The history of communication has always been about reducing friction. Humans have always looked for better and faster ways to connect with each other. We went from the pony express, to snail mail, to phones, texting, emailing, instant messaging, Snapchatting … the list goes on.

Live onsite chat has been around almost as long as websites. It was used for years by customer service teams before sales adopted bots. And now, it’s the hot new tool in many marketers’ arsenals.

Today’s buyers want real-time engagement, and they’re asking for it at a time where most marketers are seeing acquisition get harder. So software that connects buyers with marketers and salespeople in real time is basically every CMO’s dream.

Yes, live chat is exciting, but it can’t magically fulfill your prospects’ and customers’ desire for speed.

Chat connects you with prospects, leads, and customers faster than ever. But they don’t care how fast you can say, “Hi, how can I help you?” They care how fast you can actually help them.

Speed is a systems problem, not a software problem. Quickly solving customer problems isn’t about a tool. It’s about integrating your sources of information so employees can quickly find the context they need to answer prospect and customer questions quickly, accurately, and completely. Live chat is just one of those sources. But many businesses are adopting live chat and leaving it at that.

Live chat has no intrinsic value

Yeah, that’s a strong statement. Let me explain.

Communication channels have no intrinsic value. They facilitate two core types of value:

1. Channels connect you with your customers and prospects so you can learn about and serve them better
2. Channels store a full history of customer issues that brings context to new customer inquiries, and that you can use to inform your business strategy

Every new communication channel dilutes the average power of the ones you already use.

Does this mean you should only use one channel to communicate with buyers so all your information lives in one place? Of course not. You should engage buyers however they want. (And for your benefit, data from multiple communication systems paints a richer picture of your customers than one self-contained system ever could.)

But growing businesses face a common operations challenge: Fragmentation.

We asked businesses how they communicate with prospects and customers, and how they communicate internally about prospects and customers.

This is 11 different formal and informal channels that connect your employees to customers, prospects, and each other.

That’s 11 different systems of record, each containing one fragment of the full customer story, your employees need to patch together in order to get the full context of a customer’s problem and solve it.

That’s 11 different datasets to reconcile when you’re trying to see trends in customer behavior.

(And that’s before you consider mind the many teams you need to put in place to staff these channels 😳)

Your go-to-market should fit your customers, not the other way around

The best reason for any business decision is: “This will help us serve our customers better.”

While the way most companies currently use live chat may appear to do this, the reality is quite different. Let’s walk through three ways this typically manifests itself in businesses:

1) Live chat isn’t a fix for system speed

Modern buyers want information, and they want it now.

Ten minutes might seem like more than enough time to respond to a customer or prospect query. But because most companies’ systems require patchworking, the median frontline marketing, sales, and customer support employee spends 45 to 60 minutes a day slogging through their systems.

There’s a mismatch in how quickly customers want a response and how fast your team can actually deliver that response.

36% of buyers plan to increase their usage of chat tools this year, while 60% of buyers plan on keeping usage the same, meaning your chat volume (and your team’s workload) will only increase.

Integrating your systems of record lays the foundation for an amazing customer experience that will scale no matter what channels buyers contact you on today, tomorrow, or five years from now.

2) Live chat isn’t a fix for customer convenience

In an ideal world, buyers could use live chat throughout their customer lifecycle — whether they’re converting on an ebook, trying to get in touch with sales, or reporting a product problem.

It doesn’t work this way.

In most cases, only one department staffs and manages chat software, meaning employees in other departments don’t have access to chat — and the number of companies where multiple departments do have access is small.

From an internal perspective, this is understandable. Each department head likely functions autonomously and put their own budget behind a live chat solution.

But this doesn’t bring convenience to the customer, just that department head. Customers don’t care who “owns” their specific type of request; they just want their problems solved. If customers want to talk to you via chat, you should empower them to do so at any point in their lifecycle. When setting up live chat, make sure all customer-facing departments are bought in, know how to access data, and can do so.

3) Live chat has to work offline too

Live chat is great when you have a team available to respond to prospects and customers. But what happens when your employees go home for the day, and your buyers are still online?

Most solutions will let you toggle chat off outside of certain hours or send a canned response, then let the prospect know a representative will be with them once business hours resume.

That’s a good start, but it’s not enough. Just as lifecycle stage is an arbitrary roadblock for customers who simply prefer chat, you shouldn’t limit when and how your customers can get answers to their questions with business hours.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean you should force your team to monitor chat around-the-clock. It does mean you need to invest in an “offline” chat strategy.

• What frequently asked questions can you build into an chatbot to help users solve their problem?
• How can you integrate your chat with self-service resources like your knowledge base to content easily searchable through a bot?
• Can you collect some important information and set expectations on response time for sales inquiries?

See what I mean by convenience and speed being a systems problem? No live chat software, no matter how good, can produce a system where all the pieces work in tandem to provide a great customer experience.

At some point, you may find your technology simply can’t handle the conversation without a human present. That’s fine. But you should try and automate everything up until that point, so you’ve given your customers as much value as you can.

What this all means for your business

Disconnected systems means misalignment. Across the board, executives are more optimistic about how things are going than their frontline employees. Here are the quick hits:

• 55% of C-levels and VPs are extremely confident that they have access to a complete record of a customer’s previous interactions with their company, compared to 23% of individual contributors
• 54% of C-levels and VPs think it’s very easy for marketing to pass leads to sales with contextual information, compared to 24% of individual contributors

C-levels and VPs are also overly optimistic about the records their frontline employees can access.

This kind of misalignment is never good, especially when customers are involved. 80% of consumers would stop doing business with a company that provided a poor experience, so you only have a short window of time (10 minutes or less) to set yourself apart from the pack.

It’s also costing you money. When your employees are hopping between communication channels, they’re not creating value for your business, just locating information they couldn’t previously find. Here’s how much money you lose to system reconciliation per employee per year (based on median salaries for that job title in the U.S. and a 50-week working year):

• Marketing: $6,513 — $8,685 per employee per year ($69,483 salary)
• Sales: $4,963 — $6,617 per employee per year ($52,946 salary)
• Customer support: $2,284 — $3,045 per employee per year ($24,360 salary)

You can expect to spend 9–12% of each marketing, sales, or customer service employee’s salary on activities that will not help your business grow.

That’s why we built Conversations

HubSpot’s mission is to help millions of organizations grow better. That means helping our customers engage and delight their customers by building trust and establishing lasting relationships.

Enabling our customers to have more open conversations with their customers is a great way to do that, but scaling those personal one-to-one engagements can be hard.

So for the last few months, HubSpot has been building Conversations — a unifying free product designed to align your entire company and its systems around the customer. That’s right — we believe so strongly in this vision of the world that we are offering it to everyone for free.

Conversations is a shared inbox that pulls in all your communication channels so you view, manage, and reply to all prospects and customers without skipping a beat. It’s built to integrate with CRM software, so you’ll be able to pull in a full engagement history alongside your contact’s full profile. Automation empowers you to use the power of live chat on any page of your site, whether it’s for lead capture, sales conversations, or customer support.

Conversations will be your source of truth to tie your marketing systems to your sales conversations to your customer service requests.

Your one source of truth that will put an end to siloed communication channels, reduce work for your team, improve response times, and create more opportunities to turn customers into vocal promoters of your brand.

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Customers Want Live Chat — Just Not the Way You’re Doing It was originally published in ThinkGrowth.org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the big themes for me in 2017 was what it means for marketers to do the right thing. Outbound marketing that relies on spamming, irrelevant advertising, and other tactics that are almost as bad for the business as they are for the customer is obviously not the right thing. Better analytics has brought a lot of focus and measurability to marketing, but creates the tendency to do what’s best for the business versus what’s best for the customer.

And even well-intentioned inbound marketers who are trying to pull versus push … well … sometimes we just pull a little too hard.

It’s hard for goal-oriented, data-driven marketers to stop doing things that hit the numbers … even if we know these tactics fail to create the best experience for our prospects or scorch the earth for future efforts.

One of our goals as a marketing team in 2017 was to push ourselves to do the right thing, even if that meant more difficulty for us or even missing our goals. It was a tough year and yes, we missed some numbers, but wow … we also learned a ton, and I wanted to share some of our biggest lessons here. I think they have big implications for marketers in 2018.

1. We can break our email addiction and still hit our goals.

Marketers have been touting the death of email for years, and while I wouldn’t say the channel is dead, you’ll be hard pressed to find a marketer who will argue that engagement on email is what it was five years ago. At the start of 2017, HubSpot’s CMO asked our team to see if we could break our addiction to email.

Could we shift conversations to emerging platforms like Facebook Messenger, and cut our reliance on email? The answer was a resounding yes.

In 2017, our team cut email volume in North America by 50% while increasing engagement by 28%. That’s wild.

One tactic our team used to achieve this was moving from two weekly email sends per week to one and then focusing on making that one send count: better segmentation, lots of testing, and creating more interactive content (like the webinar promotion email that includes a countdown shown below).

2. Offsite messaging has earned its place in inbound marketing.

Another one of the reasons we have been successful at reducing our reliance on email is that we got serious about testing emerging channels. Here’s an offer email we sent earlier this year that gives people the option to access content via Facebook Messenger or a form:

If people choose Facebook Messenger, our chatbot automatically delivers the requested content to them in their Messenger app instead of their inbox.

We’ve seen offers delivered via Facebook Messenger result in 2.5x lifts in open rates and 6x lifts in click rates vs. email.

This improved performance is partially a function of the channel (it’s great to get push notifications on someone’s home screen), but partially a function of it being a channel that aligns with how people want to shop and buy today, and how they want to engage with companies.

3. Onsite messaging is now playing an integral role in inbound sales.

For the past decade, lead forms have been the go-to way for prospects to express interest in working with your company. But just because something has worked, doesn’t mean it will keep working.

This year HubSpot’s marketing team got very serious about testing alternatives to lead forms. We rolled out onsite messaging across our entire website.

Yes, this meant hiring more salespeople to respond to the influx of one-to-one communications.

Yes, this meant responding to a lot of irrelevant inquiries with a personal, human response.

Yes, it was expensive and took some internal training and systems finagling.

But …

We’re producing 20% more qualified opportunities as a result of adding an onsite messaging option.

Customers today expect to get answers to their questions right.now. For serious buyers, a lead-form is just too long of a delay. And all of the short-term costs will decrease as we get more serious about chatbots. Onsite messaging is now an integral part of our inbound sales playbook and we’re looking to start even more conversations in 2018.

4. B2B podcasting doesn’t need to be boring.

Picasso is famously credited with saying, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

Of course…there’s a high probability he stole this aphorism from T.S. Elliot.

Regardless of credit, what’s true for artists is true for marketers: Copying is one of the fastest ways to get good at something really quickly.

The problem is that you very quickly end up in a world where every marketer is doing the same thing. So sometimes, doing the right thing as a marketer means intentionally separating from the herd.

We started The Growth Show back in 2013, and “boring” is probably an unfair descriptor. Actually the show has built an engaged core audience, but it never turned into the kind of massive audience builder that consumer podcasts can be. We gave ourselves a pass, it’s a B2B podcast, right?

But in 2017, our growing podcast team pushed us to get a little weird, launching a podcast called Weird Work where we interview professional mermaids, ASMR content creators, and writers of dinosaur erotica. The reception to this little series has been so cool:

• We made it on the top 100 podcasts list in iTunes
• Achieved New & Noteworthy status in the iTunes store (this is the promised land for podcasters everywhere)
• Were named a “Top 10 Podcast Right Now” by Inc.

It’s tough to measure the business impact of such a “brand” play, but one way to think about content like this is in terms of ad spend. You can pay to advertise on someone else’s podcast or you can create your own audience and advertise there. We calculate that the value of the Weird Work audience is equivalent to $12,000 in ad spend every month.

Sometimes not following the herd pays off in a big way.

5. The future of SEO is topic clusters.

Google has been moving toward rewarding creators who create topic clusters for some time. This means that instead of Google looking at every individual post as its own SEO opportunity, it now looks at the scope of content being created by a given URL and sends more traffic to people who appear to be experts on a given topic.

We’ve been shifting to this strategy for new content creation for a while. But 2017 was the first year where we began to tackle 10+ years of legacy content, and re-working our architecture to fit the topic cluster model.

Why did it take us so long? Because this work is hard! We actually started a topic cluster project addressing the resource site architecture back in January of 2016 and it was so complicated we had to table it. In May of this year, we finally pushed it live and the results were astounding.

In the months following the re-architecting of our resources pages, traffic increased by 107%.

HubSpot’s blog team has also begun to rework older posts around select topic clusters. Here’s the impact of one of the first clusters we did; check out that average rank going up and to the right:

The days of throwing content at the wall to see what sticks are officially over. Doing the right thing today means creating content only when it meets a demonstrated user need. (BTW, HubSpot also released a tool earlier this year that makes it easier than ever to find and create your own Topic Clusters).

6. Doing fewer things better.

Every marketer has felt the pressure to churn out offer after offer and our team has not been exempt from that pressure. It’s hard to place bigger bets on a smaller number of activities.

Our co-marketing team feels this pressure every single week. In a given quarter, this team typically executes 15–20 campaigns. But we finally stopped and said, what if we could do less and take bigger swings? So we rolled the effort of four to five campaigns into one big campaign — 4 Days of Facebook.

We went big with our partners (Facebook and Gary Vaynerchuck), we went big with our promotion (Facebook Messenger), and we went big across the company (getting buy-in from multiple marketing teams and regions to support the campaign).

How to Lead High-Impact, Cross-Functional Projects

The results? Our biggest acquisition campaign ever, in all of HubSpot’s history. It generated 10x the leads of a typical acquisition campaign and 6x the lifetime value of projected customers.

And it brought together so many things: new channels (Facebook Messenger), new ways of selling (acquiring users for HubSpot’s freemium funnel), live video, and amazing partnerships (Facebook!).

This was hands down my favorite campaign from the entire year and all because our co-marketing team committed to doing fewer things better.

Looking forward to 2018

I’m excited about these results. But most of all, I hope the results we’ve seen in 2017 encourage you to be a little bolder in your strategy, to push a little harder for the right things (even if you’re unsure about the results), and to occasionally miss some quantitative goals in order to learn some big things.

Good luck out there!

Learned something? Click the 👏 to say “thanks!” and help others find this article.

This article was first published on the HubSpot Marketing Blog.

6 Marketing Lessons HubSpot Learned in 2017 was originally published in ThinkGrowth.org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.