What is Freshdesk?
Freshdesk is a powerful CRM that enables your business to offer exceptional customer support. The platform helps you manage tickets via email, live chat support, and a call center. In addition, it offers several useful tools for team collaboration, including shared mailboxes and tools to automate inbound requests. The software also includes some very advanced reporting features, although there is a steep learning curve for them to use.
Freshdesk is among our top recommended customer service software for small businesses. When we evaluated this provider, it scored high in pricing, general features, and niche features. It received lower scores in customer support and expert score because of the lack of email and phone service channels for lower-cost tiers, as well as the small learning curve new users encounter during setup and navigation.
With Freshdesk, you can realize your vision of operational efficiency for your agents. It includes a quality ticketing module that lets you convert every transaction into a ticket. Its integrated multi-channel support ensures that you no longer have to overwhelm yourself with so many tools to navigate.
It is certainly designed for maximum collaboration, thanks to its tools for streamlining ticket delivery and management and a feature that lets you tag tickets according to properties and requirements. Its Service Level Agreement management module facilitates effective delegation of tickets by setting up rules and requirement. Freshdesk is also packed with collaboration tools that help internal teams find context in issues and solve it. It offers a way for users to collaborate on a ticket and even split these into smaller tickets.
Moreover, Customer frustration is avoided through instant notifications and ticket updates. Urgent events can be immediately tagged and sent out to prevent customer attrition.
The solution also gives you access to qualitative insights in a snap. Quickly view these data on the reports page, and identify pertinent issues relating to customer frustration, ticket closing, response time, and other bottlenecks. Insights including average first response time, pending tickets, tickets reopened, and first contact resolution is swiftly provided. Its reports page also features a helpdesk that lets you find relevant reports of your interest using keywords of choice.
Freshdesk also features a multi-channel helpdesk, a powerful, integrated knowledge base, and tools for customization, advanced automation, and community platforms. Furthermore, the solution gives you the flexibility to link forum questions to a ticket and vice-versa, allowing you to create a more streamlined set of answers and replies.
Freshdesk has integrated live chat, phone support, and game mechanics. It also works with legacy productivity tools and your CRM when you need to pull out customer information. Likewise, it works with popular help desk and multimedia apps, such as Google Apps, YouTube, Slideshare and other widgets that can spice up your knowledge base.
Pricing Details:
*Free trial
*$15 for fast growth
*$49 for pro
*$79 for enterprise
Is Freshdesk Right for You or Your Business?
Freshdesk Contact Center is a good choice for growing businesses as its four pricing tiers make it possible to stay with the VoIP service as your business expands and needs change. Given its competitive price and feature-rich platform, it’s a good solution for budget-conscious businesses looking for an easy way to manage a number of contacts that rely heavily on contact via phone. For example, a home heating business or an advertising agency.
Freshdesk offers a powerful suite of tools and modules to sustainably grow your customer base and drive in continuous business growth. Its ticketing module gives your agents the tools they need so they can work on the tickets appropriate to their expertise. Scenario automations, canned responses, and custom ticketing features solve the strenuous pains of grunt and repetitive work. Collaboration tools such as the ability to link related tickets, context-specific solutions delivery, and more complex tools for ticketing give you an all-around tool for driving customer happiness.
With its powerful multi-channel helpdesk, automation tools, a suitable and integrated knowledge base, as well as reporting and analytics, you drive in sustainable business growth and make your customers keep coming back for more. Here are the main Freshdesk benefits:
Multi-channel features
Freshdesk is focused on making sure it offers a broad set of features for every channel a customer support team wants to engage with users in. Freshdesk comes with excellent support for traditional channels such as email and phone as well as modern channels like chat, forums and social media, with a ticketing helpdesk that is tightly integrated with all these channels.
Each Freshdesk account can have multiple custom mailboxes associated with it, allowing the support team to manage all their support emails in one place. Freshdesk’s social media integration is top-notch as well: with support for Facebook pages, an in-sync Facebook support center, streams to keep an eye on what the world is talking about a company, and a social tab that works on mobile, Freshdesk’s support desk compares well with its competitors for businesses that want to deal with a young customer base.
Freshdesk also has a phone system built into the system where users can accommodate calls from clients. Currently covering over 30 countries, this will allow you to perform call center operations without having to invest in a full-fledged business phone system. If you aren’t as comfortable with using phones for your customer support efforts, the system also has live chat solutions where you can facilitate real-time conversations with customers right on your website.
Gamification
Businesses often choose Freshdesk not just because it is easy to set up, learn, and use, but also because the internal game mechanics turn an otherwise boring and thankless customer support job into a fun game for agents. Employees in customer support often use gamification as a motivation tool to compete with their own colleagues when solving issues reported by customers. With gamification emerging as a strategy across the world to boost engagement among employees and consumers, Freshdesk’s internal game mechanics helps agents engaged in their otherwise monotonous tasks, and is a differentiator in a crowded help desk market.
Global customer support
Freshdesk makes it easy to scale support across multiple products, languages, and timezones.
With multi-product support, all customer support queries can flow into the same helpdesk and get categorized and assigned to specific agents or teams, with ease. Each product can have specific assignment rules, different email notifications, customized SLAs, etc. associated with it in addition to having its own support portal with a dedicated knowledge base and community forum.
Extended support with integrations
Freshdesk is integrated with 60+ productivity, eCommerce, CRM, cloud storage, and collaboration systems to empower support teams with rich information about their customers. With a majority of its customers using a variety of cloud-based suites already, these integrations often help clinch deals in modern organizations. Freshdesk’s tight integration with Google’s suite of products makes it the ideal choice for businesses that rely on Google for work suite to run their operations. Collaboration between sales and customer support teams is a lot easier for a significant percentage of businesses who have chosen to integrate their CRM systems with Freshdesk.
Manage Customer Queries Efficiently
Freshdesk offers multiple support channels such as phone and email, as well as social media, chats, and forum. With this, you can manage all queries in a single dashboard and even queue them based on its urgency, service level agreements, or other metrics of your preference. On top of that, Freshdesk also has the capacity to support self-service options such as knowledge bases and forums so that customers can help themselves to the information that they need.
Freshdesk features
Freshdesk provides you with a wide range of features, categorized into 4 sections as below:
1. Support channels
- Public and private notes in tickets: Add private notes for your support team or inform customers with public notes.
- Ticket activities: View the history of a ticket from the day it was created.
- Team inbox: Collaborate with team members using a shared inbox.
- Merge tickets: Merge all the tickets from different channels in chronological order. Also, add/remove tickets from the merge.
- To-dos: Add a to-do task within the ticket or add it to your dashboard. Prioritize work and mark the checkbox when a task is done.
- Freshconnect collaboration: Collaborate with other team members right inside Freshdesk using Freshconnect. ublic and private notes in tickets: Add private notes for your support team or inform customers with public notes.
- Ticket activities: View the history of a ticket from the day it was created.
- Team inbox: Collaborate with team members using a shared inbox.
- Merge tickets: Merge all the tickets from different channels in chronological order. Also, add/remove tickets from the merge.
- To-dos: Add a to-do task within the ticket or add it to your dashboard. Prioritize work and mark the checkbox when a task is done.
- Freshconnect collaboration: Collaborate with other team members right inside Freshdesk using Freshconnect. Chat support: Enable chat in customer portal by integrating Freshdesk with Freshchat. You can then convert conversations into tickets.
- Email support: Convert support emails into tickets.
- Phone support: Enable phone calls by integrating Freshdesk with Freshcaller. Get notified whenever a customer calls. Miss calls get listed as tickets.
- Twitter support: Add your company’s Twitter handle to Freshdesk. Tweets, direct messages, and brand mentions get displayed as tickets.
- Facebook support: Add your company’s Facebook page to Freshdesk so you can respond to your visitor’s posts and comments. Direct messages, posts, or comments can get listed as tickets.
- Website support: Place ticket forms either as a pop-up widget or by embedding it to your website.
2.Productivity hacks
- Tags: Use tags to classify tickets so that agents can find the issue type quickly.
- Dispatch: Create rules on incoming tickets and automate support workflows.
- Automatic email notification: Notify customers and agents automatically when changes happen in a ticket.
- Canned responses: Create reply templates for specific situations and categorize them into folders.
- Customizable help desk: Automate ticket assignments based on agents’ current workload, skills, or channels.
3. Helpdesk management
- Default dashboard: View ticket trends, recent activities, arcade, gamification, community forums, customer satisfaction, and other metrics.
- Freshdesk analytics (beta): View performance distribution, group performance, agent performance, ticket volume trends, ticket lifecycle. Public and private notes in tickets: Add private notes for your support team or inform customers with public notes.
- Ticket activities: View the history of a ticket from the day it was created.
- Team inbox: Collaborate with team members using a shared inbox.
- Merge tickets: Merge all the tickets from different channels in chronological order. Also, add/remove tickets from the merge.
- To-dos: Add a to-do task within the ticket or add it to your dashboard. Prioritize work and mark the checkbox when a task is done.
- Freshconnect collaboration: Collaborate with other team members right inside Freshdesk using Freshconnect.
4. Reporting
- Default dashboard: View ticket trends, recent activities, arcade, gamification, community forums, customer satisfaction, and other metrics.
- Freshdesk analytics (beta): View performance distribution, group performance, agent performance, ticket volume trends, ticket lifecycle.
Conclusion
Freshdesk delivers exactly what you would expect from a brand-name ticketing software. However, it’s not perfect even though it’s very close to it. It won’t disappoint any type of user and it will provide a generally great ticketing experience for every help desk ,regardless of the plan you decide to choose. The pricing can get expensive with higher plans, but it’s only up to you to decide if it’s worth it to upgrade in the first place.