I would gladly recommend FreshDesk as a very competitive option if you are evaluating ticket management software. The whole implementation could be done by us in a manner of hours and they have an academy where you can get a certification and learn how to deploy it.
Pros
FreshDesk is one of the greatest ticket management software. It has a marketplace with addins that can expand it's features and possibilities and is easy to use. We deployed FreshDesk looking to upgrade how we managed out customers.They are now impproving with AI features.
Cons
The customer portal is a little bit dissapointing and can't be customized for every client. The contact management and arcade (gamification) features could be better, although they work.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
Personally, this was the best platform that ever happened to our team. We reviewed some pay-for feature models, as well as the free bug tracker in Spiceworks (which had a ton of adware), and Freshdesk was the simplest to use and track our bugs even with the non-ability to drill down further with the tier we were using for our staff. The only other thing I would mention, is that it is not HIPAA compliant, so you want to make sure anything users are posting in there is not anything related to proprietary software. Otherwise it worked like a charm for our team, and our users seemed to like it. You do need to make sure that your teams using it have their emails alerting them, otherwise a ticket can just sit there. I found that I was reminding folks to check the freshdesk--from an IT standpoint, we were in there every day fielding tickets and this really helped us to schedule out our day/week and prioritize.
Pros
I set up and administered Freshdesk for a 200+ non-profit agency. There were three departments tracking bugs through it, and we were able to deploy it and announce its use with ease. It was easy to explain to our staff who didn't want to take time to learn something overly complex. As a non-profit, it was important to find a solution that could assist us day-to-day without breaking the bank. We were able to use the first-level with support for our use. The Freshdesk support was highly responsive and helpful if we had questions. Using this platform cut down on time spent fielding immediate requests that were not a high priority. It allowed us to really prioritize, track and automate repeat issues, and cut down on 'putting out little fires everywhere mentality.'
Cons
The automation was helpful, but I think it could have used a bit more complexity. We were able to implement an automated routing for email subjects and user emails so that certain requests or bugs/issues would go to a specific department. We used the platform in Communications, IT, and Facilities for all requests. We didn't have a bug or issue tracker prior to this platform. The Frequently Asked Questions portion of the portal really didn't end up being used, although we did use it when we first started the platform. Higher ups really liked the ability to see numbers in what we were fielding, but there was not enough drill-down in the pay/point we were using--that may have been available within higher paid levels. The automation has a lot of options for sending alerts when a new ticket is created. It can become cumbersome and send A LOT of emails. I'm not sure if there is a better way to automate/cut that down w/o losing that function. Also, the 'archive' user feature was a bit weird. We had a lot of employees that would leave and come back, and if you archived the user, it was a bit of an odd way to get them back into the platform, it's doable, just awkward.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Mediocre at best - it does what every other support desk system does - assign & distribute tickets, some automation etc. etc. I've submitted the above feature request for very basic date based filter & displays that any email system should have and what is supposed to be an advanced business management tool completely lacks this.
Pros
For years I've been asking for date filters - something as simple as "see all emails sent by this client between 2020-04-10 to 2020-04-15" - NOTHING.
To make matters worse, when looking at older emails in a list, it doesn't even show the date - it will show some ambiguous phrase like "About a year ago" which lumps in a 6 month period.
If you want accurate tracking of communication, forget it. If you have one off emails that you'll never need to see again once resolved, maybe.
If it weren't for the fact we have so many existing records with this company we'd switch but we are stuck, and years of asking them for a simple feature to either allow date based searches OR at least display actual date of email, has been futile. Regret having chose this as our support desk provider for our team of 8!
Cons
The lack of basic and very simple features such as filtering emails/communication by date, or even displaying an accurate date. What business runs on emails that show the date on a list as "About A Year Ago"?
Absolutely horrible for business management or record keeping. If you want to manage long term relationship with clients and be able to look up conversations quickly, DO NOT USE FRESHBOOKS.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 2/10
While Freshdesk has a great UI, and is a feature-rich service, the truth behind the advertising leaves much to be desired. While their software is good, the pricing model isn't, and their marketing is intentional bait-and-switch. The features listed on each pricing tier are expanded upon here: freshdesk.com/features. Once you buy, and ask what's up, the support will tell you to upgrade for that feature, and link you to a page that isn't linked to from anywhere on their site: freshdesk.com/helpdesk-features, as justification. As an example, $15/agent/month includes, "SLA Management," which is described from their features page as including every SLA feature, including basic things like SLA email notifications, reminders, escalation policies. You know, what anyone would think of as "SLA Management." However, none of those features are actually included in that price plan. To even get email notifications of SLA violations, or have your SLA respect office hours, you'll have to pay $50/agent/month. Worse, there is no way to discover this until after you've paid and spent time getting everything set up.
Pros
Wonderful tracking and organization of emails and support issues, with a nice and clean UI, and simple tools to automate many support tasks.
Cons
Features listed as included in lower tiers on their pricing page, are not actually included until much higher tiers. See: https://freshdesk.com/helpdesk-features for the real breakdown. Freshdesk has no links to that page, and you'll only get it if you ask about a missing feature in their support portal.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 0/10
Wonderful, I really like their 24hrs support system
Pros
With 5 years in business, we started seeing change in our revenues and employee behaviour in the last 2,5 years of using FRESHDESK.
We stopped for sometime thinking maybe we could continue without these tools and a huge gap opened up thus we had to go back to the tried & tested.
Cons
Ease of business
Friendly Interface
Work Anywhere (App or Web)
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Freshdesk is priced per support agent per month, and has 5 different plans.
Sprout - $0 (unlimited free agents)
Blossom - $19/agent/month billed monthly or $15/agent/month billed yearly
Garden - $45/agent/month billed monthly or $35/agent/month billed yearly
Estate - $69/agent/month billed monthly or $49/agent/month billed yearly
Forest - $125/agent/month billed monthly or $99/agent/month billed yearly
Freshdesk offers a host of tools for sorting and prioritizing help requests in a more efficient manner. The help desk software augments two-way communication between your customer services reps and their clients, providing a more user-friendly experience to both staff and customers. Freshdesk helps small to mid-sized companies build a fully-functional help and support desk through their highly customizable, cloud-based software.
This help desk and customer support application is adaptable, allowing a business to customize their Freshdesk sites with company logos and other elements specific to their business, as well as to define their business rules and processes. The software’s core functionality is centered around its ticketing system which sorts through customer help requests, distributing ticket numbers to each client and routing them to the correct agent, whilst assuring them that am agent will be with them promptly.
You can support your customers through multiple mediums using Freshdesk, inclusing phone, email, your website and social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Freskdesk also offers your customers a self-service portal through which they can find solutions to common issues, get access to articles and company documents, and view shared tips left by other users.
Freshdesk offers a way for businesses to organize, prioritize and sort client requests without expanding their work force. Though a smart ticketing system and the ability to set custom business rules, customer experiences can be tailored to match each client. Freshdesk also provides your clients with the ability to help themselves, by automatically creating a company knowledge-base based on archived emails, conversations and ticket resolutions. The knowledgebase can be designed to reflect your company´s branding.
Freshdesk offers a number of customization tools. Upon signing into Freshdesk, you will be given a unique URL to reflect your company name. Alternatively, you can set up Freshdesk to point to your preferred domain. The Freshdesk help desk solution also includes a customizable dashboard that gives users a summary of all tickets and recent activities. Freshdesk is multilingual offering customer support tools in 18 languages, including popular languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portugese and Polish. Multi-time zones are also supported.
This customer service solution is suited to any small or mid-sized business that requires a fully functional help or support department without the associated costs. Freshdesk is also suited to startups and freelancers, providing a free plan that includes up to 3 agents.
Freshdesk provides a way to speed up customer support, automating certain laborious tasks such as sifting through requests and allocation tickets. This solution helps businesses interested in reducing man hours who wish to enable their staff to focus on just the most important tasks.
Freshdesk provides an automated ticketing system which reads and sorts through all incoming tickets, assigning them to the most appropriate representative,.
Freshdesk uses a common policy called SLA (service level agreement), with pre-defined parameters for service workflows. You can use a standard SLA policy for all of your customers, or you can also create custom SLAs for priority customers with specific needs and requirements. Through the Ticket tab you can set all your ticketing rules and workflows for your ticket system.
In order to keep the lines of communication between your team and your clients in need of help open, Freshdesk allows you to transform your company email into support tickets. These emails are set up as automatic response to requests emails, letting your clients know that their request has been received and queued, and that an agent will contact them promptly. You can also define behavioral rules for requests so that certain tickets are routed to the most appropriate support personnel.
Freshdesk gives you the option to use your own branded email address when sending request responses, rather than the one that Freshdesk automatically assigns you when you first sign in. To help ensure that your help desk emails are not treated as spam, Freshdesk recommends that you create an SPF record of your emails in your DNS zone file if you are using your own domain.
Freshdesk’s FreshThemes feature enables companies to offer a consistent visual experience across their company and helpdesk webpages. This can be done through pre-defined themes or you can customize themes through the use of Javascript and CSS code.
Freshdesk’s Self Service Portal provides your clients and agents with a singular place to find all the information they need to get answers to the most frequently asked questions with a knowledge-base of technical and training advice. The Self Service Portal in Freshdesk serves as a space that holds all your important company documents, such as fact sheets, company handbooks, and brochures, as well as self-help tips and articles. You can create a knowledge-base for either public consumption or exclusively for staff, or both.
Through the use of forums, Freshdesk continues to encourage conversation and feedback between your help desk team and your clients. The Forum section provides several tools to keep these lines of communication open. Tools included within the forum section include Announcements, Report a Problem, Tips and Tricks and Feature Requests. You can use these tools to post important updates and make announcements, as well as to receive feedback from your colleagues and clients. Within each of these tools you have the ability to create a topic, you can input information to each topic and save it within the portal for further discussion.
Freshdesk helps users to automate tasks and save on ticket resolution time through integration with multiple platforms. This includes email integration, a feature which allows agents to manage, update, reply to and assign tickets directly from their email accounts as requests come in. You can configure the settings in Freshdesk so that all emails sent to your account are logged as tickets, they can then be categorized, prioritized and assigned to the correct agent. You can also set up automated email actions such as sending acknowledgement emails or notifications.
Another emailing features of Freshdesk includes “Email to Knowledge base”. This feature automatically converts email threads or ticket replies into articles in the knowledge base article. These emails are saved as drafts which can be edited before sending them to the knowledge base for publication.
Other channels supported by Freshdesk include social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. You can be notified of all customer activity associated with your brand on either channel and reply directly to these in real time. You can also use Freshchat, Freshdesk’s live-chat solution and Freshfone, the software’s integrated voice telephony system to provide further support channels to your clients, as well as to track tickets from multiple sources.
The Freshbooks software offers a number of reporting features for measuring time and productivity. These features include an integrated time tracking tool which allows your agents to measure the time they spend on various support tasks. This tool can use this information to automatically generate time-sheets, even differentiating between billable and non-billable time spent.
Agents can assign themselves to tasks and then start the task timer to measure the time spent on each task. Admin supervisors can also assign agents to specific tasks, subtracting and adding total time spent on overall ticket resolution. Freshdesk data can be automatically fed to other third-party applications, including Freshbooks or Harvest, and compiled to generate client invoices and payments.
Freshdesk’s At-a-Glance Reports feature allows you to get a quick overview of the activity of you entire helpdesk, as well as individual customers, agents and teams. Freshdesk also provides reports that let you identify your top performing agents and teams, as well as your based clients. You can use this tool to compare agents and customers using key metrics to see how they perform against each other.
The Freshdesk help desk solution includes an agent collision prevention feature. If another agent opens up a ticket you are working on, you will be alerted through a flashing icon next to your open ticket. If another agent is already writing back to a customer, a pen icon lights up on the screen to inform you of this. If you have a ticket open and an update occurs, then the refresh icon will light up. If you click on this you will get access to all the latest information associated with that ticket.
The “Ticket Watchers” feature alerts you to tickets that are of specific interest to you. For example, this might be a ticket that was assigned to you at an earlier stage, or one that addresses your area of support. You can set up email notifications associated to ticket topics and specific ticket activity. With this information, your sales teams can prepare valuable metrics for use during their next call with a client.
One of the newer features that Freshdesk added last year includes Freshdesk Arcade, providing the ability to gamify your help desk activities. By using the Freshdesk Arcade feature you can incentivize your staff to meet targets and send staff on certain “quests” to earn points. The tool will reward teams and agents based on a point system that determines the quality of their service performance, based on speed and customer satisfaction.
For example, teams or agents that solve customer issues in a more timely manner get certain badges, virtual trophies and a number of points that send them climbing up the leader board, an appropriate reward system can then be determined by the company.
Freshdesk offers a growing number of native and 3rd party integrations. Native integrations include Facebook and Twitter; Saleforce, Highrise, Zoho CRM, Sugar CRM and Capsule; Freshbooks and Harvest; Atlassian from Jira; Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Gmail Gardets, Google Hangouts and Google Drive; HelpOnClick and Snap Enagae; MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Constant Contact; Olark, Survey Monkey, Dropbox, Zapier and Shopify, among others.
Third party integrations include Magento, Talkdesk, Kipfolio, Pipeliner, OneSky, Userlike, Woo Themes, Timecamp, and Fromcrafts.
Freshdesk also offers a service called Freshplugs so companies can create custom integrations.
Freshdesk also has a help-desk plugin for its mobile app called MobiHelp that comes in the form of both an Android app and an iOS app. The app functions on all mobile devices including iPhones, Androids, iPads and Blackberries.
Freshdesk offers 5 different pricing plans. The most basic plan is the Sprout plan which is offered for free and can be used for up to 3 agents, it includes email support, phone support and a knowledge base. Additional agents on the Sprout plan costs €12 per month.
The Blossom plan costs €14 per agent per month and includes social support, community forums and game mechanics. The Garden plan costs €20 per agent per month and include live chat, multiple products and multiple locations. The Estate plan costs €32 per agent per month and includes enterprise reports, portal customization and custom agent roles. The Forest plan costs €56 per agent per month and includes IP whitelisting and custom email servers.
A free trial is available for 30 days on the Estate plan for an unlimited number of agents.
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