There's no doubt about it, customer experience is increasingly important if you want your business to continue to grow. Your competition is becoming increasingly fierce and you must always improve your level of service. It's a daily job to make sure you attract and retain your customers. Moreover, your reputation is entirely linked to the quality of your customer service. One solution is to create an exceptional customer experience and align all of your teams. From the moment a prospect finds you, until they buy and even after, you want to be as helpful as possible. You can do this through relevant support, timely messaging, and human, empathetic interactions. One of the foundations of this approach is customer service software, a platform that allows you to categorize your customers' needs and efficiently manage tasks to be as efficient as possible. There are several service solutions available. We're going to compare two of these popular solutions - Zendesk or HubSpot Service Hub.
What is HubSpot Service Hub?
The HubSpot Service Hub is part of the HubSpot CRM platform. The Service Hub provides you with features specifically designed to improve the customer experience. These include chatbots, a knowledge base, satisfaction surveys and ticket management.
What is Zendesk for service?
Zendesk provides a suite of integrated tools, such as help desk features and omnichannel support, designed to provide support and convenience to your customers. So they're both part of a CRM, which is a positive for both platforms, 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 capabilities to ensure a smoother handoff between teams and therefore a superior experience for customers in their journey with you. The Zendesk Service Features
- Ticketing system
- Messaging and live chat (Conversational tools)
- Help Center
- Reporting and Analysis
- Answer Bot
- Ticketing System Software
- Knowledge Base
- Forum Software
- Help Desk Software
The HubSpot Service Hub Features
- Help desk and ticket management
- Team management
- Customer Portal
- SLA management
- Knowledge base
- Omnichannel Messaging
- Live chat and chatbots
- Customer feedback system (surveys)
- Advanced reporting
- Shared inbox
How can these two platforms help you be more efficient?
One of the main goals of any customer service solution is to reduce the time spent on routine and administrative tasks to improve your productivity. It's not just about dealing with unhappy customers, lack of time in the day is the second biggest challenge for service teams every day. In fact, everyone is short on time these days. HubSpot has recently enhanced its tools to boost individual and team productivity. Service platform features such as the knowledge base, shared inbox, and customer portals allow teams to spend less time on data entry and prioritize the most pressing issues. Full CRM integration and automation capabilities also provide service representatives with full context for customer interactions, enabling them to provide personalized service responses based on context and urgency level. Zendesk began as support software, offering a comprehensive set of tools designed to empower customer service agents. Service level agreement management and customizable ticket layouts allow for advanced services, but they lack the functionality of a common interface to make all services available in one place.
Self-service support
Another way to lighten an ever-increasing workload is to let your customers be as autonomous as possible. This means providing them with the right information at the right time. If your customers can and want to serve themselves, you need to give them every opportunity to do so, as it will save you a lot of time. HubSpot Service Hub and Zendesk Service offer similar features that help achieve this goal of self-service. Both platforms have a knowledge base feature, which allows you to create helpful articles that answer the most common questions. HubSpot Service Hub offers a customer portal setup. This portal connects to your shared inbox, allowing ticket conversations to flow seamlessly between customers and your customer service employees. The customer portal allows your customers to have an overview of the different open and closed tickets.
Customization and integrations
To keep your business unique, you need software solutions tailored to your needs. Zendesk is ideal for larger, more complex businesses that may not need as much visibility into sales and marketing activities. Which is why HubSpot comes into play! HubSpot's personalization features have evolved significantly in recent years. On March 15, 2022, HubSpot relaunched its service module to make it much more competitive in the market. HubSpot's Service Hub offers very easy-to-use customization, allowing anyone to tailor the tools to their needs. When it comes to integrations with other applications, both platforms have comprehensive offerings that allow you to extend the core capabilities and sync with other tools you use. Zendesk has about 1,200 apps in its app marketplace, most of which are support-related. HubSpot has about 1,000 apps on its marketplace, more than 100 of which are specifically dedicated to service. Where HubSpot is really a big champion is in its ecosystem of partner directories. If you have more complex requirements, there are over 6,000 certified partners that can help you, including our Parkour3 agency. Zendesk recently relaunched its partner program, but only with about 300 vendors. We won't lie to you, our preference is for HubSpot. From an ease of use and CRM synergy standpoint, HubSpot is really the best choice. So, if you were already using other HubSpot modules, The Service Hub is in our opinion the best one for you. While the functionality of Service Hub and Zendesk Service are very similar, the all-in-one capabilities of the HubSpot suite give it a significant advantage. If you're looking to make the switch from Zendesk to Service Hub, we can certainly help. All you need to do is contact us. And if you're still not convinced that HubSpot can meet your CRM needs, we invite you to see our article on 40 reasons to use HubSpot.