6 Best HubSpot Service Hub alternatives for customer support

What is HubSpot Service Hub?

HubSpot Service Hub is an AI-powered customer service solution that helps deliver flexible support with extensive user insights. While it’s certainly a capable platform, HubSpot may not be the best choice for all businesses; it can be difficult to utilize for non-technical employees, while falling short in customization capacity and relevance for enterprise-level companies.

Today, we’ll take a look at some of the best HubSpot alternatives to help your organization gain a competitive edge in your customer support offerings.

The top disadvantage of the HubSpot customer support offering

HubSpot Service Hub may not be the most ideal platform for larger businesses, as its ticketing system, pricing, and lack of features may be prohibitive for some depending on their organizational requirements. Service Hub is the newest of HubSpot’s solutions, being introduced in 2018, so there’s still room for growth with many of its tools. Enterprise-level companies seeking a full-feature solution that can immediately handle a high volume of support requests may want to find an alternative.

Several user reviews mention these limitations, with one saying “The ticket system is not designed for high volume. You can't see if another team member is on the ticket. If the customer replies back to a [sic] closed to [sic] ticket it doesn't reopen so we miss emails unless we are double checking our notifications.”

Another client mentions how expenses can quickly snowball as organizations continue to add more agents to their plan, saying, “As the size of your team grows, you'll need to buy more seats to keep everyone on the same platform. It would be fantastic if purchasing the platform didn't restrict you to a specific amount of seats.”

Bigger organizations or those anticipating significant growth in the future may want to look elsewhere for their customer support needs.

6 HubSpot alternatives for customer support

Fortunately for you, there are plenty of more-than-competent alternatives if HubSpot isn’t meeting your business needs. We’ve done the heavy lifting, compiling some of the best solutions on the market that may be a better fit for your organization.

Freshdesk Omni

Freshdesk Omni is designed to cater to companies of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. Freshdesk Omni can be molded to fit your company’s unique requirements, allowing for extensive personalization on every channel to help you adjust as needs evolve.

Freshdesk Omni empowers businesses to manage customer inquiries, support tickets, and proactive outreach across a multitude of channels from one cohesive platform. Enjoy the ability to integrate with Salesforce, Shopify, Slack, and 1000+ other apps that you can find on our Marketplace. You can easily custom-build your connections by employing Neo, our flexible enterprise platform.

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Key features

• Freshworks chatbots work across channels to automate self-service and answer up to 70% of conversations

• Centralize customer inquiries from email, phone, chat, social media, and more

• Freddy AI Insights can analyze performance data to discover opportunities to increase productivity, deflect issues, or recommend and help execute remediation responses 

• Intelligent Ticket Assignment distributes requests based on agents’ expertise or current workload to ensure issues are resolved quickly and accurately.

• Robust Self-Service features with a scalable knowledge base allow customers to answer questions, deflecting inquiries from live agents autonomously.

• Automation triggers can instantly perform actions on tickets based on elapsed time or specific events.

• Easily segment customers to provide personalized support to specific groups based on customizable criteria

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Pros

• Great for collaboration – Collaborators, linked tickets, and parent-child ticketing features allow teams to work together to serve end-users better

• Ticketing tools like dispatch, intelligent assignment, and email notifications ensure that requests are directed to appropriate reps and are resolved promptly.

• Extensive personalization capabilities like portal customization, custom ticket forms, and custom agent roles ensure that support is tailored to each user’s specific needs

• Automation and workflows eliminate redundancy while allowing teams to improve productivity with generative AI

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Why Customers Love  Freshdesk Omni?

Freshdesk Omni’s scalability, automation capacity, ticketing optimization, and more make it one of the most appealing solutions for businesses of all sizes. With its unified customer helpdesk, agents can easily collaborate to support all users from a consolidated platform to provide a seamless experience for end-users across all channels.

Help Scout

Help Scout is a support solution that offers extensive collaboration, organization, and automation tools to help teams react efficiently to customer requests. It provides email, self-service, and live chat support from a single platform designed to feel like an inbox.

Key features

• No-code help center allows businesses to publish and manage articles to help customers find answers to FAQs and common issues without additional intervention.

• AI Assist helps optimize tone and translate to several different languages to cater support to the needs of unique users.

• An unambiguous overview of which team members are working on specific conversations keeps the inbox collision-free and ensures companies utilise resources efficiently.

Pros

• Easily navigable interface allows agents to quickly respond to customer inquiries

• Powerful inbox that brings conversations from all channels into a single space

• Docs Report tool breaks down visitor numbers, content gaps, trending topics, and more to help optimize CX

Cons

• Lack of integration options – site references connection with only ’50+’ platforms

• User reviews mention lack of customization, restricting personalization for end-users

• No ticket numbers available – may be confusing for agents accustomed to more standard systems

Zendesk

Zendesk leverages cutting-edge AI for support teams to resolve customer issues faster and more accurately. It can be utilized across the entire service experience, from self-service to agents to admins, to help companies operate efficiently at scale.

Key features

• Proactive messaging through SMS and WhatsApp helps resolve potential issues before they escalate.

• Generative AI-powered chatbots can handle complex interactions with minimal human oversight, allowing live reps to focus on more complex issues.

• Advanced triaging tools reduce manual sorting and prioritization while ensuring context is always included as conversations move between channels or agents.

Pros

• Extensive self-service options with AI assistance to ensure information is robust and accurate

• Customizable themes enable organizations to mold their help desk layout to better fit their brand image

• Centralized agent workspace ensures that all tools and interactions are unified in a single location 

Cons

• Pricey compared to similar solutions

• Not great for smaller businesses and ecommerce organizations due to price and lack of integrations

• Triggers and automation can be confusing and unreliable at times

ZohoDesk

Zoho Desk helps organizations manage customer communication over the phone, email, social media, and more. It also assists in assigning conversations to agents based on their department or team, automatically routing them to the most relevant individual.

Key features

• Contextual AI oversees the knowledge base, auto-tags tickets, and provides notifications on unusual activity in ticket streams.

• Notification rules enable ticket progress alerts for agents and customers based on specified criteria.

• Headquarters feature provides a live dashboard with real-time updates, allowing teams to fine-tune support strategies dynamically.

Pros

• Extensive list of features empowers companies to cater the platform to their unique needs

• Affordable pricing for basic and advanced plans

• AI-powered assistant, Zia, offers a wide range of capabilities, including sentiment analysis, field predictions, and more.

Cons

• While customization is extensive, users report it’s sometimes difficult to use

• Constant changes and updates can sometimes cause service interruptions

• Many key support functionalities are only available with higher-priced packages

LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a help desk and live chat software that offers personalized customer interactions with an all-in-one help desk solution. It features an omni-channel universal inbox, real-time live chat, a built-in call center, and a robust customer service portal. 

Key features

• Live chat widget provides canned responses and real-time typing-view while easily integrating onto most websites.

• Native mobile applications for both iOS and Android to handle omni-channel requests while away from a desktop.

• Support software allows agents to reach out via proactive chat invitations to reduce bounce rate and improve CX.

Pros

• Internal tickets and notes improve cohesiveness as conversations are passed between representatives

• Universal inbox gathers all messages into a single location and turns them into tickets

• Supports 43 distinct languages to help provide support to global customer bases

Cons

• No chat-to-SMS capabilities

• Integration with many popular applications comes at an extra charge, which can add up quickly

• User reviews mention limited mobile app functionality, restricting on-the-go utilization

Intercom

Intercom is a customer service solution that offers extensive automation and optimized human support, aimed at boosting satisfaction while reducing costs. It places an increased emphasis on AI capabilities, incorporating it into its ticketing system, chat options, proactive efforts, and more.

Key features

• Fin AI tool instantly summarizes conversations, personalizes replies, and auto-fills ticket information.

• Workflows features a visual builder to automate workloads with assignment rules, SLAs, time-saving bots, and more.

• Built-in safeguards ensure chatbots answer questions based solely on support content, while teams can closely monitor all of their responses

Pros

• Automated proactive support can target specific customer segments through multiple channels to reduce request volume for live agents

• Offers 360-degree customer profile with real-time updates and conversational insights

• Robust App Store with 450+ integrations to extend support outreach as far as possible

Cons

• User reviews mention confusing layout – sometimes difficult to locate or follow conversation progress

• Reporting and analytics capacity may be insufficient for companies with complex data needs

• Updates can be buggy or rejected altogether, while users report problems connecting with customer support regarding these issues

Why choose Freshworks for your customer service needs?

Freshdesk Omni is the premier help desk system available to organizations today, providing wide-ranging automation features, considerable collaboration capabilities, and much more to assist your help desk team in realizing its full potential. 

Utilize advanced features such as generative AI to analyze vast amounts of information, providing data-driven insights to highlight areas for improvement and better understand your customers. Additionally, you can optimize your ticketing strategy through tools like ticket dispatch, intelligent ticket assignment, and time- or event-triggered automation to ensure support requests are directed to the most relevant agent and are prioritized by urgency.

Our clients such as Travix, Restaurant365, Klarna, and more have already leveraged Freshdesk Omni advantage to their benefit; sign up for a free trial or request a demo to see how it can serve your business needs today!