Freshservice Platform Review
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We utilize Freshservice for incident, service, and knowledge management to provide internal technical support to our business operations. Typically our business users will connect with support through a web based support portal, which we were able to easily customize to appear as an internal web page. Additionally, we are able to intake incidents and requests through an internal support e-mail address, or by calling our help desk, where agents can create tickets on behalf of users. Internal to the IT department this software enables us to monitor the progress of incidents and requests and measure the performance of our support agents against SLA measures that we have defined for ourselves. Recently we have begun utilizing their built in AI tools, Freddy Copilot, to further enhance our support agent. The goal of this was to allow our support staff to locate and draft solutions for the business faster.
Pros
- Platform customization. Most users don't even realize that they are not on an internal web page as we've been able to change all the branding and domains to align with what users would expect to see. On the agent side of the platform we have been able to create different organization structures and teams that allow for work to be directed to the right groups and giving our support teams a focused view of what they should be working on.
- Freddy Copilot. An AI add-on has proven to be very effective in enhancing our support agent performance when focused on those working on incident intake and triage. Overall it's enabled roughly a 20% gain in response and resolution times among our teams by aiding them in finding past solutions and applicable knowledge articles and drafting responses back to those requesting help from their teams.
- Knowledge management. The article editor in the platform is clean and easy for agents to use when adding knowledge articles. There are multiple points in the platform where both agents and end users will be directed to potential solutions that can lead to issues getting resolved without a ticket ever getting cut.
Cons
- Jira integration. Our product development team manages their work in Jira and as such integrations between the two platforms needed to be built when work crosses between the support and development lines. We have been able to create effective workflows between the two, but there have been challenges in how webhook triggers can be defined and in many cases the built in integration functions needed to be replaced by API calls to pass all the required information between the platforms.
- Deep root cause analysis. Freshservice's reporting tools are very customizable and provide great visibility on what is happening in the platform at a high level. I do however find myself taking data out side of the platform when a deeper analysis of trends and root causes is required. They have been taking strides to improve this with platform enhancements that provide trend analysis, but they haven't fully supplanted my need to dive deeper with data exports elsewhere.
Return on Investment
- Freddy Copilot allowed enabled agents to decrease their response and resolution times by roughly 20%
- Prior to using Freshservice we did not have a centralized knowledge base, information was scattered and knowledge was frequently tribal between SME's, as a result training new support team members took a significant portion of the year before they were able to operate with full independence. Since then we've built out a repository with over 1000 solution articles which has cut the time it has taken new team members to operate independently in half.
Alternatives Considered
Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk
