Freshdesk

Benefits:

Incredibly easy to get going with the software. Your in house IT team can set this up themselves and you dont need to spend a fortune getting a consultancy firm to do it for you. The interface is also very intuitive and even without any training your staff should be able to do the basics. We looked at other solutions that were more of an all in one kinda package that also included financial, stock/warehousing etc but found that these were overly complex and as a result made us work less efficient and the helpdesk staff also did not want to use it because it was just too bloated for their needs. Freshdesk does ticketing and it does it well. The company does have other software modules and integrations that you can add if you want (addon integration apps or maybe look at their other products like Freshsales or Freshservice) If you just want a great easy to use ticking system, definitely give Freshdesk a try. The free trial should be more than enough to give you a fell for the system.

Drawbacks:

I cant really think of a con. Some might want something that has more features or customization but we are seeing that as a pro as it keeps it simple and efficient (not that Freshdesk lacks features. For us, it has everything that it needs to have and more)

In sum:

We are an MSP and Freshdesk is the core of our support business. Without it we wont be able to keep track of what work needs to be done. Our client tickets get logged on Freshdesk and assigned to technicians. Time logs gets added, tickets get exported and processed for billing. Any issues that we've had, we simply contacted them via in support chat and it was resolved quickly.

Benefits:

What I like about Freshdesk that we can manage all our support channel from one place, the automations and reporting features are excellent and we can customize it according to our needs. Also the support is good whenever I need help I can find quick response

Drawbacks:

It's only 3 cons: 1- Twitter: The DMs in Twitter is a little bit messy, it keeps the message history for only 7 days maximum and any new message from the same user will come after one week will be opened as a new ticket which is a true waste of time to keep checking the whole history for one case across many tickets that's unlike FB messages 2- Direct integration with iOS and GooglePlay stores so you can manage the reviews directly without using third party app with extra cost 3- When you compose new email it does not allow to enter more than one email in (To) field any additional mail have to be added in CC which is sometimes not practical at all also to use group emails is not allowed till now you need to log the emails one by one

In sum:

It was a good choice and I recommend Freshdesk if anyone is looking for Omnichannel solution with affordable price plans

Benefits:

Freshdesk enables your clients to create their own help desk request tickets, track their ticket's progress, add notes & comments along the way, and decide when to mark each ticket as Done. Once you know what the solutions to their most common problems are, you can post self-service procedures for the easy ones that they can handle themselves - thus freeing you from unnecessary remote support or onsite support events. Use the built in ticket timers, and you have a way to capture the data for your Time & Billing system. And you can build your user community with a built-in user forum and links to your social media accounts. Help desk managers can spot check the Dashboard and see at a glance how many & which tickets are unresolved, overdue, due today, unassigned, or on hold pending various 3 party issues. All of these features are designed to help you get on top of your service delivery and get the metrics you need to maintain quality service while adding clients & technicians. Pair Freshdesk with Teamviewer Corporate and you have a powerful Help Desk with one click remote support connectivity to any PC at any client location anywhere. Now you can deliver quality support with fewer truck rolls!

Drawbacks:

My only real problem had to do with Notification Alert Sounds. I wanted a way to use different new ticket alert sounds depending upon with the client, priority or assigned to me status so that I could walk away from my workstation and do other work in the computer lab but get a loud sound alert for critical new help desk tickets. A prompt response from the Freshdesk support team let me know that none of the major browsers support custom notification sounds in their API's, so there is no way to implement this at this time. (Hey Google Chrome & Microsoft IE teams: how about custom notification sounds in the next update release? Very useful for advanced users!)

In sum:

Freshdesk helped BootUp LLC to get on top of their user help desk support problems, and this NYC-based MSP is now poised to grow its client base by hiring more technical staff and expanding its support offerings. Our collective experience with Freshdesk has been extremely positive, and we recommend it wholeheartedly!

Benefits:

Wonderful tracking and organization of emails and support issues, with a nice and clean UI, and simple tools to automate many support tasks.

Drawbacks:

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.

In sum:

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.

Benefits:

I'm tech manager in a growing online business and our support team is currently 3 agents. We needed to transition our support flow from mostly shared email support to something more efficient and I was the one to explore and choose the tech solution that we would implement - I chose Freshdesk. Here is why: The User Experience is very very well designed. I looked into ZenDesk, ZohoDesk, Desk.com, Kayako, Cayzu and others and they were all about the same price however Freshdesk stands out for the ease of use by far. Desk.com was the second-best design however it was quite bland. Freshdesk was surprisingly easy to understand for the less technically inclined people in my team and that is a win. Freshdesk is full of features and while there are many we won't use in the foreseeable future there were enough really useful ones in the first paid plan [Blossom] that we felt comfortable justifying this expense for 3 agents and eventually 4. The ease of use of these features especially compared to shared mail made us buy into Freshesk: 'Group', 'assigned to', 'Tags', ' Dispatcher' , ' Observer'. We found how to automate all of them. I had EXCELLENT tech support to customize the ticket fields and widgets; we needed API calls and Webhooks used to fit the workflow to our preferred implementation and really the tech person knew his job, was always patient and knew what to suggest and how to help me configure Freshdesk above and beyond what I expected.

Drawbacks:

The time before we became paying Freshdesk customers is the one place where I feel there is a need for more care. Once we are paying clients however the service is really good. Here are my main points for them to work on: 1. Please, we don't want to feel even the slightest pressure to buy into Freshdesk: we are a slow-moving company tech-wise and we needed more time to try all the features without having our trial deleted. The free trial is 21 days. We did receive one full extension and part of another and our assigned agent was as patient as she could about our slow pace; however I had the impression that behind her she maybe was pressured to ' close the sale ' . I felt pressured to go faster than our time budget was allowing to fully explore in depth Freshdesk. 2. That agent was also somewhat slow at first to answer to some questions I had before committing to a paid plan. 3. While I was exploring the whole feature set of Freskdesk I felt that she was not sufficiently able to help me understand why the first paid plan would be better for us than the free plan. I had made a list of features I wanted more info about and even on a live call I would have liked for her to be able to go deeper with me in my understanding of Freshdesk at that time. I felt she was mostly reading the same feature-sheet as me. 4. So we committed to Freshdesk a bit before being fully ready however by then I knew that there were more than enough paid features for us to make the jump.

In sum:

Much more speed and efficiency in our support work flow : Automation, assignements, grouping, tagging, SLA, Monitoring, Canned Responses, Integrated Widget, Email Forwarding, Facebook integration, etc. Looking forward to integrate the telephony also :-)

Benefits:

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.'

Drawbacks:

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.

In sum:

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.

Benefits:

Freshdesk has been a breeze to set up and use effectively. My team loves how easy it is to quickly work through tickets. We heavily use Trello and their integration is top tier. When issues do come up, the support team is always available to answer my questions. Even when it doesn't support a particular workflow, I've always been given excellent suggestions to work around its limitations.

Drawbacks:

Many integrations are v1 products that were built years ago and never updated. Salesforce integration needs a lot of work. We had to disable it because it was using too many API calls.

Benefits:

Ease of use. Reasonable price. Otherwise, I like the way tickets can be prioritized with SLAs, status, etc. Canned responses and automations are great too.

Drawbacks:

The automations, despite being very nice, are somewhat limited in terms of what they can do. Sometimes I'd like to go a little further than what they can offer. It's often just little details, but it could make a big difference. Here are a few basic examples: 1) IF field is empty, THEN send a notification to the user with a message saying that it has to be updated. This is not possible since we can't have an automation triggered by a field being left blank. 2) Only the custom fields with drop down lists can be used as triggers for automations. Also, I'd like to be able to have the SLA based on the expected first response rather than the expected resolution. Overall though, it makes my job a lot easier.

In sum:

I am currently the only person responsible for customer support in a small company. Freshdesk made it much more easy for me to manage support tickets due to SLAs, automations, etc. I used to have to do pretty much everything manually. We'll be adding new users soon because of this great experience.

Benefits:

The ease of use, both for the agents as well as the clients is pretty awesome. Being able to pull out detailed reports concerning not only the tickets on the system and their categories and statuses, but also seeing agents' performances makes this product recommendable for me.

Drawbacks:

The fact that I have to log in twice, once for freshdesk and then again for freshworks, before I can gain access to our freshdesk platform really irks me sometimes. An SSO would go a long way in preventing this. Also, being to integrate with Jira proved unsuccessful for me.

In sum:

Awesome.

Benefits:

I love the analytics and history log in Freshdesk. Freshdesk tracks agents' productivity through out the day and breaks up this information by the hour. We can also look up who has resolved the most tickets or who sends out immediate responses. All of this information is especially helpful when assigning new tickets because we can see a history of our most efficient employees. Previous tickets can be easily searched by key words, agent, or time frame. When multiple people are working on one project, it really helps to decipher who did what and when!

Drawbacks:

One thing that I believe can be improved is having a group option to send out an email. It's not common when we have to include multiple people on a ticket but when we do, we have to cc them in the very beginning as opposed to adding "Group A". -- The information still gets everyone on the same page, however it is an additional step on the agent's end.

In sum:

In general, I think there are plenty of customizations and features with Freshdesk. The real selling point for our company was the analytics because we can see the history of our tickets and prevent them from reoccurring in the future.