Calling In HubSpot
Sarah Hall and Francis from HubSpot walk through calling features including call recording, transcription, power dialer, and AI customer agents. They answer questions about call spam, consent recording, and upcoming integrations in a live Q&A.
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Welcome to another session of the HubSpot admins hug everyone. This is our Housekeeping page. If you join the upcoming events link you will find all of the new events that are coming up today. We'll be talking about calling next week Video. We will have some sort of session that happens during Inbound still to be determined, but the following week we're going to be talking Breeze and all of the things that happen with Breeze at Inbound. The week after that we're going to be chatting about Commerce Hug and we've got a ton of other events lined up to share all of the amazing things that are happening during Inbound next month. If you do miss a session, that's okay. We've got all of our recordings on the YouTube channel. Apologies for last week's session. Apparently I put the wrong link on there. I will make sure do a better job if you are looking to connect with your fellow admins, we do have a LinkedIn group where you can go share resources, find other tools and things that admins are using. Go ahead and make use of that for all your admin connection needs. We also do have a space on the HubSpot community. I have been asked to put the recordings back there so I'm going to continue doing that. If you need those those resources there. I also had the chance to put the Q and A from last week on here so are looking for any of the questions and answers that happen during the event. You can find all of those there. We also have the show and Tell is ready and available for you all to go ahead and put your show and Tell options that you are working on. Anything amazing that you've been thinking through or you've discovered, come go ahead and share that with the HubSpot user group. What else do we have? We also have the Inbound sessions. If you haven't saved your seat already during the inbound and you're coming if you make sure you go and do that. That opened this morning about an hour ago. The Super Admin Bootcamp also opens this week so on the 15th the registration will open for fall boot camps. The Super Admin Boot Camp. Great Bootcamp to go. Check it out. Learn with your fellow admin if you have any issues during the event. You can't hear sound, something is frozen. Go ahead and try refreshing your browser. If not, you can check out some of these other troubleshooting tools. Definitely. If you've got an idea for an upcoming hug. If you've got a session or a tool that you're looking at or a piece of HubSpot that we haven't talked about yet here on the hug. Go ahead and send those ideas over. Love what you want to learn and what you want to find out here at Edmund Hug. Make sure you're connecting with myself and Kyle. Kyle will be back shortly. Couple more months, a couple more weeks. And then if you are looking for a role or you're looking to hire someone for HubSpot, go ahead and check out the hiring for HubSpot over on LinkedIn. Next event will be video and I will bring it over to Sarah and Francis. Go ahead and take it away my friends.
Awesome. All right, I'll go ahead and share my screen. Sarah just went through this. Cool. All right, let me know if you guys can see that.
Looks great.
Awesome.
Well, I'm Francis. I'm One of the PMs over at HubSpot working on calling. I've been at HubSpot for little over nine years now working on a couple different products and I'll let Sarah introduce herself.
Everyone, I'm Sarah hall, product manager on Calling as well and I've been in HubSpot since 2021, so almost, almost the five year mark coming up soon.
Awesome. And so Sarah and I are here to talk to you guys about everything Calling. We'll give a quick overview of what we have in terms of today's platform and then we'll walk through some demos for some of the exciting new features that we've been working on in prep for Inbound and Beyond and then we'll open it up to some Q and A. Here's some of your thoughts, concerns and then take any questions that we have about what we show you today. So without further ado, we'll kind of kick into the existing current state. We'll also keep an eye on the chat. I think we'll keep the presentation pretty formal, so if you have media questions, feel free to pop in there as well. But when we look at the calling landscape today we have a phone so bidirectional calling that works today in the browser. And recently I think as of this month we now also have a similar bi directional experience happening on the mobile app as well. Inbound outbound calls are logged, calls are recorded and we capture that all logged in the CRM and associate data across different records. Next I'll kick it off to Sarah to talk about some of the other features below.
Yeah, so we also have call recording, call transcription and analysis, what most of you probably refer to as conversation intelligence. We have a very big initiative that we want to do some major upgrades and updates to our Conversation Intelligence tool and make sure it's not just sales like sales centric and really kind of spread out the functionality there, add some more features. But in its use today, you can access a transcript, you can view call summaries, you can utilize track terms, you can see questions and insights on the calls. And then we'll have our call recording, which when you turn the setting on, you can capture all of your calls inbound and outbound in HubSpot from there, once you have those, the basic settings set up so that you can actually capture the data and do analysis on them. We have IVR as well, which launched in 2024 I believe. Sorry, it seems like ages ago, but IVR is up and running. We're going to continue to iterate on it. But if you do just have just your simple routing where you have an inbound call placed to your main line, you can route to a seated sales or service hub user. And then from there you can also route to one of our team calling workspaces which would be Help Desk or Inbox. And then from there we also have integrations with our third party calling apps, a lot of them you all are probably utilizing already. Air Call, Just Call, Kixie, all of them are integrating with our system. And then we have RingCentral, RingOver, Air Call as well that are integrating with our workspaces like Help Desk, so we're continuing to iterate on that as well. And then lastly, just the expansion of our global nubbing, global number availability. A lot of you that have been with us before 2022, you are aware we didn't even have HubSpot numbers at one point. It would just come in and register your own number. So we're really excited to continue to expand there. We're in over 20 countries as of now and we'll be offering international porting in the next two weeks here. So really excited to expand and allow you to make sure that all of the regions that you solve for that you can go in and acquire or port a number for those regions.
Awesome. And I think I accidentally added a question to the Q and A instead of responding to one there, but cool. So now what we're going to do is walk through some demos, so bear with us. Some of this stuff is still in development actively, so if things break, the caution of presenting live is always there. But one of the first things that I'll walk through here is kind of this new enhanced experience. A lot of this is targeted towards sales reps. But the features are spread out through the platform. So if you recognize this little thing here, this is the new outbound dialer. Right now we use this mainly for inbound calls. There's a few new spaces where folks can use this tool to directly make upon calls when you're floating through the CRM so you're not anchored on a specific record. One of the things that we're working on building now is a power dialer experience, and it involves a couple moving pieces. Again, not all of them will be here, so we'll have to use our imaginations. But the next few weeks we'll start to see this roll out into various beta states where you can start to test this out yourself. But first, we have a list of contacts here that we've added to our power dialer queue. If you've used another power dialer or autodial or tool, this works pretty similarly. We select records. We'll have some validation to make sure that phone numbers and key pieces of information are correct before adding them to this list. In this example, all of these folks passed the validation and now we add them in. Next, you'll be able to choose your number that you're going to be using for dialing here, and then you'll be able to set a quick timer in between calls. So this just means you have time to finish notes, you have time to finish follow ups, anything before you move on to your next conversation. The next feature that we're including in this release is going to be voicemail drops. So if you approach or if you're making an outbound call, you hit someone's voicemail. Instead of sitting there and recording the same message five times, you can now add a pre recorded audio recording and then we'll automatically leave that for you so you can move on to the next call, knowing that your user will still receive a personalized voicemail from you. So now we go ahead and click Start session. Try and do this with as little feedback as possible. We're now inside of our power dialing session here, so I'm connecting with this contact. Joe. You'll notice that my notes appear here, so I don't have to navigate to another record or another space to take my notes. I can do that directly from this call remote here. Next you'll see this new transcript tab because I'm muted right now. Yeah, so it's still coming in unmuted on one end. So we're seeing a one sided conversation, but this is a live transcription of the conversation as it's taking place, so you can refer to this to catch up or follow along as your conversation is evolving. Next up so right now this is another feature that's kind of built in side by side. With the transcription feature we'll have personalized templates for summarizing your call notes. At the end of the call we'll have a couple of templates to start, one that's sales and one that's service suited today. Again, that's a feature that's still under development, but we'll be able to see that soon. Everything else you see about the call here, you'll see a lot of familiar pieces like the Copilot integration where we can chat with Copilot live, get contacts or information about the ongoing conversation of the contact record themselves. We'll also have a Insights tab. Right now we're loading this in with mostly property data, so we'll be able to see things like open deal records, open tickets, latest activity, some other quick snippets of info that are helpful while on the call. And then finally here if we go ahead and hang up on Joe, click done. We'll see that wrap up time pop up. You can feel free to skip it if you want to move on to the next call immediately will start the dial. Finally, one thing I do want to show here is on my personal so this is an example of what it looks like to go through the ring I mentioned earlier. With the experience being mirrored between browser and desktop. You'll see that that call run me directly in the HubSpot mobile app. I have the same call controls here. This contact is just a contact using HubSpot number in another portal. So that kind of wraps up the functionality here. When I end my session we'll hang up click done. End session. We'll give you some helpful stats at the very end. So your connection rate, average talk time and then again voicemail drops is not plugged in yet, but we'll also be able to report on those towards the end of the call. So yeah, I'll stop my demo there and then pass it off to Sarah.
Great.
We'll hope this plays. Not going to do a live one or if we have to, It'll be fine. We can do it. It'll be fine. Can everyone see this?
Hopefully says request access.
All right. All right, well let's pivot. We'll do a live one then. Okay. Just a preference preface here. I do not HubSpot does not have any affiliation with the Grayson Hotel. When you hear the name, it's just A test. I also don't have any affiliation, but I love the hotel. So this is going to be a test of our voice or essentially our calling on customer agent. You may hear it referred to as voice agents in the marketplace or with a lot of my competitors. But because it is coupled, the only way you can set it up is actually setting up our customer agent inside of HubSpot. And customer agent is currently live with live chat. We just went live with the email channels as well. And then calling is a channel as well. So when you set up your customer agent, you'll be able to sign one of your calling channels from your help desk or your inbox, place that inbound call, and then our automated AI agent is going to be able to do a live Q and A pull pulling from your sources, hopefully resolve the ticket. If it can't resolve the ticket, then it's going to be able to transfer to one of your live reps. But again, the goal is cutting down on that time that live reps have to spend answering frequently answered frequently asked questions. So let's give it a go since the video won't play. Sorry about that.
You've reached the Grayson Hotel. Your call is being recorded for the ultimate satisfaction. Hello. Thank you for calling Grayson Hotel. My name is Grayson Concierge and I'm an AI Customer support assistant. How may I assist you today?
I'll be traveling in October. What benefits do you offer business travelers?
We offer several amenities that are great for business travelers. These include complimentary WI fi business services, meeting facilities, dry cleaning and laundry services, and a 24 hour fitness center. Our prime midtown Manhattan location also makes it easy to get around for meetings or events. Does that help or would you like more details on any of these services?
What options would I have for dining so I don't have to go far from the hotel?
We have several dining options right within the hotel. There's a new American brasserie called Harta, which offers seasonal dishes with Mediterranean influences. We also have Bar Sema, a Latin cocktail bar and lounge with great city views. For something more casual, there's Tecale, a hidden garden spot serving Mexico City style tacos and margaritas. Would you like more details on any of them?
No, that sounds great. I'd actually like to be transferred to an live booking rep so that I can book my room.
Thank you for your patience. Someone will assist you shortly. Sorry.
Okay, so the sorry was because I'm not actually live on the call, but you get the gist of it. And just to share the screen here again, let's go ahead and take a look at how that ticket's going to come through. So you can see in the inbox that ticket originally, when the call came in, it will have the call summaries. So that AI powered information is going to be already attached to the ticket. We'll be able to access the call recording as well. Everything that's already in Help Desk is just plugged into that, so you get the same benefits of that workspace. And then if you actually want to go over to the call recording page from here, this is where the conversation intelligence will kick in. You can actually access the recording. You can see the questions asked, you can see any track terms that you have highlighted. The transcript would also be available and then any stats from the call. So all of that's plugged in and you kind of just again harnessing the power of Help Desk and Inbox and just plugging in the AI agent on top of that. All right, so I'm going to hop into the next screen, so. Well, I don't know if there's one more demo. I think that's the last demo, Francis, but. Okay, so we'll hop into just a snapshot of 2025. So everyone always wants to know kind of what's coming. What are we working on? This list is not exhaustive at all, but just please understand there's a lot of things in the works, but we know the things that have been blocking you as users for adoption for your customers, for anyone that Solutions Partners power dialer, as Francis just alluded to and did a quick walkthrough. Also, AI NoteTaker voicemail drops is in the work calling on Customer Agent, as you just showed you, calling and wait list. So everything that has to do with call queues. I know call queues has been a huge blocker for teams that need that waiting experience. That's going to be baked into a feature called Waitlist, which is going to be more like an omnichannel type of cube experience. And calling is going to be baked into that. So we're actively working on that now as well. Also, again, expansion of global phone numbers and then recording consent message has been something that's been asked for over two years now. We're finally going to finish the swing on that in the next week and you can customize that inbound recording consent message that plays. So this is just a quick snapshot. There's a lot more to come. I don't know if you have anything you want to add on here, Francis, but. But these are just a few of the quick ones.
Yeah, these are some of the quick hits, but each of those, a lot of what we showed you is just at the tip of the iceberg. And so I've been hopping in and answering some of the questions in the Q and A, but I can also add some color. Today that power dialer experience is the first piece will be building off of the contact CRM page or the CRM index page, so selecting contacts directly. But eventually we do want to integrate with tasks, call type tasks from the sales workspace and other object types that are callable. So being able to build a list based on either contact records, task records, or even things like company or custom object records as well. Then same thing with AI NoteTaker. This first iteration has those pre built templates, but eventually we do want to get to the point point where admins can customize or even users can customize the shape of their notes, similar to tools like Granola where they have a library or you can kind of build your own. And they do also factor in your handwritten notes or manually written notes as you're typing as well.
Cool.
So now. Yeah. How should we run the Q and A section? Do you want to run through the two questions that we have for Sarah or.
I think there's a lot of questions in the. In the Q and A. Maybe we hop on those live and then. And then if there's time, we can answer the other questions.
Yeah, you guys left a good amount of time for Q and A, so I love that we'll be able to get through all of them. What worked last week when we had people answering questions during the demos was to read them out loud because people were able to add, you know, additional flavors and be able to hear the actual answer and maybe have you guys add additional context to them. So why don't we go ahead and do that. I'll go ahead and read the one the most voted out and then if people keep voting them up, I'll go ahead and keep refreshing them. Sound good? Love that. Okay, so with eight votes, Alex Berdine says can we address the spam issue with dialing around outbound with HubSpot, I have reps calling from their cell phones because dialing that same number through HubSpot causes their numbers to show as spam.
Alex, the burning question. So when you register a number with HubSpot, we're one of the. We're in a unique space. We're one of the few CRMs that allows you to even come in and Register a number with no additional calls or without having to purchase a number. I think Zendesk has something similar. But for most of the other CRMs that you'll go to, you have to either acquire a porter number. We were obviously not in that state because we didn't have HubSpot numbers previous to 2022. So when we built that feature it was intended where we'd be able to have up on calls work. However, because our calling provider Twilio does not own those numbers the way that they are connected and try to be try to go through the downstream carriers to connect, it does spoof the call and that's why you see so much of the spam complaints like the lower answer rates. When you're using a registered number, I'll actually plug a resource. So to be very clear, a registered number is a number that you own. You did not port it over to HubSpot, you did not acquire through HubSpot. So you have HubSpot numbers and you have registered numbers. Registered numbers is where you guys are seeing the bulk of that issue because it's a number, your rep zone, a number you own. You just come in and register it and all you can do is place outbound calls. So unfortunately we don't have a resolution for that Alex, because we don't own the numbers, there's nothing we can do to like change the way that those numbers are connected to the call carriers. What we are recommending is going to be the use of a HubSpot number or. And I get you can't do that with sales reps with their personal lines. But that's, that's the path of enablement we're trying to move to. And that's why we're trying to work so urgently to expand our number acquisition so that we do solve for all the regions that you all need.
Yeah. And then even maybe adding on top of that the. The benefit of using the HubSpot provided numbers also comes with some added functionality around KYC that does help improve how carriers are interpreting this. Stay tuned to learn a little bit more about that in the next couple quarters.
Awesome. Joshua says how does this power dialer interact with sales workspace and call tasks from sequences? It looks like there's an answer.
In future iterations we'll be able to build that power dialing list from different object types. Right now it's working just with contact records in the CRM, but we'll be building hooks into the sales workspace, hooks into tasks and other object types so that you can build a list of callable objects from a couple different locations. So if I had to guess, I'd say that you should start to see that expansion happen later in 2025.
Love it. Chris says how do you handle consent for recording? Some states are two party consent and others are one.
Go ahead Sarah Francis oh yeah, yeah.
I was gonna say that that was a question I accidentally asked myself to, but I dropped an article here as well and Sarah actually has a link right from our knowledge base there we do try to examine there's certain jurisdictions that are clearly marked as two party consent states. So for example Massachusetts will, when you have your recording settings turned on at the portal level, when you make a call out to a state like Massachusetts will only start recording once the rep has clicked the manual record button and you'll see a pop up that has a little informed consent confirmation. We are starting to explore more granularity in the way recordings operate on calls. So this includes being able to limit recording to just manually initiated recordings or giving admins more control over how recorded behavior works across the entire portal. But yeah, this article is the best resource to see what that looks like across the board.
Also adding we didn't have it on the 2025 snapshot, but it's always been on the roadmap. It's just a larger overhaul but we will continue to dive as much as possible and prioritize the call recording settings. That's been something on our radar for quite some time. To make it more granular to do it by call direction and by team. We also just did a new like a quarterly update on the legal side of reviewing the international jurisdictions in terms of how they do first party and second party. So we're going to be revamping a bit of that because some of those were set by default to two party consent. So we'll be updating all that and just you know, letting you all know in the UI before we make any changes. But as Francis alluded to that resource that Supported Countries list and call recording list is going to to be the best place to understand which laws apply.
Where A little bit Taylor asks is there a silent coaching feature for managers to be able to listen in live and calls, live calls and feed lines.
That is on our radar for 2026. And so yeah, this is very similar to call whisper call coaching, essentially having one person on the call who can either only speak to the rep without the caller hearing them or just a listening role. Also curious in the Q and A or the chat if you guys are Finding yourselves doing more hands on live coaching or are you starting to see an opportunity for AI to help step in in real time and kind of scale that coaching across all reps?
Love that.
Yeah, definitely put those ideas into the chat and share what you're doing. Joshua wants to know how does the power dialer interact with I just did that one. Apologize guys. Joshua wants to know what should we think about and advise clients with the changes coming to blocking and preventing robo calls.
Blocking them for inbound calls to your to customers or us play our our customers placing outbound AI generated calls.
Great question. I'm going to assume it's the first Josh, if you want to answer in the chat and share what your intention was on that one, give them a moment to answer in the chat. Let's see I just resorted and messed it all up. Chris wants to know will you be adding a way to use Playbooks in the power dialer while we're waiting for Chad to answer?
Yeah, that is something we're going to be we're exploring in terms of a integration with Playbooks. I would love to hear more too if you want to add some color on in the chat of kind of what the experience you're envisioning looks like.
And Joshua said that's correct. Reps making outbound are getting very nervous about speaking spam with the new iOS changes especially.
Gotcha. Yeah that's something that we're actually we're working with our provider or our carrier Twilio to start to understand how we can navigate some of those changes. Some of this has been out there on the Android landscape for a while as we know Apple can be a little bit behind the game but yeah the best practices I think we actually do have a doc we can share but typically I think we will find more success using either HubSpot provided numbers or numbers that are ported in versus the bring your own number or outbound calling. Typically the flow there is seen as spoofing. Technically some countries have cracked down across the world but the us, Canada and UK some of the bigger markets typically haven't made a position very strongly against stopping spoofed calls. But yeah for now I think we'll provide deeper guidance once we get that from our provider.
All right this is a big one so I'm gonna break it down three big needs Alanya has I have with phone for an phone for an inbound call center give us an option to not do simultaneous ringing to our team and to have HubSpot routing just pick the rep in the round robin fashion so that not all reps are busy for multiple incoming calls. So the wish list going on give us a phone queue option so people aren't sent to a voicemail and allow us to do automated messaging for outbound outside of business hours and then hang up. No voicemail option.
Yeah. So 1 and 2 are essentially in the works with the calling and waitlist feature. I know I'm not able to demo to you all, but again that's inside of that is going to be encompassed like the call queue system. So we're building that call queue mechanism now and essentially what's going to happen is the inbound call will come in if you have five reps on your help desk channel that are available. That simultaneous ring, essentially it'll still be the first thing. So if you have three incoming calls, those reps will be rung simultaneously. Once those reps are maxed out and everyone is on a call or not available, then the proceeding calls that come in will sit in that queue and then we'll do more of like at least busy next up type of ring and that'll get to that rep. So we're still going to be solving for additional ring times. To answer your question, like we're still going to be solving for that outside of call wait this, but call wait this is going to solve essentially 1 and 2 ETA on that in terms of like public beta readiness is probably going to be 2026, but we are building it right now, so we're hoping to have some hands on it and testing it probably sometime in Q4. So we're getting a solution out there. In terms of number three, I'm assuming you're referring to you would you would like to have a custom message that does not actually trigger the voicemail once after hours? And so we don't quite have like a way where if you're after hours it just displays a message and doesn't actually capture the ring. But we can definitely look into some options there with custom messaging.
Josh wants to know, will we be able to build custom note templates? Francis, you answered this one.
Yeah, that's the intention down the road. Yeah. If you've used tools like Granola or some of these other note takers on the market, you gotta have your template library of things that are pre built for common use cases and then. Yeah. Similarly we'd like to offer admins or even users the ability to create their own templates for their calls.
Love it. Shell wants to know, is there is this available away from the homepage our reps are not using it because they can't customize it.
If we were talking about the power dialer at the time, it's accessible. In that navigation icon, the little phone icon up there we have this current setup that's a technical limitation. But the tab that opens up once you click the phone icon, that's what maintains our connection. So that means when you're in your HubSpot window, the rep can be on any page. As long as the navigation is up there, the call connection is kept alive and they can access that remote anywhere.
Let's see. Rice says, my thought is if the call is booked via meeting link, which is for a certain type of call such as intro call, then the call then should be able to fill out a specific playbook for. For intro call. Is this something we can expect coming?
So that's interesting. Yeah. So we have calls that are booked or set ahead of time. Could be a task, could be a call type that you know ahead of time. Yeah, that's an area that we want to explore is kind of a more automated integration with Playbooks. So rather than just having the playbook open and the rep filling it out, kind of being able to use our AI features to map the conversation to specific Playbook items. So I'd say that this is probably more an exploratory research phase for us, but it is the type of functionality we do want to continue to roll out using our AI pipeline.
Let's see, Chad wants to know how does the AI NoteTaker relate to the meetings notetaker the meetings team built?
Yeah, they are sharing a little bit of infrastructure internally, but for the most part the.
Let's see. Chad wants to know how does the AI NoteTaker relate to the meetings notetaker the meetings team built?
Yeah, they are sharing a little bit of infrastructure internally, but for the most part the video conferencing apps, what we just.
