More #HubSpot Updates and some Story Time! #HubSpotCRM

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 Casey Hawkins and George B. Thomas. We are here every weekday morning to make sure you're not sleeping on HubSpot's two capabilities. If you're joining live, drop a hello in the comments and let us know what you're building in HubSpot today. On Wednesdays, we wear orange. Casey, what's happening?

I. You're right, I didn't.

You got. You got the ultimate out, though. Like, your hair is orange. I know.

I'm.

You're good.

I'm the worst at this. And then whenever I remember, I just like shame everyone else for like, how orange they are. I feel like, very righteous whenever I remember. But that's.

Well, we got a fun one today and. But before we get in, I need to share a story. One of the reasons I show up every day to try and create awareness about this beautiful customer platform is that it's never been more affordable and available and easy to use than ever to create this, the kind of experiences we talk about on this show. Example, personally. So I shave my head every couple days, right? And it's very important to me a specific, specific type of, you know, Burt's Bees cleanser that I use very shaving, right? $10. $10 product, right. I have bought it from Amazon. No surprise there. I'm sure I've tried other things. So I used to be on a schedule of ordering, you know, where it automatically shows up, canceled, that tried some other things, didn't work. Now I'm back to that for the past couple weeks. So I do it at the end of each hour. So I'm not in a place to go buy it when I see, oh, I'm running low, I need to buy some more, right? So I remember when I see it low and then I take a few minutes to dry off and by then I've forgotten about it. Right? Until the next time, right. Yesterday this happened and I see a little yellow light on Alexa and she's like. So I asked her for the notifications and first of all, so value first she tells me about, you know, tornado, you know, warning in the area, right? And then she says, hey, based on your order history, it might be time to order Burt Bees Cleanser. Would you like me to add that to your cart? Yes. Would you like to place the order? Yes. Okay. You will receive it on Thursday. Hands off. Right? No touching any devices. Just talking to the system and getting what I want in return. Yeah, you can do that in HubSpot. With HubSpot, you can provide experiences like that. That's why we're here every day talking to you guys about that.

I love that story, even with the visuals that it gave me along the way. Chris, so thanks for sharing that.

No, I definitely went through a few iterations about how I could tell it. Just a little bit of shower. Not a lot of shower.

Not a lot of shower. But it's amazing. Here's the thing. It's about user experience, right?

And.

And it's about how the world can and could be, if you're part of the solution, be better for all of those humans that you're serving. Like.

Yes. So we'll continue showing up every day to help you guys understand how we can do that in HubSpot, because at the end of the day, Amazon can do that because they have a bunch of data, they've created a great customer experience, and that full cycle loop over time tells them everything they need to know about me. So that a device like Alexa can just do that for me as if she's reading my mind.

Yeah.

And I had not done any searches recently. I had not touched Amazon, so just trust me how serendipitous this situation was. Not to mention the anxiety I was starting to feel as the supply of Burt's Bees gets lower and lower and lower. Right. Okay, so speaking of Smart Properties.

Wow, that was a bumpy one.

But okay, we'll go with it in public beta. Smart Data Management, Smart Properties, whatever you want to call it, this is related to Breeze Intelligence. What is it? Want to know whether a particular company has a podcast? If they're remote, Only if they're a competitor. Smart Properties gives you the ability to customize the data returned by Breeze Intelligence to focus on the data that's most important to you. Create Properties with an embedded AI prompt for our agents to research and find out the answer for you, whether it's information on the Internet or within your portal. Ask anything from a simple question to a complex prompt with context, and data will populate within the property for use across the CRM.

Why does it matter? Smart Properties will give you the ability to ask a question or prompt and have Breeze Intelligence AI answer the question, similar to Data Enrichment. Want to know if they have other office locations? Just ask. Need it formatted in a certain way. Include that in your prompt, too. Here's an example. Does this company have any office Locations other than North America. If yes, list them out with the city and country. If no, then don't respond with an answer.

Man, I wonder if anybody's going to use this for like competitive intelligence. Like, is this a direct competitor or like things outside of the typical use cases. I would, I would be interested to know how other humans might, might be leveraging this technology.

Yep. And here's the update. We now support several new property types. Single checkbox, multiple checkboxes, radio select and drop down select. We also will support those new property types as output formats to make structuring the unstructured outputs even easier.

Uh oh.

Simply create a property with a smart prompt and a research agent will format the result to automatically fit the output into the selected property type.

You know the. The other place that my brain goes with this is like one of the maybe potential terrible things we can do in life is like these words. I guess. I guess. Does this mean that we will have to like, not really guess because we'll just know and like, is it knowing half the battle? Go Joe. I just dated myself. Anyway, if you get it, you know, if you don't, sorry.

Yeah, no, I. Knowing is half the battle for sure. That's why I like, I don't necessarily agree with. If no, then don't respond with an answer. Uh, I'd like, I'd like to know that you completed, you tried, and that you didn't find anything like, can we have that as an answer? Maybe.

Well, that's like I, I try to avoid check box boxes for the same thing. I'd rather have yes or no so that I know that it like got filled out.

Yeah.

Yes, it is good to be able to close the loop. Chris, you'll find this interesting for the first time ever. Yesterday I got an email from my clone of a question it couldn't answer and it was nice to get notification of that it couldn't answer it. So then I could email the human and actually ask more questions and then give an answer anyway. Not why we're here, but I. Little story time there for you.

Yeah, that's very coy. Everybody go check out George's clone and if you trick it, you get an answer from George.

Yeah.

I thought all the answers were from George. Wait a second.

No.

Browse Search Knowledge Base in the Widget help tab. If you haven't seen the chat widget recently, very amazing updates have happened there. I don't what's new. We've upgraded our chat widget with a new help tab that gives users direct access to the knowledge base. No more jumping to external websites for answers. Inside the Help tab, users can browse categories if you've created those categories, search articles if you have articles to find, and find trending articles if other people are reading your articles. This update makes self service support much smoother by keeping everything in one place, making helpful information available exactly when users need it.

The why matters apparently is self explanatory.

Yep and this is interesting just in case you come in here. I don't think Pro plus is a thing. I think Marketing Pro plus is the only Pro plus available so well we'll.

Just say Service Pro unless we don't know something. The other thing too that's probably should be pulled out here so people know is like the how do I set it up section does talk about this is not supported in the legacy knowledge base. So you will want to be using the new knowledge base to be able to do the thing that we're talking about right now.

Yep. And George's story about his clone, like obviously he's super cool, he's done the work to to create an amazing clone. But customer agent HubSpot can do the same thing and then tell the knowledge base agent that it got a question it couldn't answer and maybe we should write an article and then Knowledge Base Agent writes an article and now it's available for the people in the chat. Move to the new Knowledge Base please.

Yes.

A new Monday.com data sync app. What is it? This new data Sync app mirrors the comprehensive integration capabilities found in our 100+ data sync apps, which automate the synchronization of data fields and objects across platforms, reducing manual work and ensuring data consistency. With customizable field mappings, filter settings, and real time updates, HubSpot data sync allows users to maintain up to date information across their business tools.

Doesn't matter. This app is not the first Monday.com integration to exist in the HubSpot ecosystem. In fact, a one way integration built by Monday.com has existed in the marketplace for some time, syncing certain Data points from HubSpot into Monday.com Our new data Sync app offers an alternative approach by enabling not only the import of data from HubSpot into Monday.com but also ensuring that the updates flow seamlessly in the opposite direction from Monday.com back into HubSpot. Additionally, it can help you migrate data from Monday.com into HubSpot. While it's possible to install both apps concurrently, we recommend turning on the sync process in only one of the apps to avoid potential sync loops and confusion.

So in and in what world do you use HubSpot and Monday.com.

People use Monday for like project management.

But I mean I'm literally looking at their it's like CRM and sales operations. I like and I do see projects and tasks but like so is it that. It's like it's their version of ClickUp.

And so it was actually originally built as a project management tool.

Okay, okay.

And then they changed to CRM because they just had. They had some fields and they had some tables and they had some objects. So let's build the CRM.

Why not?

So my good friend Bill Barless uses this as a project management tool for his business and he's very excited about this update. I will say I expect as we talk about MCP a little bit later, some of the challenges with the data syncs are that they're not quite as customizable as we need them to be and it can be a very all or nothing situation as to whether you can use the data sync or not. So just take care as you look at it and confirm it's going to work for your use case before just diving in. I do like seeing things like customizable field mappings, filter settings and real time updates. I expect more configurability to come to all the Data Sync apps as HubSpot becomes more flexible and the data sync.

Apps are built by HubSpot, right?

Yeah.

Yes. Number four assign customer agent to Email what is it? Businesses can now assign the customer agent to their email accounts, streamlining support and lightening the load on human agents. For more information on the existing capabilities of the customer agent, check out our Knowledge Base article or stay updated with the latest features on our wiki. If you work outside of HubSpot, you cannot access that wiki.

Just why does it matter? Email is the highest volume communication channel for our customers, but managing it effectively is a constant challenge. Delayed responses, inconsistencies in replies and the high operational cost of manually handling make it difficult to meet customer expectations. End users expect timely, accurate and personalized responses that make them feel valued and understood. When businesses fail to meet these expectations at scale due to limited resources and the volume of inquiries, it negatively impacts the customer experience. This can lead to diminished trust, reduced customer satisfaction, missed engagement opportunities, and harm to the brand's reputation.

Just another way to work smarter, not harder. This is amazing.

I know in the this came up actually yesterday in the admin hug with Andy where you know, I thought he had something interesting. He had an interesting Example, like, someone had said they were a little concerned. You know, when they reach out to HubSpot support, they just want to get to a person and they're like, they were feeling frustrated that they have to, like, basically go through this agent to get to the person. And Andy said something that is very true, which is when online food ordering came out, delivery, he used to call the restaurant still. He was like, I don't trust the online system to, like, take my order and everything. But now he's flipped and he'd prefer to use the I. And I'm like, I remember this. I remember this vividly. And so what he suspects is as the AI agents get better, we may find ourselves in a similar thing where, like, we'd rather just have the agent because they're going to give us the answer. Like, I don't have to wait for the rep to read my thing and understand my portal and like, all this stuff.

I don't know when. When the agent doesn't feel like an agent, you won't care. Like, when you go to McDonald's and place your order and didn't realize that it wasn't a human, you didn't care. You know what I'm saying? So, like, I. Here's the thing. I love that story because I was the guy, by the way. I'm the old Bart on the show. I was the guy that was like, just call the dang store. Like, quit trying to use the app. Right? And now, now, of course, I'm like, I've got.

Really?

Oh, yeah, bro. And now I've got, like, every food app possible. Probably Domino's Slim, Chickens. Like. Like, I have all the apps, and then I use my app because I get the points like, and I'm like.

If I go to get my coffee, I'd rather order it through the app because then I don't have to, like, say all the words. I don't have to say all the words.

Yeah, that's one place I don't use an app yet. I literally will. When. When. And if I go to, like, Dunkin or Starbucks, I'll wait and I will order it as. As a human orders.

You probably drink hot coffee.

No, iced coffee. I don't like hot coffee.

Okay, yeah, I could see a heat.

Thing, but sorry, as a reminder, like I mentioned on the last. On the knowledge base tool, in order to provide timely. So this handles timely. Like, you could turn this on and we can get timely responses. But in order to be accurate and personalized, it needs data, it needs content, and if that content and data is living inside the heads of your customer agents, that's not an easy switch to just put it inside of the AI agent. So please keep that in mind and be gentle when you talk about that topic with your human agents. Filter data set based reports directly on dashboards. What is it? Reports made from data sets can now be filtered on dashboards. You can now narrow your data without leaving the dashboard.

Why does it matter? Before you had to leave your dashboard to filter data set reports, this took extra time. Now you can filter those reports right on the dashboard. This makes faster, makes it faster to see the data. You need.

Straightforward duration and control all over the place. The data is a good thing.

Yep.

Oh, are you ready for this one, George?

Low impact.

Low impact.

Wait, what? Oh my God.

Master Control. I'm sorry. Model Context Protocol Server is now available in public beta, enabling AI clients to interact with HubSpot data and unlocking powerful integration possibilities. What is MCP? Thank you. Model Context Protocol is an emerging standard that allows AI models to interact with applications through a consistent interface. It acts as an abstraction layer over traditional APIs, enabling AI agents to access application functionality without needing to understand specific API protocols.

Why does it matter? In this AI era, users expect to interact with business critical tools such as HubSpot's Smart CRM through Natural Language AI applications like Claude to capture vital records, notes and tasks. The current MCP tools in this server enable you to retrieve, create or update HubSpot objects, list HubSpot objects and their properties, access and create associations between objects, create tasks and notes in your HubSpot account, open specific screens with the HubSpot UI, provide feedback on the MCP server. Okay, can I be the AI dum dum?

Sure you can, but one second. Okay, go ahead, go ahead.

Acknowledge that you are are way more, well, first in the hand than I am. Sounds very cool. I love the idea of the AI platform that I'm using being able to like create and update objects and things like that. Data privacy concerns. Question mark. Is that something that companies should be considering? I know there's different, different models have different like locks on your data.

Go for it, George.

I was waiting for you to answer that one, bro.

I mean, so I'll just say that's the importance of, of them landing on a standardized protocol.

Okay.

So that we can protect from. This came from Claude and Anthropic, which is known to be one of, if not the best security minded LLM provider.