To deliver an exceptional customer experience you need an exceptional customer service solution. And two of the great customer service solutions that are revolutionising the market are Zendesk and HubSpot.
Customer experience is more important than ever when it comes to growing your business, and in a market with so much supply and demand, you need to go above and beyond to attract and retain customers.
The key to this is customer service software, a platform that allows you to prioritise your customers' needs and effectively manage your organisation's tasks for maximum efficiency.
Today we're going to talk about two possible customer service solutions you've probably heard of and find out which one is right for your business: Zendesk or HubSpot.
what is HubSpot?
HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales software that helps businesses attract visitors, convert leads and build customer loyalty. It's a cloud-based platform, so all your data is synced across computers and devices, and updates are instant and automatic.
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What is Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is part of HubSpot's customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Service Hub provides you with a suite of tools developed specifically to improve the customer experience; from self-service features like chatbots and FAQs that deepen customer relationships, to enhanced automation and ticket management to increase service efficiency.
what is Zendesk?
At its core, Zendesk is a customer service platform that makes it easy to communicate with customers through any channel. More broadly, Zendesk is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides solutions for sales and support teams.
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What is Zendesk Sunshine
As part of Zendesk's core CRM, Zendesk Sunshine provides a set of integrated tools, such as help desk and omnichannel support features, designed to support and convenience your customers.
Similarities between HubSpot and Zendesk
Both platforms are part of a CRM, or customer relationship management system. This is a positive point because it means you can use customer data to provide contextual and relevant information. Both HubSpot and Zendesk CRM have sales, marketing and web development features to ensure a smoother handover between teams and therefore a superior customer experience.
However, HubSpot's CRM has been carefully crafted in-house, whereas Zendesk has had external updates to bring it to a similar position. This means that, from the perspective of providing a complete end-to-end solution, HubSpot has an advantage over Zendesk, as it has been specifically designed to provide a seamless end-to-end experience.
Differences between HubSpot and Zendesk
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Number of features
HubSpot includes tools for customer service, sales, marketing, web, and operations teams. It is powerful and easy to use, and also provides a complete view of the customer journey. As a result, it fosters seamless collaboration between marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
Zendesk Sunshine is Zendesk's CRM platform. It combines its Zendesk Sell and Zendesk Suite products. It allows designers and developers to create and integrate software for teams that have direct contact with their customers. As a native Amazon Web Services software, it provides the tools needed to create robust customer experiences. However, when compared to HubSpot's CRM platform, it's not entirely built on the same foundation.
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Efficiency of tools
HubSpot Service Hub has a wide range of tools that can help you improve your team's efficiency, such as support automation, SLA management, multi-channel messaging, mobile inbound and a customer portal. In addition, HubSpot's CRM offers a comprehensive set of sales tools that work hand-in-hand with marketing tools to help you get both teams aligned, and able to work towards your company's growth goals.
Zendesk Support and Zendesk Suite, as support software, offer a comprehensive set of tools for customer service reps, including SLA management and custom ticket design for advanced support teams, but these tools lack the functionality to keep different teams aligned with a common interface.
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Self-service tools
A key element to alleviating growing workloads is to allow your customers to self-serve.
HubSpot Service Hub and Zendesk offer similar features that facilitate self-service. Both have knowledge base functionality available, allowing you to create helpful articles that answer common questions. This is offered at the Professional and Enterprise levels for HubSpot and at all levels for Zendesk.
HubSpot Service Hub has a customer portal feature that, when connected to your shared inbox, maintains the flow of ticket communication between customers and reps, provides access to your company's knowledge base, and can be customised to create an optimal experience for your customers.
Zendesk also has customer portal functionality available at Growth, Professional and Enterprise levels.
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Integrations and extensibility
When it comes to integrations, both platforms offer fairly comprehensive offerings that allow you to extend core functionality and sync with other tools you're using.
HubSpot has around 1,000 apps in its app marketplace, 100 of which are dedicated specifically to support.
While Zendesk has around 1,200 apps in its app marketplace, most of them are in the support category, with fewer than 100 apps for sales and chat functions.
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Pricing
In general, pricing for both platforms is comparable, offering 'agent' based pricing around USD 70-80 per month (as of March 2022), with both also offering free access to users with reduced functionality.
However, HubSpot offers free starter packages, which means you can start using HubSpot CRM with additional access to marketing, sales and customer service tools. Free service tools include ticketing, email scheduling, live chat, shared inboxes and calls.
Final verdict: which platform is better?
Considering the features of each platform, we can say that HubSpot offers more comprehensive tools than Zendesk.
From a customer service perspective, the tools offered by Service Hub are unrivalled, especially when combined with HubSpot's other services, which is what makes it so powerful.
ifyou want to start investing in HubSpot's services, contact us and we'll help you with everything you need.
