Freshdesk (a product of Freshworks Inc.) is a customer service solution with enterprise capability. Freshdesk unifies channels, conversations, AI capabilities, customer insights, and advanced ticketing into the Freshdesk Command Center so agents are ready to resolve. With Freddy, People-first AI, customer service teams can take AI agents live in minutes to fully resolve complex and simple queries, get response and resolution assistance from AI copilot, and stay ahead with AI insights.…
$18
per month per agent
IRIS CRM
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
IRIS CRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) software focused on lead management, marketing automation, and business process automation.
N/A
Kustomer
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform built for managing high support volume by optimizing experiences throughout the customer service journey. Kustomer was acquired by Facebook in late 2020, but spun out in 2023 and re-launched as an independent entity, Kustomer, LLC.
$89
per month (billed annually) per user
Pricing
Freshdesk
IRIS CRM
Kustomer
Editions & Modules
Growth
$18
per month per agent
Pro
$59
per month per agent
Enterprise
$95
per month per agent
No answers on this topic
Enterprise
$89
per month (billed annually) per user
Ultimate
$139
per month (billed annually) per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Freshdesk
IRIS CRM
Kustomer
Free Trial
Yes
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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All plans require an annual subscription and 8 users minimum.
We evaluated Odoo before; it was a good tool with more features than Freshdesk, making it an all-in-one solution. But it is exactly because it is an All-in-one tool that Freshdesk has more refined features for request management and the portal we have considered.
Far more straightforward than Salesforce which has too many features and modules and is very hard to navigate, making it too complicated for our organization. Similarly for Zoho, but not nearly as bad as Salesforce. Zendesk, for us, is quite similar to Freshdesk. The key reason …
We actually use both JIRA and Freshdesk, and Freshdesk has been a great tool for our clients and our internal users to have visibility over both the big picture and the individual issues at play.
We use Intercom for 70% of our inbound, its a great tool that has many inbuilt and easy to use out the box features like their knowledge base, live chat, tool tips, product tours etc. We primarily use freshdesk for the customers that want to use our email to raise issues etc
Freshdesk offered a faster time-to-value and a more intuitive, easier-to-administer UI for the mid-market team size we targeted. It was more affordable without significant feature lock-in. Freshdesk had a more polished omnichannel experience, and its reporting/analytics were …
It had a good set of features and tight integration with other Zoho apps, but the UI felt less modern, and some customizations were a bit clunky. That said, Zoho Desk is still a great option, especially for teams already deep into the Zoho ecosystem or those looking for a …
Freshdesk, Zendesk and ServiceNow are all excellent. Other products have good points and bad points, but, in my opinion, are clearly inferior. It really comes down to implementation and how well the ticketing system is integrated with other systems, and customized for your …
I use Freshdesk over other similar products I've tested because the price difference and ease of use for the end user seem to me to be the most suitable for achieving a better return on investment within my company. I also found the various AI-powered automation tools to be …
We felt that Freshdesk offered better value in terms of pricing and offered a matching feature set. It was also highly recommended by a member of a team that had used Freshdesk in their previous organisation. Lastly the fact that it could integrate into Hubspot (that we use as …
We use all Freshdesk, Freshchat, and other Freshworks tools—they’re all great. Freshchat is awesome for real-time support, while Freshdesk handles tickets, automation, and multi-channel queries really well. Using them together gives us a complete, seamless customer service …
Freshdesk was the easiest to set up and was the most straightforward product of all the products we evaluated. It had a better user interface for agents, and provided a great solution to meet our needs at a lower cost than the other products that we evaluated. Freshdesk offers …
Ultimately we ended up switching from Freshdesk to Zendesk, and then from zendesk to devrev. We're still trying to find the right fit for us - Freshdesk covers the same options as Zendesk, if you use the whole suite it's probably a good option.
Freshworks desk is very easy to use and understand. The biggest strengths if Freshdesk as it's usability, Affordability and the vast number of features it provides for its clients.
Freshdesk lacks some of the functionality of costlier IT tool suites but makes up for it in value. Yes, that means you may have to use two tools to do the job of one complete suite, but for the price and the functionality, Freshdesk does what it does at the best value point.
As saied before, Freshdesk is very simple to use. It is very agile to our needs and uses, based on the requests are made from our employees only. So, everything they demand, is a well know task or activity in our duties. Zammad does it very well, but needs an on premises …
By using IRIS CRM we had a wonderful experience with the automated workflow process as compare to other alternatives. Now we are better able to keep a track of the performance and hence we can enhance productivity and eventually can get more profit.it has made automated …
I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the …
It has improved a lot of the training time needed for our new hires to understand the Kustomer interface and how to handle communications fully. The time invested went significantly down, and the learning curve improved a lot as well.
Apps like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gorgios all treat customer inquiries as tickets, just tracking that one issue or interaction with a customer. Kustomer treats each customer as an individual, which allows us to provide top-notch customer service. Customers love that we're able …
Kustomer is a great fit for our organization because we can cut down on multiple contacts from the same customer and see all their information in one place. It's also infinitely customizable, so if we need changes made we can make them while still using the same platform. This …
The UI of Kustomer is a lot cooler than what we are using before. There are a lot of features that Kustomer has that make things easier and more convenient than Desk.com.
I use both in my role with the company. Our social media channels are managed through Khoros, but we use Kustomer to notate and contact customers outside of social media. I'd much rather bring our social media channels into Kustomer, to help with efficiency.
Kustomer is far more intuitive, personal, and holistic than Zendesk. As a company who has a lot of interaction with a single customer, it is such an advantage to take the customer approach rather than a single ticket approach. Zendesk was very limited in a lot of the actions …
All other systems I have used have been internally-made programs that were a lot more basic order-taking systems, no notes or call functions outside of when order was placed. Doesn't really compare here.
Kustomer simply does more than any other platform I've been able to work with. Sure some others will give you a handful of neat tricks built in for managing a channel or two but those rarely offer any external integrative capacity or limit what you can do in connections. …
I was not personally involved in the decision-making process when selecting a new CRM and ultimately settling on Kustomer. That said, I'm happy with the decision to partner with them. Compared to our previous CRMs, it is much easier to work with everything in one place and we …
Moving from Zendesk to Kustomer was driven by the clarity that the customer timeline brings for advocate engagement alongside the custom workflow abilities.
Zendesk did not give a big picture of the customer. It was more of a ticketing platform, and only gave statistics of those conversations. We were unable to track customer sentiment, or other attributes of the customer.
Kustomer is far more scalable and flexible than Zendesk, and it provides a real omni-channel experience far from the "Zendesk for mails, Zendesk chat for chats" we were used to. On the automation and customisation features, it gets even clearer how Kustomer can deal with a lot …
Overall, it does a great job of handling support, which is our user case. It is best for narrowly focused issues and issues that are resolved in a few interactions. When issues are broad and have several paths of issues and/or corrections it is not easy to segment off the work and responses necessary. This makes it hard to have several support personnel work on an issue that is more diverse and requires multiple skill sets.
The cost is a little higher than other CRM software options, so IRIS CRM is better suited for larger organizations. It is great when multiple departments and functions are accessing sales data, as the software is fairly comprehensive in retention of sales related data. It is also great for generation of processing stats and simple reports. Calculation of rolling opportunities data is made easy. It is less appropriate for smaller sized companies with many novice users looking for high levels of customization. The software is highly capable, but the company isn't as well established as some others so some custom features can take time to implement.
It works really well for you to ask a teammate to review a case/email/message and provide some input since you can all review the same conversations and client accounts. They can also cover your inbox using your email handle in case you are out of the office suing some well deserved PTO.
Follow up on all conversations that enter and are easy to use by the employee and save responses ready for use.
Find out the average rate of the number of conversations that occur in the company and conduct the analysis.
There is a feature it allows one to take a permit in the name of the employee who responds to the conversation and to know the problem faced by the customer and the solution.
Grouping is done very effectively. For a company with a wide product portfolio, it is greatly beneficial to customize product families.
Streamlines the life cycle of merchant services very well. E-signatures, workflows, and help tickets are well integrated to maximize efficiency.
Processing stats and reporting tools are intuitive, useful, and aesthetically pleasing. The software allows you to quickly generate sales reports for specific product families and time periods.
All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.
SLA Policies where it is not customer / contract driven but agents / groups driven.
Audit Trail is not available in Pro version makes the tool adoption difficult from compliance perspective.
Chat Bot and Fresh Chat Services has greater potential to explode, but the pricing model tagged to chat bot sessions .are illogical as it limits the ability to use the fresh chat feature
Agent Logon Screen use earlier version of Captcha as it is annoying for the agents to login. Very frustrating experience.
For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.
My company that used Freshdesk was acquired by another company that uses Salesforce, so our only reason to keep Freshdesk would be records, but migrating the tickets, notes, and company details from Freshdesk to Salesforce was straightforward enough. Had the acquisition not occurred, we would have renewed Freshdesk because the cost of switching would've been too great in terms of price, time, and sunk cost (our Freshdesk customizations would not port over well).
I gave it a rating of 9 out of 10 because they delivered on everything we asked them to do. Easy to setup, easy to deploy to end users, easy to customize, easy to enter tickets and so much more. Our experience with their support is top notch! After opening a ticket for support they call use back within 10 minutes every time!
It is a wonderful software with an automated messaging service. It has helped us in having a better knowledge of our customer’s needs, preferences, and habits, and by knowing all these we have improved our business. Security is my basic concern and the fact that it has a disabled human element from the business equation are the things that I don’t really like in it.
There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.
I have encountered a lot of errors in the Freshdesk, however, they tend to resolve it on priority or at least they will share the timeline by when this can be resolved. Most of the time the issue has been from the other partner's end. They take time to resolve their vendor issues and they don't have any timelines in case of developed app errors.
The reports take a lot of time to download if the time period is large. Also, the tickets take their sweet time to open and load. It is not fast as Zendesk. Only 30 tickets are visible in a single go and there isn't any option to select all. If we need to change the pages and dashboards it takes a lot of time to open.
The main thing about Freshdesk user service is that once a request has been made for information about a feature of the platform, the support team responds to tickets quickly, within a day of writing and submitting them, with information that is concise enough so that there is no need to ask for help on the same topic again.
It has enabled us to keep a record of the demographics of our clients and eventually we can develop a better understanding of our clients that will lead us to uplift our business. With its amazing sales tool, we have developed a strong relationship with our clients, and helped us in creating a good brand image. We really adore the convenience of managing and reporting data. It is quite easy to handle and all our business is depended on it and it helped us in gaining more loyal customers.
It’s a great tool that has helped our company and overall customer service. I believe if we were able to edit certain setting for our specific company that would be hopeful. We have been told before that certain desires of ours would make a change throughout all of Kustomer. Which is not something we would want, we would just want that to change for our business.
In-person training is provided to all the agents and it is very easy to learn the basics of the Freshdesk interface. Solving tickets via dashboards, replying to the guest queries in bulk via Freshdesk. The training which is a bit hard is creating the logic according to the ticket flow and intergeration.
This tool is no doubt easy to learn but in-person training is a lot better than online training. It takes time to grasp things in the online training, however, in pandemic we have done all the training online. Apart from a bit more time we haven't faced any issues with online training.
Our team easily implemented Freshdesk, and as soon as we started, we were pros with it. In a matter of days, we had integrated signatures and canned responses. The biggest problem was the Help Center part, but after some time, that was also integrated. We did not know some features when we started, but that is normal.
We evaluated Odoo before; it was a good tool with more features than Freshdesk, making it an all-in-one solution. But it is exactly because it is an All-in-one tool that Freshdesk has more refined features for request management and the portal we have considered.
By using IRIS CRM we had a wonderful experience with the automated workflow process as compare to other alternatives. Now we are better able to keep a track of the performance and hence we can enhance productivity and eventually can get more profit.it has made automated messaging so convenient and simple. We believe that by understanding our customers we can make our business better and IRIS helped us in having a better knowledge of our customer’s needs, preferences, and habits, and by knowing all these we have improved our business a lot. We have found it very convenient to navigate and now we can better spread our business database. It helped us in having active and strong customer service and now we can better manage our relationship with our customers.
I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the resources or the customer-focus to rally behind setting up their customer service/experience team up for success. With a platform like Kustomer, you can actually evolve the relationship over time, or use the past experiences (number of contacts, purchases, previous issues, etc.) to power your next steps with a customer, making for a much more nuanced relationship with a human, not just a ticket.
My company had Freshdesk agents from support and success. It's generally difficult to customize permissions for different agent "roles." We were a fully distributed company, so "multiple sites" doesn't apply to us. We found Freshdesk features lacking as we grew our customer base, and adding agents wasn't easy because price steeply increases with number of agents.
We automate all the questions and concerns our clients may have, and we have countless solutions ready thanks to this platform.
It allows us to help our clients in any language with automatic translations on both sides, making it easier to provide solutions to clients and potential clients' needs.
It allows for centralized ticket-based query management, where we can apply resolutions and follow up on cases without resorting to tedious emails, all through live chat.
We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.
