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Zendesk vs Intercom

Customer support plays a crucial role in maintaining and building strong customer relationships, ensuring customer satisfaction, and creating brand loyalty. While Zendesk is angled more for managing customer support, Intercom is better for managing customer relationships

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About Zendesk

  • Zendesk is a cloud-based platform focused on providing service-oriented solutions aimed at improving customer relationships.

  • Zendesk Service is a customer support solution that is designed to manage customer requests, tickets, and communication channels such as email, chat, phone, and social media.

About Intercom

  • Intercom is a customer communication platform that helps businesses interact with customers and users via in-app messages, email, and live chat. 

  • Intercom features a suite of tools for customer support, sales, and marketing, allowing businesses to engage with their customers through personalized and automated messaging campaigns.

About HubSpot

  • HubSpot is a cloud-based customer platform that helps scaling businesses grow better with sales, service, marketing, and content management software.

  • Service Hub is a seamless component of HubSpot's AI-powered Smart CRM, providing businesses with a streamlined way to resolve customer issues, and a complete view of their customer interactions and data from every aspect of the flywheel. 

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Zendesk

What Zendesk Offers:

  • Within the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you can work together on tickets with both internal and external teams using Side Conversations. You can grant restricted access to essential team members, enabling them to stay updated on ticket progress and offer their expertise through private comments when needed, using Light Agents.

  • Zendesk allows you to optimize workflows by developing macros for support inquiries that can be addressed with a single, standard reply or action. This spares agents the need to individually respond to numerous clients experiencing the same problem.

Where Zendesk Falls Short:

  • A customer service playbook enhances your potential to fulfill your customers' needs, as it provides Customer Success Managers with guidance on the necessary actions to accomplish their objectives and identifies the customer segments they should prioritize in their proactive endeavors. Zendesk does not support playbook functionality.

  • Zendesk offers more customer service features at lower tiers, with more customization and higher limits.  This typically adds complexity and management effort, but can make Zendesk more suitable for larger organizations.

Intercom

What Intercom Offers:

  • The Intercom Help Center is an effective tool for organizing and sharing your knowledge base articles. Articles can be categorized and integrated with your messaging system to enhance the overall chatting experience.

  • Intercom Operator bot streamlines basic tasks, enabling your team to concentrate on higher-priority work. They intervene in conversations only when appropriate and can provide assistance. The bots are designed to be useful, discreet, and transparent.

Where Intercom Falls Short:

  • Intercom surveys offer access to crucial customer insights that enable you to transform those understandings into actions, seamlessly. Gaining access to surveys requires add-ons.

  • Ticket status provides insight into the current stage of a specific request. Because every organization is different, they may require the ability to create custom ticket statuses. Intercom does not provide the functionality to customize ticket statuses. 

HubSpot

What Sets HubSpot Apart

  • Service Hub allows you to help customers on your site instantly. Direct users to the appropriate personnel within your support team, and cultivate stronger connections through meaningful discussions.

  • Build a library of resources and guides for your customer service team to follow. Automatically surface recommended content to your team, right when they need it.

  • Service Hub removes unnecessary manual tasks to allow your team to concentrate on addressing customer issues. With automated workflows, you can enable agents to create genuine experiences that will grow in scale with your business.

ServiceHub_Service-workflows_with frame

55% of Service Hub Professional and 68% of Enterprise customers display high Service Hub feature usage. (HubSpot Annual ROI Report)

How HubSpot Measures Up

Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users. HubSpot Service Hub connects all your customer service data and channels on HubSpot's AI-powered Smart CRM, so you can easily support, retain, and grow your customer base.

Service Hub is easy and powerful customer service software that connects without complexity, powers productivity with easy-to-adopt tools, and supports growing service teams.

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Feature Comparison

  • Zendesk Differentiation

    • SMS Hosted Support
    • Conversation Tagging

  • Intercom Differentiation

    • SMS Hosted Support (as an add-on)
    • Conversation Tagging

  • HubSpot Differentiation

    • Playbooks
    • Custom Surveys
    • HubSpot-Provided Phone Numbers
    • Meeting Scheduling

    What are customers saying?

    HubSpot Service Hub received G2's top 100 Best Software Products & Highest Satisfaction Products 2023

      Since implementing Service Hub, customer service call volume has declined because issues are resolved more efficiently and customers are kept informed, which frees up the customer service team for other tasks.

      Katapult
      Read the case study

      HubSpot is trusted by over 205,000 businesses in more than 135 countries.

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