HubSpot enables 128,000 businesses with live chat that just works

HubSpot is an innovator, with a strategic focus on providing its customers with the tools and capabilities they need to accelerate growth across the customer lifecycle. With that in mind, HubSpot recognised that adopting live experiences as a core element of its platform would be crucial to enabling more efficient, slicker collaboration and communication – ultimately delivering business value for customers in the form of revenue growth.

That process started with customer live chat, using a third-party service to provide the realtime infrastructure, but with big plans to build out further live experiences across its platform. However, it quickly became clear that the third-party they chose could not offer the QoS guarantees, nor the stability required to support the uninterrupted experiences HubSpot commits to delivering for its 120,000+ customers.

Freiert explained: “With realtime, there is no middle ground. If messages are dropped or delayed, the whole experience is broken. So, for us, realtime has to just work and it has to scale with our platform, because when truly live experiences like chat suffer issues or go down it affects all our customers and seriously impacts our reputation, so the criticality of this just working is much more magnified.”

Initially, HubSpot explored the option of building realtime infrastructure in-house, but it quickly became clear that was not a viable option.

“Around 20% of our engineering team is dedicated to infrastructure,” Freiert said. “But we could see that building realtime infrastructure we could rely on would be too complex and time-consuming to provide value for our customers. Overall, the opportunity cost associated with taking so many engineers away from core product innovation was simply too high.”

Instead, Freiert and his team decided to look for a third-party vendor offering the QoS, performance and integrity guarantees HubSpot needed to deliver on their 120,000+ users’ expectations, as well as the flexibility to support new and diverse realtime capabilities over time – quickly identifying Ably as the ideal solution. 

“Ably wasn’t just the right solution for now, but for our future needs too,” Freiert confirmed. “Its scale-ready realtime platform with simple, API-driven set up massively reduced our initial engineering overhead, delivers against all our QoS, performance and integrity demands and gives us the scope to quickly bring innovations on the customer experience to market.”

Since choosing Ably, HubSpot has launched a range of live experiences that its customers can rely on to deliver business value - driving more efficient collaboration and providing tools that open up new revenue opportunities. Today, it relies on Ably to power live chat between 128,000 businesses and their customers across 120 countries - and more than 500,000 business-critical conversations every month.

Ably has proven highly cost-effective too, delivering a 60% upfront CAPEX saving and a further $300,000 saving every year in reduced infrastructure and engineering costs, compared with a self-built solution.

“I’m very happy we found Ably,” said Freiert. “It immediately solved our issues around the user experience and scale. It supports our customers’ stringent expectations as well as future product development, because all our teams can now call on realtime infrastructure that can support thousands of services and scales limitlessly in step with new features and an expanding user base.”

Ably now provides HubSpot with a high performance, reliable, effortlessly scalable organisation-wide edge messaging platform on which Freiert and his team can easily build ever more live experiences for customers. For instance, it is crucial to HubSpot’s Conversations feature, which allows customers to work smarter by drawing diverse channels – email, live chat, bots, Facebook and web forms – into a single inbox.

“Ably makes realtime just work,” Freiert concluded. “Without it, our product would literally stop working - but it is so much more than that. Ably is now a business-critical part of our organisation-wide infrastructure and a key innovation partner that our engineers really like working with. The support and communication are just outstanding and that is huge for us - we really see Ably as a partner in our growth.”