Gist is a unified marketing, sales, and support platform. It includes live chat, a help desk, knowledge base, email marketing, marketing automation, opt-in forms, and more.
$29
per month
HubSpot Service Hub
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
HubSpot Service Hub aims to bring customer service data and channels together in one place, and helps scale support through automation and self-service. According to the vendor, Service Hub provides more time for proactive service that delights, retains, and grows your customer base.
If your marketing model is selling products, services, or SAAS where you are doing inbound marketing and your website will do most of the lead generation and conversion, this is a great product. From live chat, support, event tracking, and automation, you could almost put your entire business on autopilot. If your marketing model is mostly outreach to cold leads and conversion, this software currently does not have any type of sales stages or task generation. I would still use Gist for website inbound but use another software for outreach and cold leads then when they become a lead put them into Gist for marketing automation.
I can only speak to our use case - in which HubSpot Service Hub is used as our Support Desk ticketing system. It is well suited to intake and log support issues, it makes communication with clients easy, and allows us to track and move tickets through custom statuses. HubSpot Service Hub also allows us to integrate with JIRA when we need to escalate and assign tickets to our development team so that we can continue to track status. It is well suited to automate communications, routing of tickets to different queues, and customizing ticket statuses.
Customer service via a unified inbox so you dont have to separately monitor your twitter, Facebook or IG account for consumer communication there. Gist unified all into one inbox, better than anyone else I've seen in the market. They archive all communications and tie them back to a single user so you get unified customer history / data.
Marketing segmentation and automation: they track user history and behavior across the site and have super detailed segmenting capability, on par with ActiveCampaign's, but better I'd say. Better UI for the marketing admin person, and more unified data than in AC.
Live chat and chatbot. Usually it's either one or the other but with Gist you can do both seamlessly.
Plan limits can be confusing. For example, there is a monthly charge for support and a monthly charge for "growth," plus there's a separate charge depending on how many contacts and seats you have. Perhaps this is normal in the industry, but it can make it a little challenging to understand the bill every month.
The vast amount of features means development will never be as fast as you'd like it to be (even though they release updates all the time). This may not actually be a valid concern, and it certainly isn't unique to Gist (who doesn't have a wishlist they're waiting on their favorite SaaS to get to?), but I do believe the likelihood of being stuck without your desired feature being developed goes up a lot as the product gets bigger and bigger.
Email deliverability has been less than perfect in the past, but it has improved drastically in the last year.
The app is a bit confusing and does not seem to have all of the features that the online browser does
A bit expensive. I do think it is worth it because of the simpleness but it is a very pricy software
Sometimes when you reach out to HubSpot Service Hub support, they send you a link to public articles instead of helping. But sometimes they do jump in and look
Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder
It’s pretty simple, but it does a lot so there are more complicated features which depend on an individuals ability for software implementation. I am not an IT expert and I’ve managed to implement everything myself, others that are more tech-minded may find everything easier.
although it has room for improvements, this is still a very robust service hub for any type of software. An internal comment I often heard was, that if we were to make this as good as for example zendesk, it shouldn't have to feel like we must have external systems integrated to the HubSpot Service Hub (in zendesk, most things happen within the same system). I suppose this is more a matter of preference, because just like all other hubs, we see way more benefits of allowing our service working in the same way as the other departments (which won't happen if you have an external service system).
Fantastic support. Ask a question, get an answer within 24 hours every time. And sometimes within a few minutes. They've always come through for me, helpful and, even when it's an issue on my end, they point me in the right direction.
Gist combines all our previous products into one application and adds many more features that would require more apps. Gist is excellent and a no-brainer all-in-one application when compared to having to manage multiple applications at higher cost. The support from the whole Gist team has been extremely responsive.
HubSpot [Service Hub] had many integrations we needed to connect to our CRM, and the cost was just right from them VS the others. We had to look at all the features, and HubSpot CRM just had way more than the others and more bang for your buck. So the Service Hub was just a bonus with their CRM tools.
They are perfect for me as a someone who needs a lot of bang for the buck. The chat messenger device on my website alone has brought me new prospects that I did not have to spend money recruiting.
I am able to save hours of time with the automated emails that are GDPR compliant.
I don't have to pay for a designer to have excellent looking emails either.
Sales targets are visible; any changes made can be easily tracked and accounted for
Overall lead lifecycle management has improved and the way data moves to other apps makes life easier for the other business functions to keep track on the new and old deals