different forms but the
same goal: increase recommendations and boost the rating of the company.

Customer service tools with AI; chatbots:

● Chatbots is the tool on which we will focus our study. While humans can find
some tasks tedious and repetitive, customer service tools can help lighten the
workload by using chatbots that would alleviate the costs associated with
growing. It can be described as tools that would conduct a conversation without
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the need for a human agent, usually driven by Artificial Intelligence, they can be
utterly effective especially the more advanced one which can handle complex
requests.

● Using these customer service tools with AI provides aid to businesses to save
up on customer service costs. Indeed, it allows companies to answer faster and
provide answers to simple and common questions automatically.

● With the rise of social media where everything is accessible in a few seconds,
customers don't have time to waste, and everything must go fast. It creates a
new challenge for customer service organizations and thankfully, chatbots are
here to help. First, chatbots help improve and manage the customer experience.
Then, automating tasks increases the productivity and efficiency of the
company. Finally, it reduces the staff turnover rate which allows them to focus
more on the emotional aspect of the work.

● There exist tons of Artificial Intelligence customer service chatbots, for example,
Acobot, GetJenny, or Spoke which help companies create their own chatbots in
order to facilitate and streamline processes, improve customer experience and
reduce support costs.

3.2. Evolution of bots, used in companies

People have wondered what it might be like to converse with a robot since the dawn
of science fiction. People have been working toward attaining this elusive ambition for
more than a century.

Alan Turing, for example, wondered in 1950 if a computer program could talk with a
group of humans without them realizing their interlocutor was a machine. The Turing
test, as it is called, is often credited as being the idea for chatbots. The first chatbot,
named ELIZA, was built in 1966. ELIZA worked as a psychotherapist, returning the
user's phrases in the interrogative form of Weizenbaum (1966). It had limited
communication capabilities, but it served as a basis for the development of succeeding
chatbots.

SmarterChild7, which was available on America Online (AOL) and Microsoft

Messenger in 2001, was a significant advancement in chatbot technology (MSN). It
was the first time a chatbot could assist individuals with everyday chores by retrieving
information from databases such as movie times, sports scores, stock prices, news,
and weather.

Marketers began deploying bots with automated email campaigns, allowing them to
follow up with every single consumer who had left their email address on their
websites. This technique was incredibly effective for marketers since it provided
customers with relevant content, enhancing their trust in the firm and their desire to
purchase their items. However, an increasing number of people responded to those
emails that were impossible to treat. The no-reply email address was implemented by
the companies; however, it influenced customer relationships because customers
were unable to contact the company.

To address this problem, businesses began to use live chat, which allowed customers
to get answers to their questions directly on the company's website. However, just like
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email usage increased, businesses began to receive an increasing number of
messages that they were unable to respond to. According to a recent study, 21% of
live chats help inquiries go unanswered totally. Furthermore, the response time was
too slow for customers, resulting in a deterioration of the customer connection.

Early in 2016, Artificial Intelligence Technology underwent a significant transformation

that altered the way individuals communicate with manufacturers. Developers might
construct chatbots for their brand or service on social media platforms like Messenger,
allowing customers to complete specific everyday tasks within their messaging apps.
At the end of 2016, there were 34.000 chatbots8 in use across a variety of industries,
including marketing, support systems, health care, entertainment, education, and
cultural heritage. According to LivePerson13, 90 percent of consumers are more likely
to do business with companies that respond to inquiries quickly, therefore many
businesses have turned to chatbots to help them communicate with their customers.

According to Accenture Digital, 57 percent of businesses9 agree that bots help them
get a higher return on investment with minimum work, and 90 percent say bots help
them resolve complaints faster10 (MIT Technology Review).

Research showed that 63 percent of people said chatting with a company made them
feel better about the relationship, 55 percent were more likely to trust the company as
a result of their chat conversations, and 53 percent were more likely to shop with a
company they could contact via a messaging app. Overall, companies are
incorporating more chatbots into their Consumer Marketing Management because it is
a strategic and effective approach to respond to customer requests.

3.3. The ability of bots to replace humans

As Sumit Raj said,” chatbots are not just software in the modern era. Chatbots are like
our personal assistants who understand us and can be micro-configured. They
remember our likes and dislikes and never tend to disappoint us by forgetting what we
taught them already, and this is the reason why everyone loves chatbots.”14

Chatbots were increasingly popular over the decade, and people began to treat them
as if they were real humans and started replacing them, attributable to a variety of
factors.

First and foremost, chatbots deliver faster customer service. There is no doubt that
chatbots can save time that humans cannot. Because chatbots may be taught to
respond to simple questions, staff can focus on more complicated difficulties that their
clients may be experiencing. Virtual customer assistants, according to Gartner, help
firms cut the call, chat, and email queries by 70% 11.

Second, like it has been said multiple times, unlike humans, chatbots are always
available. They may react to client inquiries at any time without incurring additional
costs. A chatbot with 24/7 chat capabilities can rapidly address client questions,
eliminating the need for customers to call personnel during business hours.

Finally, chatbots encourage conversational marketing because most customers prefer

to receive an immediate response to their questions. A chatbot allows clients to interact
with the site without requiring a real human to monitor the dialogues, rather than having
to scroll through a website and locate the answer themselves or fill out a contact form
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to receive a call or email at a later date. While nothing surpasses human-to-human
engagement, a bot can fill in until support or sales representative is available, and it
can do so in a way that is intuitive and consistent with the company's tone. The
chatbots provided by Manychat and Intercom are a nice illustration of this. Manychat
is ideal for Facebook Messenger marketing, whereas Intercom is great for a live chat
on a website.

Quoting Elbert Hubbard from around 100 years ago,” One machine can do the work of
fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man”15. Chatbots
have limits to replacing humans, no matter how advanced AI becomes, there will
always be a need for people to work with and alongside them.

The primary issue with bots is that they don't understand normal language. Despite
how far bots have progressed, they will never be able to replace the natural flow of
human communication. Slang, misspellings, and sarcasm are frequently
misunderstood by chatbots because they are unable to adjust their vocabulary to
match that of people. This means that chatbots can't be utilized on public and highly
personal platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This causes a snag for the bot and
prevents the consumer from receiving the speedy service they expected.

Another concern is that chatbots do not respond to customers in a customized or

emotive manner. Bots will not respond to clients with personality or emotion, which is
a major turnoff for many customers. The so-called "uncanny valley theory," which
investigates the uneasy sentiments that a person has when he or she is unsure if the
interlocutor is a human or a computer program, is based on providing no emotion or
personalization. According to the concept of the uncanny valley, certain features of
chatbots may provoke unpleasant emotions or anxiety since they make the chatbot
almost humanlike but not quite. Customers expect their concerns to be treated with
empathy, especially when they are having problems with a product or company. If a
conversation deviates from a predetermined path, the bot will be unable to improvise
and will lack the human touch, resulting in a terrible customer experience.

Figure 1: The graph shows how consumers' attraction for things with various
levels of human similarity is related. There is a dramatic decline in affinity as
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Customer Management and Technology

human similarity approaches that of a human being, referred to known as "the
uncanny valley" (Mori et al., 2012)

One of the major drawbacks of chatbots is that they cannot always help when a
customer's question is not clear or too precise. Chatbots are programmed to respond
to general questions with answers found in the bot's database, so if a customer asks
a question that isn't on that list, or asks multiple questions, the bot will be confused and
will either go around in circles trying to understand the question (often to no avail) or
will simply be left without an answer. This frequently results in your clients being left
without a solution and having to go through additional processes to contact your
customer service team. In either case, this isn’t a great customer experience and can
negatively impact your company’s image.

Furthermore, a chatbot must be maintained and optimized on a regular basis to ensure

that it is providing accurate information to customers and accurately represents the
brand. The organization will need to adapt its bot as customer demand and business
priorities alter, which will include a study of previous bot conversations to identify
typical inquiries the bot receives. Customers will notice if they leave the bot to its own
devices, and your customer satisfaction rating will decrease.

Also, chatbots are intended to handle a certain amount of data, and when the
organization changes and alters the data, the chatbot model as a whole may be
disrupted. This necessitates continuous and meticulous maintenance to ensure that
the organization does not introduce flaws into the chatbot interface.

While businesses may save money on payroll, a complex chatbot will be very
expensive. Each type of business requires its own installation, and while low-cost
options may appear appealing, they often come with limited features. When a result,
as your chatbot evolves to achieve the degree of service your clients expect, your
prices will soon rise. You lose touch with what your clients are saying when you employ
chatbots. As a result, you may miss out on input on developing concerns as well as
valuable insights into new business prospects.

Bots are not appropriate for all company models. When it comes to deciding whether
to use a chatbot, it's critical to be practical. Certain business concepts are just too
complicated to use a chatbot, and some client bases may not respond well to one.
Before selecting to use a bot to save money, businesses must assess their target
audience and industry.
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Figure 2: Acceptance of artificial intelligence chatbots by customers worldwide

(Statista 2017)

4. THE SALES FUNNEL AND ITS TECHNOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES

A marketing funnel describes the steps your visitors go through before they buy a
product. A digital marketing funnel is therefore a strategic model that describes every
(inter) action of your buyer persona on the journey through your marketing channels to
the point at which they become a customer.
Funnels are as much about sales as it is marketing. Therefore, every online marketing
funnel is also a sales funnel. However, marketing funnels concentrate on the upper
part of the funnel (ToFu; Top of Funnel), in which the customer comes into contact with
the product or service via various communications. The sales funnel focuses more on
the lower part of the funnel (BoFu; Bottom of Funnel), which pursues active (sales)
communication.

4.1. Top of the funnel

The top of the funnel, or ToFu, is all about awareness and attraction.
The company tries to generate traffic – because, without traffic, there is no selling base.
To generate this traffic, marketing workers create content with customer value to
arouse the potential customer’s interest to deal with the products. In this part of the
funnel, many companies share knowledge and insight through explainer videos or
infographics. Furthermore, it’s very useful to already start building trust and rapport for
your potential customer relationships. Giving the customers a good feeling, clicking on
the web link, or not skipping your advertisement video on YouTube is very important
for the whole marketing process. Feelings like trust imply positive effects on the whole
customer journey and the buying process.

HubSpot had a struggle, affecting their website visitors effectively. Only 4% of them
filled out online surveys they offered to create worthy profiles for CRM 12. HubSpot
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wanted to change their customers’ awareness from “a stranger attracted by inbound
marketing content to the company’s website” to a “visitor that could be engaged,
educated” 12. So Kipp Bottner, the Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot thought about
using chatbots to personalize the customer experience. He said that “A bot could make
you feel like you were just talking to somebody at the company” 12. So, the bots should
approach the customers directly, instead of indirect solicitations via forms.

This idea may be futuristic and innovative, but it may also be not generalizable for all
types of customers. Maybe chatbots would work for basic customers that have
recurring questions to classify what HubSpot is and does, but they surely could not be
satisfactory for all of the customers, especially the ones with higher demands.
Furthermore, at the top of the funnel, there is normally a big number of participants,
and only a few of them are promising customers. Therefore, I would suggest not putting
the human and financial resources in expensive live-chats and focusing on other
awareness strategies instead. Bots with artificial intelligence would of course be useful,
but the marginal utility of chatbots would be less than other marketing instruments like
an intuitive and aesthetic website can deliver.

4.2. Middle of the Funnel

In the middle of the funnel, the company has the goal to sharpen the superficial interest
of the customer and motivate and encourage him to conclude a purchase or service
opt-in. When the potential customers have already passed the top of the funnel and
are attracted by the offers of the company, they are likely to get more detailed
information. For example, companies lead from a blog article (ToFu) to a content
website of their website with specific information. So, the attention of the customer is
led to the product/offer and at the same time, they get the information that this firm
delivers them the best solution/product. From the customer’s point of view, the middle
of the funnel is about making the best buying decision. Therefore, companies use
measures to increase their credibility and promote their products.

HubSpot developed a multiple tool system to manage the middle of the funnel. On the
one side, they have a self-service part, where customers can get information by
themselves (FAQ page, product descriptions). On the other side, they used “low-costs,
light-touch service” 12, represented by live chats and question responses via e-mail.

The probability of a person that already passed the Tofu is higher, to become a
customer. So, it is more worthy to implement life-chats with employees instead of
chatbots than in the first phase. But I think that bots should still substitute humans, at
least part-time/ at the beginning of a chat. HubSpot has so the possibility to offer a 24/7
live chat without having employees working the whole day. Furthermore, bots can try
to answer the first easier questions of customers and when they become more
nuanced and more difficult, the chatting-partner can switch from a bot to an employee.
Now, HubSpot uses a combination of chatbots and humans to get their potential
customers through the MoFu. The special thing about it is that HubSpot leaves the
decision up to the potential customers, to chat with a bot or a human. This solution has
a big advantage, compared with other firms: It is suitable for almost all types of
customers. Every customer is different. Some like quick answers via chatbots and don’t
care that much about personal contact, while others feel not treated well or taken
seriously by chatting with a robot. It makes absolute sense to keep his Middle-Funnel
strategy that is a combination of bots and humans.
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Figure 3: The current Live-Chat solution of HubSpot’s customer management,

available at https://www.hubspot.com/

4.3. Bottom of the funnel

Final ambiguities are being resolved in the BoFu. Customers can find detailed answers
to their final questions and test products. Design measures for the ToFu can be
Workshops, events, demo-versions, or factsheets. In this stage of the customer
journey, the usage of human salespeople is requirable. Salespeople can answer
unusual questions about the products or selling process way better than bots can. This
does not mean that HubSpot should not use technological tools that make the selling
process as easy as possible for the customers, but the use of bots interacting with the
customers instead of humans, would not create the personal atmosphere that is
needed for loyal long-term customers’ relationships.

Furthermore, there are a lot of important points that distinguishes bots’ abilities from
humans. First, it is harder for bots to estimate the customers that are interested to
upsell products. Even if bots can already recognize human feelings and adapt their
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reactions according to that – they never can give customers this warm living room-
feeling, a good seller can. If customers feel personally connected to a human seller, it
often works to persuade them to buy a better, better-fitting, or even higher-priced
product. Over time, bots with AI learn better to adapt this ability, but I’m sure it will take
a few more years until they have improved enough to be on a good salesman’s level.

4.4. Suggestion referring to HubSpot’s usage of bots

In summary, we would recommend Hubspot and similar companies with limited
resources to use robots at the beginning of the marketing funnel. Because the further
the potential customers go through the tunnel, the deeper and more important the
personal, social, and emotional components in customer relationships become.

Figure 4: Diagram showing the relationship between the marketing funnel,

customer relationships, and the use of robots
(Eliane Tuchborn, 2021)

5. THE FUTURE POTENTIAL OF THE USAGE OF BOTS IN COMPANIES

As stated in the paper written by Avery and Steenburgh for the Harvard Business
School in October 2019, estimation shows that 60 % of customer service issues could
be resolved by chatbots in 2017, and this figure is expected to rise until 90% by 2020.
In recent years, the numbers have been growing steadily and companies only swear
by this innovation. As a matter of fact, it has repeatedly demonstrated its effectiveness
through its ability to save businesses, for example, they save $20 million per year in
2017, and they were expected to help cut costs by more than $8 billion per the year
2022.

Nevertheless, it could seem easy to create bots in the rush to incorporate new
technologies in the company, but the warning is important when these bots could do
more damage to their brands than good. As Brad Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer at
HubSpot mentioned, brands tend to abuse new technologies to the point of saturating
the most loyal customers with spam and information overload. How long will customers
last in the face of the lightning assault of chatbots?
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According to Mikko Rindell, “.. by 2025, 60 % of all B2B companies will be more data-
driven, employing AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes.”16 On
the other hand, from a different point of view, Brad Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO)
of Hubspot states that bots should be more solution-focused as they are made to focus
to busy B2B customers.

Chatbots could be extremely useful in B2B customer relationships to help with many
different types of interactions such as organizing meetings, defining leads in teams,
analyzing problems, and providing answers to customers to solve them. But if the role
of a bot seems clear on paper, the reality can sometimes be more complicated to set
up.

On one side, there are some doubts as to whether B2B customers are open to the
robotization of services, where human interaction may be more appropriate.
Customers expect a personalized, contextual service where a touch of empathy and
social interaction can often be a plus during the buying process. B2B customer
relationships are in this sense more often complex than with B2C customers and
require the know-how and expertise of a salesperson who can gain customers’ trust
with more ease than a bot. On the other other, they do not have time to queue up to
talk to the limited customer service agents companies have.

Even with the improvement of technological innovations, artificial intelligence still

requires the use of a significant amount of data to be effective; without this, it can be
difficult to do machine learning. We observe that more often, chatbots are an
advantage for B2C interactions because there is a larger volume of data that can be
analyzed more easily due to their lower value, compared to B2B interactions which are
less numerous but more complex and therefore more difficult to process. Even today,
chatbots have difficulty handling complex problems and situations.

As mentioned earlier, while they can easily answer basic questions, chatbots and
Artificial Intelligence more generally still struggle to handle rarer and more exceptional
situations such as angry potential customers. They cannot recognize crises where the
flexibility of human intervention seems to be required. Indeed, some problems cannot
just be solved by analyzing a situation and trying to solve the problem but sometimes
it requires more compassion and empathy.
In this situation, the biggest challenge in creating an efficient chatbot will be to identify
the potential difficulties of the conversations with the many customers and to anticipate
the different hazards that the bot might encounter. Here, the difficulty is more relational
and experiential rather than technical. It is a job of emotion detection, understanding
the choice of words used and the tone used, perceiving the style and trajectory of the
discussion, this is what will make the company's customer service stand out. It will be
necessary to establish a conversational strategy and include this in the bots, which will
allow the company to be not only efficient but also effective.

However, bots have proven to be much more useful than they appear, especially
during the corona virus crisis. 81% of American employees say that bots have
improved their working conditions since the beginning of the pandemic, especially
when it comes to data entry, organizing work schedules, and computer problems when
teleworking.
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Figure 5: Diagram showing the potential benefits of using chatbots according

to customers, in percentage. (Marketing Charts, 2018)

As a matter of fact, U.S employees seem to be positive about the use of bots as a
customer service tool. As mentioned in the Business Wire article published in October
2021, 90% of US employees believe that bots will play a major role in companies'
transition to permanent virtual constructs, while 84% respond positively to the
integration of more bots within the company. They would be used to help employees
work more efficiently and effectively, including taking care of simple tasks that can be
time-consuming, which could also reduce costs for the company. This will allow
employees to spend time on learning and developing opportunities, as well as
performing more complex tasks and teaming up with colleagues to seek out new
sources of innovation.

To sum up, it is important to bear in mind that we are only at the beginning of this
robotic air and that progress on artificial intelligence is constantly fluctuating. While
bots still have a lot of room for improvement in their task execution process, the current
achievements already represent an important breakthrough in the technological field
and a more important innovation in the world of corporate customer services.
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6. CONCLUSION

As Tony Zambito, the Lead authority in Buyer personas, said, “Instead of using
technology to automate processes, think about using technology to enhance human
interaction.”17

Chatbots is the perfect technology to respond to Mr. Zambito. Technology such as

Chatbot will deliver the longing of human interaction. In this report we saw the leading
company in chatbots, Motion AI bought by HubSpot in the year 2017, that not only
apply the usage of chatbot in their own company but also into one of their offered
products to their clients which are mostly growing start-ups. This technology is a
revolution for Customer Relation Management (CRM) and customer marketing
because it is useful to collect customer feedback but also propose customer service
tools that improve customer experience and reduce support costs. Moreover, it can
replace humans in ways as bots can answer questions faster and 24/7 without
companies having to pay over-time.

We have also seen that bots can handle a large number of interactions at once and
offer clear responses to simple queries. They can be used to attract visitors and
convert them to leads at the top of the acquisition funnel. We have elaborated how
ToFu, MoFu and BoFu works and how Hotspot put it into action. As Chatbots is useful
for gathering data about the user and establishing connection with the business, they
might endanger the potential or even existing relationship a company is building with
their customers as they will be the first contact customers have with the company.

We have discovered that chatbots are not capable of comprehending the whole range
of human behavior. With the danger at hand, we sectioned the market, proposed
different industries with conditions and gave our analysis which funnel would be best
for chatbots, all things considered.

The path to truly intelligent AI will be lengthy and tough, and many people are fearful
of AI's progress. However, AI's future seems bright in terms of better understanding
human wants as they are working with factual data which is rational rather than playing
with human’s irrationality. Without even mentioning it further, Chatbot is already a
breakthrough in the tech CRM and there is no doubt it will be the ultimate gamechanger
on the impact it will bring to companies in terms of cost for the future.

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7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
1
Gilchrist, K (2017), “chatbots expected to cut business costs by $8 billion by 2022”,
available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/09/chatbots-expected-to-cut-business-
costs-by-8-billion-by-2022.html/ accessed 19.10.2021
2
Smith, M (2021), “111 Customer Service Statistics and Facts You Shouldn’t Ignore”,
available at: https://www.helpscout.com/75-customer-service-facts-quotes-
statistics//accessed 19.10.2021
3
Cision News (2021), “HubSpot Signs Agreement to Acquire The Hustle, Adding
Content to Help Scaling Companies Grow Better”, available at:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hubspot-signs-agreement-to-acquire-
the-hustle-adding-content-to-help-scaling-companies-grow-better-301221703.html
/accessed 19.10.2021
4
Crunchbase (2021), “List of HubSpot’s 13 Acquisitions”, available at:
https://www.crunchbase.com/search/acquisitions/field/organizations/num_acquisition
s/hubspot /accessed 19.10.2021

5 Sixandflow (2021), “Why use HubSpot?”, available at:

https://www.sixandflow.com/why-use-hubspot /accessed 19.10.2021
6
Todays Eggspert (2021), “HubSpot CRM Review”, available at:
https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/hubspot-crm-review/ /accessed 19.10.2021
7
Molnár and Zoltán (2018), available at:
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8
Powton, M (2018), “A visional history of chatbots”, available at:
https://chatbotsmagazine.com/a-visual-history-of-chatbots-8bf3b31dbfb2 / accessed
17.10.2021
9
Srinivasan et al., (2018) “Accenture Digital report - chatbots are here to stay”,
available at: https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-77/accenture-research-
conversational-ai-platforms.pdf / accessed 17.10.2021
10
MIT Technology review (2018) “How top global brands blend human skills and AI to
build customer intimacy and drive growth.”, available at:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/14/239924/humans-bots-tension-and-
opportunity/ /accessed 17.10.2021
11
Moore, S (2018), “Gartner Says 25 Percent of Customer Service Operations Will
Use Virtual Customer Assistants by 2020”, available at:
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-02-19-gartner-says-25-
percent-of-customer-service-operations-will-use-virtual-customer-assistants-by-2020
/accessed 17.10.2021
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Customer Management and Technology
12
Avery and Steenburgh (2019), “HubSpot and Motion AI: Chatbot-Enabled CRM”
working paper, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Boston, 22 October.
13
Liveperson, Inc. (2019), “Nearly two-thirds of consumers worldwide say they’d like
the ability to message with brands, according to LivePerson’s Consumer Preferences
for Conversational survey”, available at :
https://pr.liveperson.com/index.php?s=43&item=587 (accessed October 2021)
14
Raj, S. (2018), Building Chatbots with Phyton : Using Natural Language
Processing and Machine Learning, Apress, New York City.
15
Leonhard, G (2019), “Preparing For Tomorrow's Workforce In A World Run By
Machines”, available at :
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/03/25/preparing-for-tomorrows-
workforce-in-a-world-run-by-machines/ (accessed October 2021)

16
Rindell, M (2020) “The best customer service tools in 2021 a comprehensive
guide”, available at : https://www.getjenny.com/blog/the-best-customer-service-tools-
in-2020 (accessed October 2021)
17
Bhat, U (2019) “ 7 Ways Social Media Automation Can enhance interaction with
Audience”, available at : https://www.cloohawk.com/blog/7-ways-social-media-
automation-can-enhance-interaction-audience (accessed October 2021)

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8. REFERENCES

Ha, A (2017), “HubSpot acquires chatbot builder Motion AI”, available at:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/20/hubspot-acquires-motion-
ai/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_ref
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Verstegen, C (2017), “The Pros and Cons of chatbots ”, available at:

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Rajnerowicz, K (2021), “30+ Best Brainy Quotes About chatbots and Technology”,
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Business Wire (2021), “Nine in 10 Americans Believe Bots Will Be Important for the
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Marketing Charts (2018), “Potential Benefits of Using Chatbots, per Consumers”,

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feb2018 / accessed 19.10.2021

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9. APPENDIX

2.1 Features of Product: Marketing Software

2.2 Features of Product: Sales Software

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2.3 Features of Product: Customer Service Software

2.4 Features of Product

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2.5 Features of Product: Operation Software