Our review of Freshdesk

In the customer support software market, Freshdesk is undoubtedly a leader for small businesses looking for a good customer support tool.

It’s one of the most powerful tools on the market, with comprehensive functionalities (omnichannel management, automation with high-performance AI, customizable reporting) for a renewed customer experience.

If you don’t need internal functions (project or asset management), this is the solution for you!

Find out all you need to know about Freshdesk customer support.

My opinion of Freshdesk in a nutshell

Advantages:

• Free plan available
• Gamification, Automation & chatbots
• Successful multi-channel management: ticketing, telephone and live chat

Disadvantages:

• Advanced features are only available from the latest plan, which is very expensive.
• Lots of hidden costs, not very transparent pricing

Freshdesk: our opinion of the essential features

1. Managing support tickets across all channels

This is the basic functionality. Freshdesk lets you quickly find tickets by different criteria: open, waiting, late, urgent, priority…

Browsing the list of tickets is much easier, both for individual agents and at team level.

If you have created custom categories, you can also define them as search filters.

It’s easy to add: Freshdesk features an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. Fields can be added, deleted and moved very easily. Mapping to your ticket fields is automatic.

If you need to manually filter a list of tickets, you can use the search bar at the top of the screen or the filter function on the right for a more comprehensive search.

2. Collaboration tools

This is one of Freshdesk’s key features: simplifying the issuing of support tickets and facilitating collaboration between agents. Here are some of the most useful tools:

• Shared ownership and agent collision detection: Tickets can be allocated by agent and prioritized. With the filter function, your agents can focus directly on priority tickets.
  If several agents are working on the same support ticket, the helpdesk informs them of the status. You avoid 2 agents working on a ticket at the same time without knowing it!
• Customized ticket status: keeps you informed of the status of each ticket. Thanks to the customization tool, you can create the categories most relevant to your structure.
• Parent-child ticketing: The parent-child ticketing feature lets you divide tickets into smaller, more manageable tasks. The same team can work on it in parallel.
  Another option is to merge similar tickets and send a single status update for all.
• Pre-set answers: Freshdesk remembers common answers to problems raised by customers. Your agents can answer common customer questions faster and more efficiently.
• Gamification: This is one of Freshdesk’s special features. The platform enables you to initiate healthy competition between your employees, boosting their productivity. The aim is to win as many points as possible.
  You can then reward the best agents according to various criteria: best overall score, highest customer satisfaction rate, fastest resolution time, etc.

3. Automation

With automation, you gain in efficiency. AI analyzes and prioritizes customer requests, and assigns tickets to each agent according to their skills and availability.

You can also pre-record typical scenarios. These are groups of actions with several steps that Freshdesk performs automatically. Typical scenarios can be multiple: priority, problem category, ticket status…

When you do a search, you can use these common criteria without having to manually filter the list each time.

4. Freddy AI: Freshdesk’s secret weapon

Freddy AI is a suite of AI functionalities designed for Freshdesk. It lets you create bots that automatically respond to tickets received by email, chat or via the Freshcaller tool.

Freddy AI also handles intelligent transfer of conversations to agents. It offers instant assistance on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

The social network monitoring feature automatically creates tickets by detecting publications relating to a need for assistance.

Another highlight: with automatic ticket hierarchies and standard response suggestions, your staff’s productivity is optimized.

The detection of customer thank-you emails enables the generation of an adapted automatic response.

Freddy AI then feeds Freshdesk’s reporting and analysis functions.

Freddy AI offers 2 services in particular:

• Freddy Answers: Your customers don’t have to wait any longer for an answer! This intelligent chatbot handles the most common requests, leaving your agents to concentrate on more complex problems.
• Freddy Self-service: You can provide personalized assistance to your customers in 42 languages.

5. The Freshdesk help desk

The Freshdesk portal provides answers to frequently asked questions, so your customers don’t have to wait for an agent to be available. In return, your agents can concentrate on the most complex, high value-added tickets.

You can integrate the content of this knowledge base into all support channels, including chat or your company website.

Customers can also take part in discussions on community forums.

• Automatic solution suggestions: Freddy AI automatically suggests solutions or items to your agents. You can also provide customers with relevant solutions.
• Feedback mechanism: With the ability to leave comments on articles, you can easily make any necessary adjustments.

Reporting on Freshdesk: our opinion

Freshdesk offers integrated reporting and analysis tools to help you constantly improve the quality of your customer service.

Ready-to-use dashboards give you an overview of your performance in graphical form: number of support tickets, agent and team productivity, customer satisfaction surveys…

You can filter reports by agent, team or support type, and export them in PDF format.

To move on to more detailed analyses, Freshdesk becomes a little more complicated. You can create customized dashboards by adding analysis widgets to a dedicated page.

You can use existing templates, but in general you need to add blank graphs and select the data to be displayed. You can also add images and text boxes, and modify fonts and colors.

Overall, Freshdesk’s reporting is hard to beat: it’s the ideal tool for creating quality reports. But it takes a little time to familiarize yourself with the platform, so the first reports take a while to finalize!

Freshdesk: customer reviews

Freshdesk benefits from excellent customer reviews on all existing platforms. Those who adopt the tool are quickly convinced of its features and performance. The only recurring negative point is the difficulty of getting to grips with the tool for beginners.

Customer support on Freshdesk: our opinion

The Freshdesk team is often available, even if the size of the structure means that waiting times can be long. Agents can be reached via live chat or the helpdesk. Product videos are also available if no agent is available.

Freshdesk support handles different products, languages and time zones:

• With multi-product support, requests are classified and sent to the appropriate agents. Each product can also have specific allocation rules, personalized e-mail notifications…
• Freshdesk supports 26 different languages.
• The platform adapts to the international dimension of your organization. Your agents can plan work schedules according to a given geographical location or team.
• The SLA can be customized according to the product, department or structure being supported.

Freshdesk integrations

Freshworks Marketplace integrates with the most popular applications: project management tools, agent productivity and CRM, sales and marketing, customer file sharing and collaboration, and user and content management.

In particular, Freshdesk offers the Freshworks suite of tools:

• Freshdesk Caller: A voice platform that helps you reduce waiting times and missed calls.

• Freshservice: The tool for modernizing your IT services with an intuitive, intelligent solution.

• Freshworks CRM: The solution that brings sales and marketing together to boost your revenues. Discover the 9 main advantages of implementing a CRM system.

With the API function, you can add customized features to your helpdesk. Integration with Google’s suite of products is ideal for companies that rely on the Google for Work suite.

Another highlight: Slack integration facilitates communication between agents. It also acts as a tracking system with real-time notifications of new tickets and updates on private or public Slack channels.

You can convert conversations between customers and your teams into support tickets. A highly effective tool for improving ticket allocation and tracking!

Freshdesk: prices

Freshdesk divides its pricing into 2 families: Support desk and Omnichannel. Support Desk handles tickets created via email or social networks, while Omnichannel adds telephony, live chat, Whatsapp business and more.

Each pricing family is then divided into several plans with increasingly advanced functionalities.

Freshdesk offers a free 21-day no-obligation plan. You have access to all functions, for an unlimited number of agents!

Freshdesk Support Desk plans: prices

Support Desk plans combine the best of support tickets, assistance and reporting tools.

• Growth: For access to automation features, integrations and much more robust reporting. The monthly fee is €18 per agent.

• Pro: Access automatic ticket routing (Round-robin), satisfaction questionnaires (and CSAT reporting) and customize roles and dashboards. Count €59 per agent per month.

• Enterprise: The most popular plan. It gives access to Freddy AI functionalities (chatbot, article suggestions, suggested answers, etc.). 95 per agent per month.

Freshdesk Omnichannel plans: prices

For each plan, you have access to the corresponding Support Desk plan, with additional messaging features:

• Growth Omnichannel: Access to live chat and telephony channels (up to 2,000 incoming minutes per month). Access to the Freddy AI chatbot (up to 2,000 conversations per month). You’ll pay €35 per agent per month.

• Pro Omnichannel: You grow to 3,000 incoming minutes per month and 3,000 chatbot conversations. Whatsapp Business and Apple Business chat let you send messages directly to your customers. The monthly fee is €71 per agent.

• Enterprise Omnichannel: The most comprehensive plan. You go to 5,000 incoming minutes and 5,000 chatbot conversations. It gives you access to bot email, bot voice, and brings a lot of feed customization features. Count €119 per agent per month.