Comparing Intercom, Zendesk and HubSpot Service Hub

Following our blog on the differences between Zendesk, Freshdesk and HubSpot Service Hub, we now compare Intercom, Zendesk and Service Hub.

Choosing the right customer service software is crucial for your customers and your customer service staff. In this blog, we compare Intercom and Zendesk. It will help you better assess which system fits the wishes and needs of your organisation. Both platforms offer a variety of packages, features and benefits that help you deliver the best service-focused customer experience.

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is one of the oldest customer service software packages on the market. It was founded in 2007 and is an excellent solution for phone-based customer service teams that need robust calling capabilities and highly configurable solutions. The platform offers many capabilities, such as ticket automation, self-service solutions and custom configurations.

Zendesk has only recently started expanding into sales and CRM solutions. Zendesk Sunshine, as the CRM platform is called, was announced in 2018 and launched in November of that same year. The solutions beyond customer service and support are still very much in development at Zendesk, but potential buyers sometimes choose an alternative because the technology is not yet proven. Most Zendesk buyers therefore still stick with a third-party CRM system.

What is Intercom?

Intercom launched 4 years after Zendesk and positions itself as a conversational relationship platform. With Intercom, they make it possible to offer personalised, messenger-based experiences. The platform enables in-depth conversations, but you can also handle your support within the platform, you have marketing capabilities at your disposal, and Intercom also offers a number of self-service options, such as a knowledge base.

Intercom includes a customer data platform with people and company lists and custom events, but does not offer a full CRM platform like Zendesk Sunshine. Intercom customers generally maintain a separate CRM that can integrate with it. The integration with, for example, HubSpot is available within the Intercom Grow plan.

Specialisation versus customisation

Customisation is an area where Zendesk excels. Through various paid add-ons, Zendesk enables customisations to meet the data needs of your organisation. Logically, this comes at a higher price. One of the customisations Zendesk offers is Zendesk Explore, an analytics product for omnichannel analysis that analyses customer engagement figures across multiple marketing and service channels. Alongside Explore, the Zendesk dashboard features allow you, as a service manager or person responsible, to easily interpret, evaluate and improve team performance and ticket throughput. Another interesting add-on offered by Zendesk is Collaboration. With this add-on, Zendesk enables you to share information with different teams or departments.

Intercom is more of a specialised solution and is suited to smaller teams. As a result, it is harder to achieve custom adjustments within the platform. It offers customisable bots with ‘code free’ editing, so you can, among other things, apply your company branding. Within the various packages, adjustments can be made to functionalities such as product explanations, account-based marketing, multi-channel campaigns and reporting.

What about pricing?

Zendesk offers four paid pricing tiers to help potential customers find the solution that best suits their organisation. These tiers are: Essential, Team, Professional and Enterprise. An important thing to bear in mind with all plans is that customers must pay for every user, regardless of their access level. Zendesk has many add-ons that are free, except Collaboration. That requires a paid plan to allow users with limited access into the system.

Intercom also offers four different packages, namely: Start and Grow as a basic solution for chat and messaging, and Accelerate and Scale for automations and messaging at scale. Intercom’s packages come with a fixed number of users, but you can expand this for an additional fee. Each plan has the capacity to reach 2,000 people per month, and for every extra 1,000 people you pay an additional 50 dollars. These costs can rise quickly as your organisation grows. Intercom also charges between 199 and 499 dollars per month for each add-on.

What extensions and integrations are possible?

Within the Zendesk marketplace, you can find various compatible apps. With more than 1,000 Zendesk integrations across 15 different categories, there is plenty available to find a solution. You can easily sort, filter and search to find, for example, the most-used apps and set up a connection straight away.

Intercom offers far fewer integrations than Zendesk, but does have a number of popular solutions. Think of Stripe, Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, Jira and Segment. Notably, there are few integrations for support teams, with fewer than 20 options compared to the hundreds of integration solutions Zendesk has to offer.

Self-service capabilities

Getting hands-on with customisations within the system is an important part of Zendesk. This takes the form of Guide Lite, which is offered within Zendesk support. With the scalable options for adding add-ons to Guide Lite, you get powerful features and instructions to tailor your service. Think of permission management for service teams, reporting and analysis, and installation and maintenance of customer portals and content in multiple languages.

Intercom has a multilingual help centre for self-service that is available with the Grow package. Within the Accelerate and Scale packages, a private help centre is available.

Support from the platforms themselves

Zendesk support is strongly differentiated across the tiers. For example, they offer 24/7 email, phone and chat support within the Enterprise package. At this level, as a Zendesk customer, you can purchase priority support including a service level objective and a 99.9% uptime SLA (Service Level Agreement). If you need a Zendesk success employee, this is available within all packages for an additional fee.

With Intercom, you have access to training webinars and 24/7 chat and email support for all paying customers. Within the Accelerate and Scale packages, you have the option of getting priority support and you are assigned a relationship manager. Within the Scale package, you get the most support from Intercom, with tailored onboarding, direct contact with the customer success team, personalised training and ongoing product advice.

HubSpot Service Hub

The HubSpot Service Hub offers various tools to help you build more personal relationships with your customers.

Knowledge Base

With the Knowledge Base capabilities within HubSpot, you can offer your customers self-service options. A well-developed knowledge base enables your team to prioritise the toughest customer challenges, while your customers have the basics to solve their smaller issues themselves.

Ticketing system and helpdesk

When making comparisons in the field of service software, the advantages of HubSpot’s all-in-one solutions come to the fore. The helpdesk and ticketing systems that HubSpot offers keep your team organised and ensure priorities flow into one another seamlessly. This allows you to resolve your customers’ issues faster and build a personal relationship with them.

Chat functionality

The live chat within Service Hub enables you to connect directly with the people visiting your website. This allows you to make a human connection in real time and turn these conversations into leads that ultimately convert into customers. In doing so, you offer excellent service not only to your prospects but also to your current customers.

Feedback software

Use tools to gather customer feedback, such as NPS, CSAT, CES or even custom surveys. With these survey results, you gain insights to build a better relationship with your customers.

All-in-one CRM platform for a better customer experience

Service Hub is built on the HubSpot CRM platform. This creates a 360-degree view of your customers by connecting marketing, sales and service. The HubSpot marketplace also offers more than 500 possible integrations, giving you a complete picture of your customers and their interactions across various channels. This means your customer service representative immediately has everything to hand to provide the right service straight away.

A uniquely human approach

Service Hub is focused on enabling personal contact. This can be through the knowledge base, so customers can solve the problem themselves right away, or directly with service staff. Service Hub is focused on the customer experience at every service interaction. With tools such as NPS, CSAT and other customer feedback surveys, you gain insight into what matters to customers and can continuously keep making optimisations.

Let your business grow steadily

With Service Hub, you get a platform with enormous capabilities, yet with a personal approach. In other words, a platform for large organisations, but with the personal approach of a small business. HubSpot’s CRM system is designed to help customers grow, and Service Hub is an important part of that. With Service Hub, you can work more efficiently with ticket automation to add a personal touch faster, with the right context. You can also coach and grow your team with tools to deliver a consistent service experience across all channels and with every employee.

Customer reach and engagement that are not expensive

Service Hub is a more complete package for customer reach and engagement than Zendesk. That is because it has built-in chat, calling and email functionality. This is in contrast to the paid functionality with Zendesk Support. Zendesk has advanced customisation and scalability, as long as customers pay for it. If your organisation wants to purchase an all-in-one solution, Service Hub offers a well-packaged solution with robust customer reach and engagement included as standard in every package.

A unified view of customer data

HubSpot ensures that your customer data across the various applications for marketing, sales and service is unified. Zendesk has only just started expanding into sales and fundamental CRM features. As a result, many Zendesk users prefer a third-party CRM package. This means you do not get a good, unified view of your customer data. Customers who want strong stability, predictability and robustness in their platform are better off with HubSpot. Service Hub includes more features in the ‘core’ package, which means fewer add-ons are needed.

Better support for service-oriented organisations

Service Hub offers better learning material covering every aspect of the product compared to Zendesk. All customers receive excellent support, not just Enterprise customers. Service Hub is also easier to learn and more intuitive to optimise, reducing reliance on support. Both HubSpot and Zendesk have solid customer success programmes. Looking at the reviews on G2, Service Hub is rated 8.7/10 and Zendesk scores 8.3/10.

Switching from Zendesk/Intercom to HubSpot

Considering switching to HubSpot? Addmark is a HubSpot Gold Partner and we can help you with this. Our team has experience carrying out the migration for you, with as little disruption as possible to daily operations.

We look beyond simply ‘copying and pasting’ data. It is about setting up the process within HubSpot optimally from the start, so you can easily scale up in the years ahead.

Still not sure which system is best for your organisation? Feel free to get in touch with us, no obligation.