Hey there! So HubSpot recently launched its AI offering through Breeze AI, and honestly, it's pretty impressive. If you're on Sales Professional and above, Marketing Professional and above, or Service Professional and above, you can now create a customer agent that works automatically without any human intervention.
What does this mean for you? Well, this AI agent will handle all your customer and prospect queries on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or your website chat - automatically. You'll only need to step in when the AI can't answer something properly. Pretty neat, right?
Let me walk you through how to set this up because it's actually quite straightforward.
Getting Started
First things first - head over to your Service app and click on "Customer Agent." Once you're there, you'll need to go to the "Manage" tab to start configuring everything.
Step 1: Agent Identity
This is where you set up the basics:
- Name your agent - call it whatever makes sense for your business
- Upload an avatar - I'd recommend using your company logo here
- Choose a role - you can pick from three different roles depending on what you want the chatbot to do. For this example, we'll go with customer support
- Set the personality - you can choose friendly, professional, or even set up your own brand voice that the AI will adopt
Step 2: Knowledge Sources (This is the Important Part!)
Here's where things get interesting. The knowledge sources are basically the brain of your AI customer agent. Everything the AI says to your customers will come from what you configure here.
You have several options to add content:
Content in HubSpot: If you have landing pages or your website hosted on HubSpot, you can easily add all of that content.
External files: Got presentations, PDFs, or text files? Upload them here.
Public URL: This one's really cool. If you just put in your main company URL (like "yourcompany.com"), the AI will automatically import content from all the pages linked to that main URL. So everything under your main domain gets pulled in automatically.
Short answers: If you have frequently asked questions, you can add those directly with their answers.
Knowledge base: If you're on Service Hub Professional and above, every article in your knowledge base gets automatically linked to the agent.
Step 3: Handoff Rules
You can customize all the messages your chatbot shows customers - when your team is available, out of capacity, away, or outside working hours. Pretty handy for managing expectations.
Step 4: Triggers (Smart Handoffs)
Here's something really smart. Let's say you're running an ecommerce business and get lots of refund requests or complaints. You can set up triggers so that when customers type words like "refund," "unhappy," or "frustrated," the conversation automatically gets handed off to a human agent. This ensures your upset customers get the human touch they need.
Step 5: Deployment
Once everything's configured, you can deploy your agent to:
- Facebook Messenger
- Your website chat
You'll also need to decide when it should hand off to a human agent - either as soon as it can't answer something (if an agent is available), or have it continue trying to help on its own.
Monitoring Performance
After deployment, you can track:
- Number of conversations resolved
- Human handoffs
- Performance metrics
But here's the really cool part - the system identifies knowledge gaps. If there are questions your AI couldn't answer, they'll show up in a special section. You can then manually add answers to those questions, and the AI will be able to handle similar queries in the future.
Final Thoughts
The HubSpot AI Customer Agent is pretty straightforward to set up, and honestly, it can save you tons of time on repetitive customer queries. Your prospects and customers get instant answers 24/7, and you only have to jump in when things get complex.
The setup literally takes just a few minutes, and once it's running, it works like any other chat widget - sitting in the bottom right corner of your website, ready to help anyone who visits.
If you need help setting this up or have any questions about getting the most out of HubSpot for your business, feel free to reach out. I'm always happy to help!
