Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that currently serves more than 10,000 SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers worldwide.
$29
per month per agent
Spoke
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Spoke, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their ticketing and request management app designed to support IT help desks, HR, or management with handling employee requests and assistance needs.
We were looking for a way to automate the creation of a new Teams site and were able to do so with the workflow tool. This allows for some automation to be set in place, which is beneficial. The fact that our IT team is ITIL-certified and Freshservice is ITIL-aligned makes it easy for us to follow the recommended guidelines. The self-service portal is being used to elevate work from our support team by allowing our end-users to access the knowledge base through the end-user portal.
Spoke is well suited to ingesting the myriad questions and requests I get throughout my workday. If I receive requests directly, they make it easy to change those requests into tickets, which helps my team track and demonstrate the work that we do. Spoke is also great for auto-answering common issues and questions. It only takes three of the same general question for it to start recognizing and offering the answer from our KB. Spoke has also been a great partner in helping our team be more efficient and more effective, something we never got with our old provider. I can’t emphasize enough that Spoke is NOT for external-facing helpdesks. It’s just not. It works best for teams that are supporting their own colleagues. I would also say that, at the moment, it doesn’t scale well past a few hundred users. They’re implementing features this year that will be more helpful for that sort of thing. But it does work great for remote support!
Asset Management Module: The features I like most in this module are the discovery agent software, which allows us to collect device information without manual intervention, and the simplicity and robustness of the module itself.
Service Catalog: This feature allows us to create forms tailored to specific service requests based on group requirements. The ability to customize forms greatly helps both us and our end-users provide the necessary information to fulfill their requests.
Workflow Automator and Business Rules: These two allow us to have some automation in place, eliminating some of the manual steps and decreasing the number of human errors that may happen due to manual changes.
We are pretty invested in Freshservice right now and have integrated it pretty heavily into our environment, so it would be hard to move away from it. For the most part, we are happy with Freshservice and the ease of use it gives us in managing tickets through the system. The only complaint we've had is customer service.
Easy to navigate and use GUI. We have many infrastructure team members from various departments using Freshservice and their on-boarding and training was very straightforward and we have not received much, if any negative feedback from non-technology users in regards to overall usability, interface or functionality.
Most reports are quick, however, it can take some time for emailed exports to come via email. It would be helpful to have the exports live in the system rather than having to wait on emails.
Support is responsive and adequate for most situations. For more complex tasks, there is Premium Support but that can use some improvement as well. Overall, this is a healthy marker and there are plenty of support options but I wish there were more solutioning driven engagements.
Any questions we've had were fielded in a very timely manner and their staff have been very helpful in our launch and ongoing inquiries. Internally, it has been very well received amongst staff and has increased efficiency, company wide
Their documentation is pretty good, but only available in English. This makes it difficult for some of our users to understand. There are also some basic video courses available.
Use case and requirements have to be very specific. Each business is different so it's very important to be as clear as possible with your initial requirements when communicating with the on-boarding/implementation team.
Customization of FreshService was so much easier than ChangeGear. Creating forms for end-users was difficult and didn't always work the way we wanted. The nail in the coffin was when we had a support call set up, and the IT Director was on the phone waiting, but no one joined the call. I can't speak on what the product is today, but it was JAVA-heavy, and everything was manually updated.
Spoke is just... easier. Easier to set up and easier to use, for both admins and users. We already have asset management and didn’t necessarily need our ticketing system to be directly connected to it. We wanted a product that was friendly to use, not crazy expensive, and didn’t require us to purchase an implementation package and/or a multi-day training package to roll-out. It’s not rocket science!
