Freshdesk - Simple and Easy to use. Easy to expand. Reporting could use enhancing.
November 21, 2018

Freshdesk - Simple and Easy to use. Easy to expand. Reporting could use enhancing.

Gary Pope | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Estate

Overall Satisfaction with Freshdesk

We started using Freshdesk about a year ago and it was just for use in our IT department to track issues and enhancement requests. It was so useful and liked that several other departments became very interested in it. It was expanded to our commissions department, HR and accounting rapidly. We are actively developing integrations with outside partners so we have one location for users to go to address their issues or requests, even with the solution is completed outside our company walls.
  • We use Freshdesk to track issues that are reported to us. We want to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
  • We also use Freshdesk to store our knowledge base articles so that there is one place to go to for finding solutions to individuals issues. These articles can also be published to the self service portal.
  • We like how Freshdesk allows us to distribute the workload among our agents. The reporting allows us to see who is carrying their load and who is not. The numbers just don't lie.
  • There is a bit of work and technical expertise needed when doing API calls to pull and push information automatically into and out of Freshdesk. The good news is that they have the API to allow this.
  • There were times we struggled getting the automatic assignment of tickets to go to the right location using the dispatcher. We found the order of the rules makes a huge difference.
  • It does take a bit of getting used to the interface. Once you understand the processes of opening and resolving tickets it gets easier.
  • The best return we have received is having one place to store the tickets
  • We like how we only have to pay for the agents who work on the tickets and not for everyone who could potentially open a ticket.
  • We can now more easily understand our most common issues that reoccur and allows us to put time and effort into coming up with solutions to solve the root cause of the problem.
Our Sharepoint solution was a home grown solution to track issues that never really worked. Everything we needed we had to build from scratch. It also didn't lend well to expanding into other departments. When I tried Freshservice, I liked it quite well - but it was just a trial, again to just solve a particular problem. Again - it didn't lend well to expanding to other departments. We ended up selecting Freshdesk because of it's ease of use and ability to expand.
Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Toad Data Point
I love the ease of use of content creation. The ability to cut and paste images into the web based interface is really good. Sometimes it has a problem pasting the image and a refresh has to be done with the browser to get it to work. Overall though, the ability to create solutions that are available to internal and external users is great. I do wish I had the ability to limit the solution's visibility to specific agent groups rather than just agent or public.
I like the self service portal. This allows the customer to open a ticket on their own as well as check on their previously opened tickets. They can also view published solutions. This was one of the key features in selecting this solution - giving the customers the ability to check on their previously opened tickets that we liked.
I come from a business intelligence background and this is an area that Freshdesk could improve. There are several canned reports but I do wish there were additional custom reporting options. To view a report in Excel, you have to export it by sending it to your email address rather than just downloading it.
Freshdesk is improving on their analytics that are available to the users of the software. However, I do believe that this is something that they could improve upon. Overall they have several canned reports that they have made available. Their custom reports allow for picking columns you want to include and sending it out via a csv file on a scheduled basis. I would hope that future releases allow for more complex custom reports allowing for custom formulas and groupings.
First - the set up and roll out of the solution is really simple. Nothing to install - just configuration and you are off and running. Second - it does give you lots of ways to interact with your customers. Email and self service are both supported. It was also pretty easy for us to roll out the solution to other departments. Once we had a couple departments using it, others were knocking on our door.

In our specific situation, we needed a way to track issues being reported to the IT group. We wanted something simple to use but had enough bells and whistles to track what we needed to track.