HubSpot and Motion AI: Chatbot-Enabled CRM

Name: HubSpot and Motion AI: Chatbot-Enabled CRM (English version)
SKU: 518067

Avery, Jill; Steenburgh, Thomas

Product #:518067

Supplier:Harvard Business School

Discipline:Marketing

Setting:North America;United States, 2018

Details:Case (PDF) • 24 pages • 2018-02-12 (Rev: 2019-10-22)

Subjects:

Branding Customer relationship management Customer service Marketing Marketing channels Marketing strategy Sales Sales management Service management Strategy Brand management Customer experience Sales and marketing Business management Sales and marketing Marketing

Geography:

North America United States

Your Price:

$11.64

Purchase this material with a free Educator Account and enjoy more benefits:

Free Educator Copy
Free Teaching Notes
Build your coursepack
Discounted academic price

HubSpot, an inbound marketing, sales, and customer relationship management (CRM) software provider, announced that it had acquired Motion AI, a software platform that enabled companies to easily build and deploy chatbots, fueled by artificial intelligence, to interact with their customers. Before unleashing bot-building technology to its B2B customers, HubSpot first needed to develop some best practices for the use of chatbots for CRM. First, the team had to clearly assess the trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency associated with the use of bots versus humans to create, nurture, and manage customer relationships. Second, they had to decide to what extent to anthropomorphize the chatbots. How human-like should they be? Was a conversational user interface (UI) the desired solution for B2B CRM or would a stripped down, more functional UI produce more efficiency for the customers who interacted with the bot? Historically, HubSpot had "practiced what it preached," using its own products to build its business. The team had to consider whether to use chatbots to nurture and service its own customer relationships and manage the effectiveness and efficiency of its sales funnel. Currently, a team of chat representatives worked with marketing to qualify and prime prospects for HubSpot's sales team. Could they and should they be replaced with chatbots? Was HubSpot ready for bots to become the face of its brand to its prospective customers?

Learning Objectives

The case can be used in a marketing management course in a module on sales management or customer relationship management. It may also be used in a customer relationship management course, a sales management course, or a business-to-business marketing course. The specific teaching objectives include: To understand how customer relationships are created, nurtured, and built by firms through customer relationship management programs and to explore how customers' relational needs and preferences are anticipated by, interpreted by, and responded to by firms; To explore the effectiveness and efficiency trade-offs associated with replacing human customer service representatives with artificial intelligence-driven chatbots; To enable students to understand the marketing and selling opportunities and challenges associated with different phases of the customer funnel and to understand how firms build, nurture, and support relationships with their prospective customers in each step; To reinforce concepts related to sales strategy and the selling process to highlight the importance of a salesperson in a customer's decision journey.