Wake Up Customer Platform - Mar 30, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: 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 Carolan, 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. Uh, happy Monday, March 30th, George. How are we doing?

George B. Thomas: Doing good, my friend. How the heck are you doing?

Chris Carolan: Doing good. Missing Casey this week, for sure. She's on spring break with the kiddos. Yeah. Uh so we'll do our best to uh soldier on. Uh managing all these updates. Kind of a light load today. Nice. With some old hits and some new ones too. Uh, including, uh, this major update.

George B. Thomas: Oh man, already first thing. I wasn't even ready for that, like. Already? George B. Thomas: Major update. There we go.

[01:15] **WhatsApp Home Private Beta** Chris Carolan: Uh what's app home is in private beta. Uh, just kidding. Uh what's changed? Added notice that the beta is temporary, temporarily closed. Uh, customers who have opted in cannot leave and must contact support for assistance. Uh, all right. Uh, so moving on. I'll look forward to that home when it is ready to have people in it. Yeah. George B. Thomas: Yeah.

[01:57] **Customer Agent Tester** Chris Carolan: Customer agent tester. Smarter testing with file attachments and improved guidelines in improve response.

George B. Thomas: Wow, that's a, that's a title right there. Chris Carolan: Lots of improvement here. Uh, what is it? Two new enhancements to the customer agent tester that make it easier to validate your agent and act on what you find as you are testing. Wow. Chris Carolan: Number one, file attachment support in the tester. You can now attach files, images, PDFs, videos, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, zip, CSV and more directly in the tester's text and email composers up to 10 megabytes per file. This lets you test how your agent responds to the same types of content your real customers send. Number two, manage guidelines shortcut from improve response. When you are testing questions and answers and do not like tone, response style or behavior of the response, open the improved response panel, you'll now see a manage guidelines option. Clicking it takes you directly to the guidelines page so you can update your agent's tone, response style or behavior. Then come back and retest.

George B. Thomas: Very nice. Um, why does this matter? Testing your agent should surface real problems and let you fix them fast. Before these changes, you couldn't simulate file-based conversations in the tester and getting from a bad response to the right fix required manually navigating away. These updates close both gaps. Test with realistic inputs and act on what you learn in fewer clicks. Thank you, HubSpot. Chris, do you think the customer agent will ever be able to talk to people? Uh, it can now. Like George B. Thomas: No, I mean like on the website, right? So like instead of chatting, you see where I'm going? Like a Delphi version. Like instead of having to type everything, do you think you'll get to the point or will customer agent get to the point where you can go to the website and you can just talk to it and like it would have a voice. I wonder, I wonder if we're going to get there with this thing eventually or not?

Chris Carolan: Well, that works with calling already. So. Yeah, yeah. Chris Carolan: I imagine um just a feature away. Maybe. George B. Thomas: I might be teasing that to the HubSpot product uh folks uh to see if they'll uh maybe go in that direction.

Chris Carolan: Well, it's pretty interesting and probably could dig in on another show. Maybe the helpline on Wednesday um at 10:00 a.m. or 10:15 Central on LinkedIn Live. Um the as I've added that function functionality to Value-First team.com. It's an interesting to to find the use case match because I think when it comes to voice and video or avatars, right? Like if it doesn't make sense for the use case, it becomes nice to have very quickly and like not a value add. Hmm. Chris Carolan: Right? So like with calling, it's much easier for them to set that up and then focus on voice quality and things like that. But are people used to using chat on websites yet to be able to do that? Maybe not. George B. Thomas: Maybe not. Chris Carolan: Yeah, probably very customer audience dependent. Um. George B. Thomas: Yeah, potentially. Chris Carolan: I don't know. George B. Thomas: I look at the um again, this surge of humans talking instead of humans typing, Whisperflow and all of that and uh are we in a place where maybe that changes to where it needs to be. I don't know. Anyway, not why we're here. Yeah. Uh, but this this customer agent tester, like even if you're not, we talked about this last Wednesday on the HubSpot helpline, like customer agent, if you just go set that up right now and go through all the steps and fill in all the data with help from HubSpot as you're guiding you through it. Yeah. Chris Carolan: You will set up AI for most of your HubSpot portal. Yep. Chris Carolan: And with agent tester, like you can give yourself a masterclass in how this stuff works. Without a doubt. Chris Carolan: Like you don't get to do this in the other like LLMs, there's no way to like manage inputs and outputs and like see how it, how it changes and like being able to change tone on the fly. It's a really powerful tool that even if you're not going to put it on a website or put it customer facing, like this can be an amazing training tool. Without a doubt. Chris Carolan: So many people on the team. Um differentiating between, a lot of long titles today.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, I know. I'm telling you. Chris Carolan: Differentiating between internal like promotion/lateral move and external like new employer job changes.

George B. Thomas: What the titles of What is it? Chris Carolan: Job change signals, so we're talking the intent signals here, uh, and in the. Yeah. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Which was nowhere in the title, by the way, but okay, yep. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Uh, so job chain signals have been improved to better differentiate between internal job changes like promotions and lateral moves, etc. and external job changes like new employer. Uh, man, the the positioning of the parentheses here, so important. Uh, you can use this information to trigger different workflows or create separate list segments based on whether the job change is internal or external.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, um, maybe the title should have been job change signals have been improved exclamation mark. But why does it matter? Not every job change means the same thing. A promotion within an existing account is a different conversation from someone moving entirely to a new company. This updates uh update lets you automagically, my words, not theirs, trigger the right workflow and reach the right list without manual sorting. I mean it's a dope don't give me wrong. It's a dope update, bad title. Anyway.

Chris Carolan: Yeah. Uh, yeah, this is the kind of stuff folks, automatically flowing into your hubspot already. Yeah. Chris Carolan: that the ability to differentiate this kind of signal is so powerful. You just got to take the space to act on it. Yeah. George B. Thomas: Yeah. And by the way, who gets it? Everyone. George B. Thomas: Like everyone. Holy. List subs Chris Carolan: Professional and Enterprise. Uh, and Starter. Starter. Chris Carolan: Here. Yeah. So everybody. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Just not free. Just not free. Yeah. So not everyone. George B. Thomas: That's good. Chris Carolan: Almost everyone. 10 credits. All right, this is uh yeah, moving on. It's Yeah. Yeah. Chris Carolan: Yeah, big into Buyer Intent. I know you got credits. Yeah. You probably have 300 or 500 you can use that you might not be using.

[12:01] **Third Party Links Support in Knowledge Vaults** Chris Carolan: Third party link support in knowledge Vaults. Okay. Chris Carolan: Uh, what is it? Knowledge Vaults now preserve and display all embedded links from source documents, allowing users and AI assistance to directly access secondary resources like Google Sheets and Looker reports, referenced within knowledge articles and docs.

George B. Thomas: Okay, so you can't quite yet with knowledge Vaults just give it a folder in Google Drive, because that's actually not what one of the updates a couple weeks ago or a week ago meant. But you can give it a doc and it can follow the links. Okay, so why does this matter? Uh, reason for development, users previously lost access to important embedded links in knowledge articles, leading to manual workarounds and incomplete information. This change ensures users and support teams can seamlessly access all referenced resources without searching through source documents, increasing workflow efficiency and trust. Now, my question is is this links that show up that people humans can click into. This isn't actually saying that the links that the agent can go and see the information. So still not quite what I'm looking for, but still awesome for what humans need. Anyway. Yeah. George B. Thomas: Knowledge Vaults are coming along. Chris Carolan: Yeah, these are very specific examples that they're using in Google Sheets and Looker reports. Um, but and how does it work here? When knowledge Vault processes HTML, uh docX or supported files, all embedded links are preserved during normalization. During a search, AI assistance and users receive results that include these embedded hyperlinks either inline or in a separate section. For file types like PDF, PowerPoint and Markdown, hyperlink annotation support is being expanded. Pipeline configuration may control feature enablement. If enabled, no user action is needed. Links are surfaced automatically in responses and UI displays.

Hmm. Chris Carolan: So if there's a link in the document, uh, or file that you have put in the knowledge Vault, Yep. for an assistant to use, when you ask about a specific thing that would surface that link, it gives you the link and you'll be able to click on it. Is my understanding of what's what this update is. It's very cool.

[14:53] **Voicemail Drops for Power Dialer** Chris Carolan: Voicemail drops for the power dialer. Oh, hey. Chris Carolan: What is it? Voicemail drops allow power dialer users to automatically leave pre-recorded voicemails during power dialer calls, reducing talk time and increasing outreach efficiency.

George B. Thomas: I've actually been asked if HubSpot had this. Uh, it is public beta, but why does it matter? Reps often spend significant time leaving nearly identical voicemails for prospects. This repetitive task reduces rep productivity and creates inconsistency in messaging across outreach efforts. Okay, so how does it work? Well, you'll want to come and read this uh because it literally talks you through how to use the power dialer and how to use these voice drops. Chris, do you do uh? Chris Carolan: I can't even do it with a straight face. George B. Thomas: Chris, do you do voice drops? How about do I listen to voicemails? Mm. Chris Carolan: Oh man, from my mom, and that's about it. Yes. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Right. Definitely not from numbers I don't know. Like. Mm. Chris Carolan: But available on Sales Hub Enterprise. Nice. Chris Carolan: Oh yeah. That's just that's what you're looking for, hubspot can support it. Yep. George B. Thomas: HubSpot has it. Chris Carolan: Uh, last on the list, credit memos. Uh, what's changed? Now includes creating credit memos directly from invoices, applying credits to contact balances, editing, removing, apply credits, editing, adding custom properties to credit memos, automating with workflows and analyzing credit memos in customer reports. In case you forgot, it is uh a credit memo is a document a business issues to reduce a customer's amount owed, typically to correct an overcharge, reflect a return or apply a discount. It acts as an official record of the adjustment and is applied to an invoice or the customer's outstanding balance.

George B. Thomas: And if you forgot why it matters, credit memos are a must have for finance and operations teams because they're a standard way to correct an invoice after it's issued without rewriting history. With credit memos in HubSpot, merchants can issue adjustments like discounts, returns, write offs or billing corrections, keep a clean audit trail and tie every credit back to the original invoice if they'd like to like for accurate reporting and reconciliation, which I'm sure those financial people do. Uh, the results is fewer manual workarounds, fewer data inconsistencies and a faster, more trustworthy account receivable workflow inside of HubSpot, definitely words I didn't realize I was going to say today, trustworthy account receivable workflow, but for many humans, it's going to be a very important thing. Oh, it's so good. Um man, and if you can just get them past the HubSpot perception barrier, Yup. accounting teams love hubspot. So like and if you and guess what? If you get that group in, it the rest of the work coming right behind because they got the money. That's where the money flows.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Chris Carolan: Uh, so there's so yeah, a lot of value here. And uh, a lot of screen share got. So again, if you're not sure what we mean by credit memos, because they are fairly internally focused, um, you know, but we got to start doing our due diligence after we tell the customers, hey, we'll clear out the rest of the balance for you. Mmm. Chris Carolan: And instead of just throwing that email over to the accounting team and say, hey, reconcile the books and whatever you got to do that, they can do that easily in Hubspot now. Uh, So remember folks, you probably already own the solution you're looking for in hubspot. Sometimes you just need to wake up to it. Join us tomorrow morning live at 7:30 a.m. Central or catch us anytime on Spotify and Apple Music. Drop your biggest takeaway in the comments and let us know what capabilities you want to wake up to next. Until then, I'm Chris Carolan.

George B. Thomas: And I'm George B. Thomas. Chris Carolan: And this has been wake up customer platform. Now go build something amazing. Have a great day everybody.