Calling Adoption for Sales and Service Teams

Foreign.

I'm Sarah Hall, I am product manager on the calling group. Specifically my team, the manager team, we oversee most of the pre call, post call. What does that mean? So essentially anything regarding like setup, number acquisition, all the way to like analyzing your call data. My team overseas, we have three teams on the group. So anything fully covering from our first party, which is calling inside of the HubSpot platform, all the way to our calling apps and to dig in a little bit more today and learn from users as far as how you're adopting calling and how you use it for.

Your want to be able to like earn your port and your port makes sense to bring here because we, you need to have the functionality you need to have before we even want to focus time and effort on porting. Right, Totally makes sense. Yeah. Our roofers though, they, they need their legacy numbers, that's for sure, because they're out there in the world and in their communities.

One point I would do want to double back on. You mentioned sms, obviously the combined functionality with SMS and the voice capabilities of that line. How I don't know. Also gauging how many other customers are impacted from that. Like even if the porting availability that we do have right now is for us, however, if you already have the SMS set up with our other marketing feature, that's not a combined number. So I'm just trying to what, what's the pain point there with anyone? I just put in the chat, but that is a blocker like the SMS and the voice being the same line from. From you.

Yeah. For us it's very, very important to be able to have like say the messaging. The SMS and the MMS messaging come from the rep who's assigned to the HubSpot user property. So like let's say we have a home inspection that we're going to go do we want the actual human that's going to come. You know, if I had my voice changer, I'd do the George B. Thomas humans, you know, as he does it. But I didn't have that set up. I wasn't prepared anyway. Yeah. So if we do the rep who's actually on their way to say a home services appointment, right, we're going to do an inspection on your roof. It's coming from the phone number of the person who's going to go climb on your roof so you can actually text message them if there's a problem instead of some shared number. And then the customer experience just goes down the tank because it goes to a support team and they have no idea where this person is because the stuff isn't all completely integrated. Right. So it's very important for those workflow automations to deal with user based SMS and call routing and like send as this person, which a lot of like sales message really does. Well, I would say take some stuff from their playbook if you're going to be trying to model things especially with SMS and mms.

Got it, got it.

Thank you for sharing that. The use case. That's super helpful to kind of dig into the functionality there. So I'll dig into porting just to like I'll detail everything at the end as far as the roadmap of where we are for the manual side and for us based numbers. But one other thing that kind of spark and I want to move to the jumping around here. But as far as like measuring the impact of business, this is for, for everyone. Chad mentioned lead sourcing and being able to see that based off of that ported number or even if it's not a ported number, let's say it's a new HubSpot number that you generate. I want to kind of dig into like what are the key metrics that you all are using to measure performance of your teams right now, how you're doing that in whatever calling tool that you're using. I'd love to hear a little bit more about those specific metrics and how you're using them, what the key ones are. You could throw it in the chat or we'll raise your hand. I know talking about data is always fun. So excited.

Leads, deals.

Okay.

Or I mean Sarah, I don't know if this is helpful but if you don't currently have a way of measuring these key metrics, what would ideal metrics look like? What would you, what would you like to see?

Okay, that's interesting. We have to look at call outcome.

Okay.

I'd love to dig into call outcome as well. That's a big one. I have a whole nother like call that I want to do around call outcome versus call status. I really want to dig into that a lot more with with customers creating causes, leads and associating leads.

Okay.

So kind of as we suspect, leads to calls to leads or calls to tickets, close deals, close deals, close tickets for sales and supports. Teams also export call outcomes. Yeah, hearing a lot of call outcomes is the call outcomes usually that's usually with more sales driven teams. But I'm curious, I don't know the mix of everyone's business. I don't think we got full clarity on that part, calls by time of day, a week when.

Okay, awesome.

Okay, thanks. Yeah, thanks for mixing those in. So circling back to the other, the other question as far as growth, and it's a little out of order, but given that a lot of your team sounds like they're already using a third party or their teams haven't fully migrated over to HubSpot because they're a larger team. We know with things with AI this year and the way that scale is happening across different industries, I'd be curious to hear like how you all envision growth with some of your call teams if they're not a call center. Like, that's not. They don't have to be specifically that large. But how are you anticipating the growth of your teams or your call operations in the next year? And what can we do? Like, what would you like to see ideally from HubSpot calling as a platform to be able to account for that growth? Or what functionalities would you need?

And I think.

Oh, Francis is actually so Francis in the chat as well. Francis is our senior pm. I'm calling. I don't know if he's asking that specifically to someone. If he's asking.

Reporting on data, please make call types mandatory.

Okay, I see those call types for reporting. Extending the call object autodialer. We get auto dialer a lot on the roadmap.

Folks who need the call object.

Okay, so it sounds like call object, call object structure is a big piece along with the ability for auto dialer inbound calling.

Okay.

And voicemail drops. Okay, so voicemail drops, auto power, power auto dialer. These are consistently coming up. Customization of the call object is a big piece. So it sounds like those are the big, big pieces that are preventing teams from doing like operational scaling inside of HubSpot. If I'm getting reading that correctly.

Talk about in the call.

Okay. Okay.

So a lot of auto dialer feedback. That makes sense. We'll cover that a little bit towards the end when we're going over the roadmap. That is something that is on the roadmap for the power dialer piece. We're very aware of like the necessity for that, not only for sales teams mostly, but just being able to have that option queued up also with voicemail drops. I know that's been in the community for years now of trying to figure out how to get that live to customers. We worked on the customization of voicemail first, but we'll circle back to that. That is still on the roadmap. But I don't have an ETA on that inside the dialer? Yeah. You have a voicemail.

Okay.

Call based workflows.

Got it. Okay. Okay.

Just reading through some of these comments. Let me go to the next set of questions. Just being conscious of time. I think this could lead to a lot of feedback here. Kind of open question around AI. So just giving you a very brief preview of what we have in the works for AI. Currently working on some voice bot functionality that will be plugged into ivr. So there's an AI component there with Q and A, so we're working on that. We also have call summaries which is already live and then Next Best Actions which is going to expand on that. And then there's some other capabilities we're looking to plug in as well with AI features for call data. But I'd love to hear if anyone's using any like AI specific features in your other calling tools or what AI specific capabilities would you like to see in HubSpot regarding our calling features? Sentiment analysis, call summary with action items outlined.

Yes.

So yeah, Next Best Actions is something we are working on actively. Bethany. There's. It's actually in a beta right now, but we're looking on expanding on that. That comes up quite often using AI parallel being.

Okay.

Sentiment analysis is a very big one. I know that's across the board. Just in general, it's all not just really relegated to calling but that's definitely something we definitely want to work on. I guess I've doubled out on that. What is, what's. Are there key things you'd like to see in sentiment analysis? I know a lot of the feedback we get is like just replicated by Gong, but I'd like to know more specifically, like what key things are you trying to pull out of that analysis? If you want to expand on that chat or if anyone else has any.

Feedback concerned about sharing data with OpenAI.

Okay, Courtney, that's. That's interesting. I don't know if you want to expand on that or if you want to share more about the privacy concerns with it.

She's open to hopping on.

Courtney, I'm giving you the option to unmute and come on. But no pressure. If you don't actually want to.

No pressure. This was very curious. No, I think you're on mute if you are going to share. If not, I can move. I can move on again, no pressure.

Kristoff, I'm curious about this checklist object. What that would look like, where that would live.

I don't know.

He's hopped on.

Okay.

Look for these things in our calls with the discovery call type and score them on a five. That's interesting as well, Waylon.

So, summary.

Okay.

Looking at key properties, I'm assuming Wayland and. Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, so score.

Okay.

Score the calls based off of that tag calls.

Okay, I got it.

Courtney. I'm gonna follow up with that. I don't know if Francis's question is fully being, but when it comes to interacting with AI features in HubSpot, what are some thoughts around conversational interface? That's an open question for anyone as well.

Okay.

I'm seeing a lot, yeah. A lot around the privacy piece. Just being able to expand on that and whether we're going to use your data to better train our models that that piece we can, we can expand on.

Okay.

Just in general, sorry to take the focus away just a minute, but there's a. We've created a website behind hubspotai.com where you can see how AI models are trained and what third parties we're working with. I'm dropping in a link to the specific one for call summaries, but it's a good website to just explore and get a lot of questions answered.

Yeah.

Okay.

So privacy concerns with AI, but also call sentiment and then more of giving a summarization of the types of calls, scoring them automatically. I think we've mentioned something similar to what Wayland suggested, but am I missing any other AI capabilities you'd expect to see or any other feedback anyone else has there?

Cool.

I'm going to keep it moving, go through the questions, and then I'm sure we're going to have a ton of additional questions when we kind of go through the roadmap.

Sorry, Accepts.

This is very interesting, James. This has come up before from over a copilot type of setup, so definitely notate that.

Okay.

All right, that makes sense. Awesome. So I'm going to move from AI over to integrations to make sure we're covering all of our calling functionality capabilities. Everyone has pretty much mentioned that they are either working with a third party or they have a partner or a client that's worked with a third party. So I'd love to dig a little bit more into specific calling integrations that you currently rely on or that you have tried to navigate to HubSpot calling and had to move back to another one. I'd like to hear specifically like what you're using and what they offer that. What they offer that you all had to use the third party for that HubSpot's not currently enabling or again, if it's not even a competitive thing, when you look at like Aircall, who is a strategic partner of ours, what is working well with that integration with HubSpot calling and what would you like to see to better enable that integration? That's a two part question. I'm happy to break it down.

Okay.

And then Chad, I forgot which, which integration you said you were using currently.

True. Okay, got it, got it. Okay.

Any other integration users? I know there were quite a few in there that. Yeah, just what's not working with the integration? I think someone else mentioned in the chat I'd have to go back through, they had an integration that wasn't working well. Kixie's come up.

Okay.

Actually our new pm, we have a new senior PM who's on the calling team actually has a background. They came from Ringcentral. So I'm excited for us to continue to work on that Christy, and expand that integration and that partnership. I know they've come up before with some issues. Is there specifically, is it just quality performance issues that you're seeing with integration or are there like actual functionalities you'd like to see us enable between HubSpot and RingCentral?

Bubble.

I'm not familiar with Bubble J. I grew up with Mattel system.

Okay.

They're calling Sakari.

Got it.

Okay, thank you, Christie.

Massive paint.

Okay, got it.

Cloud Talk as well.

Okay.

I'm hearing RingCentral consistency again features in.

A part of General App.

Okay.

Is there anyone that's just using that's, that's using like our APIs like custom built things and not using any of our integration partners. Is there anyone on the call that's doing that or. Yes, just the calling SDK. Yeah.

Chad. Okay. Okay. All right.

So it looks like I'm getting some consistent feedback as far as like RingCentral has come up quite a bit and looks like call quality connection and I.

Could talk this via API.

Okay.

Custom objects, Twilio integration, the default with Twilio connect. Okay. And CloudTalk came up with EU capabilities.

So we'll take a look at that.

Okay, got it. Okay. Awesome.

Sorry, just trying to keep up in the comments. This is a good feedback for us to kind of notate and figure out what some of these partnerships and kind of get a sense of what you're currently using. So just continuing in that train as far as capabilities that aren't in the system for integrations, kind of one of the last things I want to uncover from everyone is Are there specific call features that you believe would improve your customer satisfaction with your teams using calling? And then the second part is the biggest challenges that your teams are facing in your day to day calling operations. So again, doesn't have to be specific to someone, something you face when using HubSpot calling. But what are the kind of those key things in those key areas that are limiting your customer satisfaction or limiting your operations with calling?

Frank, I'm looking at your comment too. I'll take a look at that.

I don't know if anyone wants to share their feedback on the calling needs or what you think would improve. Obviously a go to would be like, hey, let's put CSAT inside of HubSpot calling. That is something on the roadmap that could be like key number one. But specifically like any features that you know 100% like, your customer satisfaction would improve if we offer this with HubSpot calling, sending the CSAT. Yeah, that's. We talked through that. We're getting that. It's on the roadmap. We're working through functionality of it now. But yeah, that's something we definitely want to get as soon as possible. One to one sms.

Okay.

Sms.

Microsoft Teams. That part I'll have to take a look at. I know there's two. There's a split of the functionality of it. So you have to take a look at that as far as callback options. A lot of sms. Sms. So I feel like the winners of of the feedback here are custom objects. Voicemail, drop, auto dialer and sms. I feel like those are both the four takeaways that I'm gauging correctly. Porting. Sorry, Forgot the key.

1.

Top five. Like that's the top five to enable your teams. Yeah, porting, SMS, auto dialer, voicemail drops and then custom objects. Obviously privacy concerns as well. We'll take a look at some of those with some of the AI components. So that's completely understandable requirements for us to consider. Okay, I'm interested Adam, if you are open to hopping on what's the mix of your team because I just want to confirm kind of the assumptions we have around voicemail drops and sms. Is it mostly sales driven? Like what's your customer base in what industry? No pressure, you can throw it in the chat.

Adam.

And Peter. Yeah, I know the split of the inbound outbound calls that's come up quite a bit. If anyone else has that feedback as well, please throw that in the chat for the different call recording functionalities. If everyone is not aware right now Call recording is all or nothing. It encompasses both directions when you enable it to clarify voicemail drops is the ability to leave a prerecorded voicemail and have your team, your rep, make outbound calls and drop those voicemails to users.

Produce a transcript but also use AI score call centimeter.

Okay.

Yeah, that's great feedback Frank. 95% about calling. Thank you Adam. Yeah, okay. Just just want to confirm our assumptions of the the the voicemail drop needs and how those teams are structured so that makes sense. Heavy outbound.

Okay.

Sms.

Okay.

Continue to leave comments and feedback in the chat. I do want to hop to any of the Q and A questions that weren't answered before hopping into the roadmap. So fully answering your question Chad, initially when is porting going to be an option? So currently right now there's a manual solution for us, only numbers. If that is of interest or something that you need or one of your customers, your clients need, let me know. I'm happy to share. I don't even know how they can get my email address Kyle, but I'm happy to share my email address and send you over the information. It's basically a beta. We would send that information over to you, the customer would do their CSR and LOA form and then from there it would be a manual process for us to go in, submit the application and then Twilio would start the porting again. It is US based only customers. We're not able to expand on international at this time. We're continuing to build out the actual UI in the platform and finishing up the APIs. But in the meantime we're happy to unblock anyone that needs to move over with porting. So if that answers the porting question, that's the partial answer to it. Right now it's available US based manual. You just need to make sure connecting with me and then I'll see how that process for yourself or your clients. Other questions 113 Sorry, can you provide insights on SMS and MMS with HubSpot? I don't have any clarity on that chat. I'll likely test tag in with Eric who's the PM overseeing the SMS side. I think I can get you some better answers there as far as how.

That works with workflows.

Also Chad voicemail drops it has been on the community page for quite some time. I know I'm a part of that that page. I get tagged in it quite often. I don't have an ETA of like when that is going to be available. I know we wanted to work on just the customization of voicemails and everything first and also some recording settings. But it is still on the roadmap. Just back a bit as far as when we'd be able to deliver it. But it is something we continually look at and try to figure out priority for voicemail drops. Let me know if that answers those three questions that awesome.

Cool.

And then moving on through the rest of the Q and A, there was a question around number availability. So Michael, we do currently have Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It's in public beta. You can go into your account right now and join the beta and then you can acquire numbers for those countries. You just have to have business documentation. So it is for local number types only. It's not for individuals. But yeah, you can go in right now and opt in for those countries and submit your documentation all inside of HubSpot. Michael, are you. Are we asking about video recording? I'm assuming Michael Wilson. I don't know if he can hop on.

Is Michael still here?

I don't know. Okay.

I don't know if Michael's still on. I'm assuming you're asking about video calling that is on the roadmap as well. Just exploring what that looks like. But I'd love to dig a little bit more into the call intelligence part of it and what specifically. I want to make sure I'm on the right track with your question. So if you are still here, Michael, or feel free to follow up. Yes, it's on the roadmap. No specifics, but I'd love to dig more into what your team needs for video calling as we're starting to draft that out. And then last one J transfer calls to non HubSpot numbers in the future.

With teams who aren't in HubSpot.

I have a follow up question on this, Jay. I don't know if you're able to hop on or throw it in the chat. Are you using a current IVR system? Like are you. Are your calls. Are your calls routed through IVR and then you transfer out or do your teams use extensions? Jamie not be here either.

Okay. Meets on the bottom left.

Oh, is it? Okay, so we have transfers that are close to beta, I believe right now we're doing transfers right now in a beta form. But as far as being able to transfer out, that's not there yet. But essentially kind of. To answer your question in two parts, we are working on the ability to dial out from our IVR feature. So if you haven't explored IVR yet, it's basically our call routing system for sales and service enterprise users. You can go in, set up your call routing and then eventually in our next phase, we like the ability for you to dial out to an extension. Excuse me, dial out to another number. Now, as far as transferring, like transferring from in between rep to rep, that's in beta right now, and then being able to transfer to another outside person, that would be similar to dialing out. So I don't have a full ETA on that yet, but it is something we are definitely open to exploring. Jay, so I'd love to talk more with you as well about specifically what you need for that and how your teams are using your routing.

Cool.

I don't know, I'll go ahead and throw. Maybe it just makes it easier just to go ahead and throw my email in the chat because I don't know how much access I'll have to everyone who was an attendee if I'll have access to the list. But I'll throw my email in there. Feel free to go ahead and tag that. Jay and Michael, if you're still on the call, I'd love to talk to you more about the video calling. Cool, I'll stop there. I know there's a lot of questions, a lot of different feedback trying to filter through if there's anything else anyone wants to leave feedback on as far as your team calling usage and your sales service teams. If not, then I'm going to hop into the roadmap a bit more. Oh yeah, I don't know.

With Bevy Chat, you please refer back in the survey.

Oh, I was like, okay, sorry. Awesome. So let me move on to the last slide. Being cognizant of time. All right, so all the questions as far as what you're currently using, how you'd like to see it being used, and what's on the roadmap. So we just expanded a little bit on porting. What's to come. What's to come with video calling and transfers. Other pieces that we're working on includes bringing in Contact center into Help Desk. So again, what's live right now is the calling app functionality. So if you have Air Call, you're able to go in, ungate yourself and connect your Air Call integration to inbound calling in the Help desk. That's going to expand into other calling apps later throughout the year and on throughout 2025. So just call Kixie. All of our other calling partners that are going to be on board would also have the functionality. The other side of that is like Contact center. So Contact center integrations like Genesis, we're looking to bring them on board and have that same functionality enabled in Help Desk with their calling experience. So that's also on the roadmap getting those two moving. AI Assistant so again a lot of AI functionality is across the board something we're continuing to work on new ideas, improving functionality. So one aspect of that is going to be with next action. So again we have the Call Summary tab where you can click on it, get a quick summary of the transcript from there. We'd like to improve the AI functionalities with next best actions on that and all of your post call data. Also international number expansion. So as we just mentioned in the previous Q and A we have Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand. Those currently went to public beta a couple weeks ago. Our next focus is to expand on France, Japan and Denmark. Those have a little bit more complex documentation requirements, but those will be the ones we'll focus on next and then continuing to expand on other countries. I know there's a long list in the community that everyone wants to solve for, so if you have any you can also throw them in the chat as well or on the community page. We're just continuing to knock those list of countries out. So also for outbound as well, I know that there's some other countries that people want to be able to dial out to, so we're continuing to evaluate those at all times. The other piece is Omnichannel so just looking at skills based routing comes up quite a bit. So not only in the IVR system but just in general skills based routing options when you have team calling additional ring types. Because right now the way that you are rung if you have a calling channel on inbox or help desk is a simultaneous ring will ring up to 100 reps. So it's definitely solving for your teams, your large teams. But we also get continuous feedback that people want to have more of a round robin or next available ring type. So continue to expand on those and look into those solutions as well as things like call cues alongside. Oh yeah. So everything figuring those out for call queues is what we want to do and continue to expand on the Omni channel experience there.

Awesome.

Yeah. And then phone number reporting just expanded on that again, very excited. I threw my email in there. So just let us know if we can solve for any of the US pieces in the international we'll be taking a look at after we go live with the U.S. portion. And then the other pieces are call data. So I know we talked a little bit about what you all kind of use your key metrics for how you use reporting for your teams. So we're continuing to expand on call analytics page. Also, what insights you need to see inside of help desk for your team. So what spaces are you using as managers? Actually, I want to pause there because I didn't ask that question. I'm assuming most of your roles are manager led and you are doing a lot of the setup. Curious. Like what spaces you're primarily working in. And when I say spaces, are you on the call index page when you log in, are you on the contact page? Are you on the call review page? Like what areas are you primarily looking at for your teams to evaluate their data and their performance? Dashboards.

Yeah.

Is the box also dashboards device or is that something else? I don't know.

Okay.

Dashboards are interesting. That makes sense. A lot of your first login is your custom built dashboard.

Okay.

So yeah, so exploring different areas to put that data right in front of you so you can immediately analyze your calling, your team's performance on their calls.

Okay.

I think Parker. Yes and no. I'll take another look at this though. I know that that's brought up when we launched the unified events in the workflows earlier last year, but I'll take a look. I know as far as like additional workflow actions has come up quite a bit. So that's something we'll definitely need to.

Circle back to dashboards with calls and contacts.

Oh, interesting. If you don't mind. Is it. David, can you expand on using reports in Excel? Are you exporting reports from HubSpot or you're like creating your own custom reports due to lack of data?

Hello, can you hear me? Yes, yes. So for traceability, we ask our sales reps to enter their calls in an Excel to make sure that this match actually what's on the dashboard. So yes, it is a bit of a double work like this. We can track also the reachability of the calls because at the moment we are a bit struggling also with reachability and with the different call tags. So in Excel it's much easier to do this.

That's interesting. Is it that the you're saying the actual outbound calls that they're placing, you're not able to tag them as you would like in HubSpot, So that's why you want to use an Excel sheet or is it just.

Yeah, correct.

Got it.

Okay.

Yeah, I'd love to chat with you more about that. Anything we can do to kind of Eliminate a double process, especially with if it's something as simple as creating a new call property or whatever that missing piece is. I'd love to hear a little bit more if you're open to hopping on a call.

Yeah, I'll definitely send you a message then. Thanks.

Awesome.

Thank you so much. Yes, correct. Chad, it does not work for third party right now for unified events. That's another thing we have to circle back and iterate on right now it was just first party for those events. So that is a known limitation. But yeah, we'll definitely keep an eye on that. Bethany, you also export calls call volume by week. Interesting. Do you mind having on like very quickly, Bethany, explain it? I'm always curious like anytime you have to go outside of HubSpot to do your analysis, we want to fix that like as soon as possible. No worries, no worries. Yeah, if you don't mind as well, Bethany, my email in there. I'd love to like hear a little bit more about that process. Even if you don't want to hop on a call. Just like kind of expanding on what that export process is. Yeah, we can talk through some solutions and like what our call data looks like. Awesome, thank you. Oh, awesome. Sorry. Jumping over to the last part of like calling, calling product roadmap, AI again, AI agents and voice bots again, big focus here. I'm super excited for when we reach the point where we have VoiceBots integrated with IVR. That's going to be the first iteration of it and what it's going to enable your teams to do is have basically two processes for an ivr. So you have the voice capability and then you'll have the touch tone capability which is pretty common with most of your day to day uses. If you call Apple or any other Macy's, anybody else you call in and you're going to have that ability to be routed. And we want to make sure that we have the most advanced Q and A experience for your users. And so that's what Voicebox is going to be doing in this first phase of it and just allowing you to have different options to have more of an AI fully integrated routing experience with your team. So that's kind of the last part of where we're focused right now for the roadmap. Again, dates vary here, but this is kind of the main focus for 2024, obviously not excluding SMS and all the other things that you all have mentioned as far as roadblocks, custom objects. So those are all things we'll continue to expand on and dig a little bit more into. I'll stop there. Yes, I'm happy to share this slide. I'll take out the questions that were in the middle, and I'll share these two pieces to you. To everyone. Again, the dates are subject to change. Just keeping that in mind, but definitely we'll share this with everyone.

Amazing. Well, thanks so much, Sarah, for coming. Everyone, thanks so much for participating. I'll be sharing the. I'll be exporting out the chat and Q and A and sharing that with Sarah and her team. So if any of your questions didn't get answered, they will be seeing them. And you are all free to reach out to Sarah directly. So with that, we're gonna call it a day. Thanks so much for being here and hope to see you all back next.