Monday = HubSpot Updates #HubSpotCRM 5/12/25

Good morning HubSpot Nation. It is time to wake up Customer Platform with your unofficial HubSpot Updates morning show where we help you discover the platform value you already own. I'm Chris Carolyn, joined by my co host George B. Thomas. We're here every weekday morning to make sure you're not sleeping on HubSpot's true capabilities. If you're joining live, drop a hello in the comments and let us know what you're building in HubSpot today. Happy Monday, May 12th. George, how you doing?

Oh my gosh, time is flying by. I'm sad because Casey's not here, but you know, we're holding down the fort. We're holding down.

We are on assignment I think is what we're supposed to say in the business.

There you go.

Yep. So we'll do our best in her stead today and we'll dive right in with one of these. That's like we can't just wait for AI to just come make everything better. Just come in and do things like Backfill AI descriptions for all workflows in private beta. What is it? Customers managing portals with numerous workflows or multiple workflow creators often rely on clear workflow descriptions for effective oversight and auditing. However, the current AI assistant only supports adding descriptions one workflow at a time, which becomes a major bottleneck when many workflows lack descriptions. Additionally, customers frequently skip adding descriptions during or right after creation, only to realize their importance later, particularly when trying to understand workflows created by others. To address this challenge, customers need an efficient way to ensure all workflows are properly described, simplifying ongoing management. We are now making this possible.

Wow. So why does this matter? Since the vast majority of AI generated workflow descriptions are accepted as is, we're now saving customers the extra clicks and tasks by backfilling AI descriptions for all existing workflows. Moving forward, we'll also auto generate descriptions for any newly created workflows that don't have them, ensuring consistent and efficient workflow management with no added effort. Man, like this sounds amazing and I am going to hit the beta chimes by the way, so let me, let me just go ahead and do that before I actually get on my horse and ride this one like one. There's a word that comes immediately to mind. Accuracy. You might want to double check the work of the AI student that is looking at you. Me, I'm. I'm sure it will do pretty good, but like we need to make sure that they really are. Also, it doesn't mention but I would assume that it's not going to overwrite anything that already exists, but I would be wondering or try to be careful of of that. And then also I've like passionately, Chris, tried to get people to go fill in these descriptions and I almost wonder if this AI piece, by the way, I'm not saying this is a good or a bad part of it, but like, will you even go in and customize it to the extra like, Chef's kiss that the workflow description needs to be like, what Looks like.

It looks like we already have our answer here. I'm not sure this is a great reason for moving this far.

Right.

Since the vast majority are accepted as is. Yeah. The same people that don't do it in the first place are the ones just be. Yep, looks good.

Check the checkbox. Done.

Move forward. This is maybe the most interesting what is it Paragraph I have read to date. Like just a great combination of wishful thinking and little passive aggressiveness about people doing what they're supposed to be doing.

The thing. We're going to do the thing. And I, George and Chris, we hope that you actually do above and beyond just the thing in your portal.

Yes. And as you do it, you could be one of those people that helps us not rely on this part and instead helps the AI get better. And over time everybody can enjoy this kind of activity. But it's a. It's the use case where we want AI to work really badly. That doesn't mean you don't know. Don't need to know what the. You still need to be able to describe your own workflows, folks.

Yeah.

Please Data Enrichment. Update the settings. Possibly related to the news last week that customer agent was going to be.

Yeah.

Unleashed outside of Service Hub and be credits based. Probably a sign of where all the agents are going. Potentially.

Yeah.

But we'll see. So a lot of enrichment settings here. I haven't dabbled in enrichment too much, so I don't know how new this is, but obviously the granularity and the control of when to use credits and when not to. Super important.

Yeah.

So what's new? We've made updates to your data enrichment settings to give you more control over how your credits are used and to simplify your settings management experience. You can now pause automatic enrichment when your portal hits its monthly credit limit. Use continuous enrichment on all credit plans, including the 100 credit plan, or manage manual enrichment entirely through user permissions. Oh, these changes are rolling out automatically to all portals using the enrichment feature.

Yeah. So why does this matter to you as a HubSpot user? Hey you us, we have asked for more control over enrichment behavior, especially when approaching your credit limit. These updates give you the tools, give us, by the way the tools to manage usage, proactively reduce surprises. Yep, we like that. And streamline how you manage access to enrichment features. Nice.

Oh man, yes. All good things here. No, no more surprises. So much to say about data enrichment and what has been and I'm so happy that HubSpot is addressing this in just the best way possible. Yeah, Number three New Elevate Landing Page Sections what is it? You can now access 13 new landing page sections in the Elevate theme, giving you more design options to create compelling conversion focused pages.

And you might be wondering why does this matter? These new sections give you more flexibility to create engaging landing pages without custom development. With these additional layout options in the Elevate theme, you can build more diverse pages that match your brand's vision and help you convert more visitors. Oh, ain't that special. I like it 13 though. Could it be 12 or 14? Like I guess I'm just superstitious.

Anyway and if you don't know what the Elevate theme is, it is a new out of the box theme from HubSpot I.e. react based instead of Hubble based. So interesting to watch this one grow in front of us, but definitely like if you don't have insider language here, it can be very hard to understand why this is important to you. Well also if the rest of your site is built on Hubble based themes, it might not be so easy to just convert over. So just check it out like definitely if you want. You know, the more flexibility, the more interactive experiences on your website. Custom development is not the only answer anymore so it's good to see them going in this direction for sure. Number four Additional Wait until Activity events in Journey Automation. Yeah, what is it? We've added new events to the quote Wait until Activity Wait until Activity action in Journey Automation to help bridge the gap between marketing and sales, we can have meetings like we can have meeting settings like meetings booked and meeting outcome changed. Can have activities in our marketing emails like email sent, email delivered. We can include sales document shared and sales document viewed.

Ah, interesting. So why does this matter? Assist in the speedy handoff of qualified leads to sales teams. Wait until a meeting is booked, then send the contact to the goal exit of the journey and mark them as qualified to hand off the sales. Ensure a relevant experience for contacts depending on all the different assets they're engaging with across sales and marketing. Wait until a sales document was viewed. Then either remove them from your journey to prevent double outreach or send them to your goal. Exit and hand off the sales or ensure you're engaging with the right contacts and the right information. Wait until an email was delivered. If not, then end the journey for those contacts and add them to a list to check those contacts email addresses. So many interesting things and actually ways to think about things with this journeys tool. Like Chris, what comes to mind immediately is people who are like on the fence, like HubSpot workflows versus the journeys. Like as we read this, you can just completely tell they're trying to like bridge the gap between sales and marketing with these actions. Like documents is immediately in there. Things like that. You can immediately tell that it's like hyper customer focused. Like experience engine. Like even the language they're using of like remove and do and this and then hand off and like. And hopefully like I need to get my portal to the point where I can dive into this more like from this point for me, complete transparency. It's just been like educating myself about it but not necessarily using it quite yet. But man, talk about being able to build smarter engagement or engaging decisions of how you're actually going to do these things versus kind of flying. We always used to say this like the journey is a bowl of spaghetti. Maybe not so much anymore. Like maybe we can kind of start to straighten that spaghetti out a little bit.

Yeah, no, I think that's, that's one way to put it. I think it's going to be a little bit of a slow uptake because it is in enterprise only, which makes sense, I'll say, just because like it takes a certain level of organization and activity to warrant this kind of granularity. Like yes, because my concern is even as you're reading this, like all this stuff is for internal. Like the customer on the outside doesn't care about any of the stuff that's happening and that can often. Like we spend so much time on this part that we don't actually understand what's happening on the outside. Right. But obviously the goal is to not send double emails and send good experiences and stuff like that to the customers. But it's just a hard read when you're like when you want to be customer focused and you know how people can kind of get bogged down in this kind of stuff.

Yeah, go ahead.

Just always keep the customer front of mind, both internal and external. Right. Like because sales people don't want to have to worry about this stuff happening either, right?

Yeah. The easier read, by the way, might be the knowledge article at the bottom of this product description, so you might want to check that out. If you're watching this next steps, go learn more about it even if you don't have an enterprise portal.

Yes. Number five Bring your brand voice to your customer agent. Oh, what is it? You can now configure your customer agent to use your existing brand voice in HubSpot. With this update, your AI powered customer agent will mirror the tone, style and personality of your brand, ensuring every customer interaction feels consistent and on brand.

I shouldn't flinch every time I hear it, but I flinch every time I hear AI powered because I just. I live in an AI assisted world. Anyway, let me go ahead and do this. I am going to hit the join the beta button like you might want to do. That's totally up to you, but why does it matter? Your brand voice shapes how customers experience and connect with your business. Previously, your customer agent's personality was set independently, which could lead to some inconsistencies between support interactions and the rest of your AI generated content. With the new brand voice option, your customer agent can now adopt the same voice you use across marketing, sales and service content in HubSpot, creating a more unified, trustworthy and seamless experience for your customers. If you're using brand voice, by the way, this is only true if you've actually dove in, turned it on, used it, created it, filled in all this. Anyway, I'll stop, I'll stop. But this is cool. I like this.

And super easy to use. This option will only be available if you've already set up brand voice and HubSpot added to the dropdown. So good to see we have more options than just friendly, professional, casual. Yeah, if you put the work in, which I know most of you have, and they're still sitting in decks like in PDFs, like outside in the. In the file storage. Get into HubSpot, folks. It's so powerful and. And works. It. It works, right? I think we did some good examples last week of George showing us, you know, social posts where it's like, it sounds like George. Yeah, when that. When the social agent is doing the work.

Chris, what I hear you saying is just do it. Like get it done.

Exactly. Number six, identify SMS failures with SMS error reporting. What is it? New SMS error reporting charts now show you exactly why messages fail to send or deliver access. Comprehensive breakdowns of error types and volumes, both in SMS analytics and on individual message pages, giving you more insights for improved deliverability.

So why does this matter? Well, without detailed error reporting, marketers often lack visibility into why SMS messages fail to deliver, making it difficult to understand sending issues that, well, they may occur. The new error reports enable you to instantly identify patterns in delivery problems and empower you to optimize your SMS strategy based on actual delivery data. Thank you. Goodness. Good. I like, I like.

Yes, we need that visibility just like we have for email and all these channels that we're choosing to use to. To contact people.

Yeah.

Because we know on the user side we have the ability to, you know, block and report spam and do all the things that, you know, you can via email often. And you want to clean up your lists if that's happening.

All right. Well, that was easy. Only six today. Wow.

Yeah.

Done. Are we.

I know something's happening this week, the Shopify sunset. So I'm going to click over in a schedule for release in a moment. But before we get to that tomorrow, Service Hub gets some love scaling support with AI. Obviously we just had the announcement of Customer Agent. Right. And it being. I keep on hearing it as one of like the best use cases ever that HubSpot has seen as far like a usage perspective, like how much people are loving it. So learn how Customer Agent automatically resolves routine inquiries 247 while knowledge base Agent identifies gaps. I still can't get over this. Identifies gaps in your documentation and drafts new articles for you.

Yeah.

Have you seen this in action yet, George?

I have not seen this in action. Yeah. Like I've said this a couple times on the show, I think, but it makes me want to build the knowledge article area that I don't currently have for my organization just so I can see how easy it would be using these tools, to be honest.

Yep. And that's a spot a lot of us are in. Right. Like, because it's kind of like Knowledge Base has always been a first step. Like if you don't really know what you're doing and but you've got support articles, you can build it out. But it wasn't super flexible in a way that the people who are serious about content as a resource and support mechanism because.