In a time of ever-evolving customer expectations, the number of tools business leaders use for sales, marketing, and service is growing. Every day, teams access software to help them automate marketing campaigns, generate new leads, close deals, and provide excellent customer service.
Unfortunately, in the past, the disconnected nature of these tools has led to knowledge gaps and data silos between teams. Companies have struggled to bridge the gap between sales professionals, marketing experts, and service reps, leading to disjointed and inconsistent experiences for end users.
HubSpot and Zendesk are two SaaS leaders working to address this problem. With a unified platform of tools for every customer-facing professional, both Zendesk and HubSpot hope to unify the experience landscape once and for all. The question is, which CX solution is best?
Zendesk vs HubSpot: The Zendesk Portfolio
Zendesk is a comprehensive SaaS solution provider committed to improving customer service. The product portfolio offered by Zendesk comes with solutions for enhancing the employee experience, crafting conversational experiences, and tracking customer insights.
Delivered via the cloud, Zendesk’s toolkit covers three main areas:
Zendesk for Service
The Zendesk service platform is an omnichannel communication and customer support platform built to unify and align customer conversations. The platform supports live chat, messaging, social media, email, and voice. Companies can also build self-service help centers and community forums, custom AI apps and bots.
Alongside omnichannel communication tools, Zendesk’s service platform includes access to intelligent routing, AI insights, knowledge management tools, built-in collaboration tools, and a completely customizable agent workspace. Users can integrate the platform with their existing tools, analyze crucial metrics, and monitor results in real time across every channel.
Zendesk for Sales
Zendesk Sell is a modern sales-focused CRM solution designed to help companies maximize growth and unlock new opportunities. The comprehensive platform includes contact and deal management tools, activity tracking, as well lead generation and qualification.
Full 360-degree customer profiles allow agents to track critical customer information cross sales and service in one platform. There’s also a full reporting and analytics section for tracking the outcomes of the sales pipeline. Additionally, Zendesk Sell integrates with numerous existing tools, and has its own dedicated API, so developers can create custom, automated workflows.
Zendesk Sunshine
Finally, Zendesk Sunshine is the all-in-one platform solution, created by Zendesk to help companies create their own unique customer service strategy. Using open standards and common languages, Sunshine ensures companies have the freedom to build the solutions they need.
With Sunshine, companies can maximize agent productivity, creating AI-enhanced workspaces with no code tools and automation. What’s more, the end-to-end platform can connect with multiple sources of data, to help businesses create a comprehensive view of their target audience.
The Sunshine platform also integrates directly with more than 1200 popular apps in the Zendesk marketplace, including Shopify, Salesforce, Slack, and Zoom.
HubSpot vs Zendesk: The HubSpot Portfolio
Like Zendesk, HubSpot has taken a unified approach to address the various needs of today’s sales, service, and marketing experts. The SaaS platform from HubSpot offers modular access to a range of different tools or “hubs” built for specific user needs. Every hub comes with access to a selection of free tools, including a free version of the HubSpot CRM.
The core hubs include:
HubSpot Marketing Hub
An end-to-end marketing platform designed to help companies attract the right audience and convert more of their visitors. The comprehensive toolkit includes social media tools, blog and content creation capabilities, and SEO solutions. Companies can even build their own websites and automate their marketing campaigns using pre-set triggers and rules.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub also features video hosting and management capabilities, analytics dashboards with heatmaps and custom reports, as well as various other solutions.
The HubSpot CMS Hub
The CMS Hub from HubSpot combines premium versions of all the company’s free tools with blog and content creation capabilities. Companies can use the technology in this hub to create their own website and optimize it for the search engine with keywords, backlinks and more. There are also lead generation tools to explore, live chat options, and security monitoring tools included.
HubSpot Sales Hub
The Sales Hub from HubSpot enhances the features of the free CRM service with tools to help companies close more deals and strengthen customer relationships. Alongside an advanced CRM environment with in-depth user profiles, companies can also access sales automation tools, Esignature software, and predictive lead scoring in the same place.
Other capabilities include automated email sequences, the ability to create multiple deal pipelines, and customizable reports on cash flow, revenue, productivity, and more.
HubSpot Service Hub
In the Service Hub, HubSpot provides companies with all the functionality they need to deliver exceptional support to customers. The comprehensive kit comes with access to an extensive knowledge base, customer service automation capabilities, and even tools for collecting customer feedback. Other capabilities include Goals, custom support form fields, video creation options, and the ability to build various tailored ticket pipelines.
HubSpot Operations Hub
The HubSpot operations hub was created to help companies more easily manage, sync, and curate customer data. The scalable platform offers access to data quality automation and programmable automation tools. Plus, companies can access comprehensive data sets for marketplace insights, workflow extensions, team management tools, and more.
Which is Best: HubSpot or Zendesk?
Both Zendesk and HubSpot have created SaaS platforms designed to help companies unify more of the tools their employees rely on each day. Both of these platforms offer plenty of tools to help companies enhance their customer service strategy, improve employee performance, and boost engagement. They also both provide access to tools for workflow automation.
However, the focus of each portfolio is slightly different.
Zendesk’s SaaS solutions focus primarily on the service and sales landscapes. Companies looking to create a more consistent experience throughout the entire customer purchasing and loyalty journey are sure to benefit from Zendesk’s flexible toolkit.
Alternatively, HubSpot looks at the needs of virtually every customer-facing employee, with tools for building websites, managing operations, and enhancing marketing campaigns. HubSpot’s portfolio could be the ideal choice for Business leaders looking for a way to unify marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
