Item: Freshdesk
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Freshdesk as a customer support ticketing system so that customers can submit tickets for issues experienced with our software/services and feature requests. Using Freshdesk means that we are able to track submitted customer requests easily, set SLAs, and generate monthly reports about the number of tickets received, the number of tickets resolved, and if any SLA breaches occurred.

Pros and Cons

Extensive customization of the customer portal, including layout and use of scripting for more advanced features.
Easy to set up and administer the service.
Customization of ticket forms is good.

One of the things that persuaded me to choose Freshdesk was the inclusion of a user type called "Ticket Collaborator." This user type allows managers and members of other teams to read tickets and leave private comments without having to use up a paid seat. However, collaborators must be added manually to each ticket for visibility, even if they have permission to see all tickets. It would be much more useful if there could be a "Ticket Collaborator" user type that has access to all tickets automatically, without the need to be manually added to each and every ticket.
Ticket fields cannot be configured with default settings, specifically text boxes. To aid customers in providing an appropriate level of information, we wanted to add a template for them to use. However, this functionality is not provided by default, and we were only able to do this via scripting, kindly provided by Freshdesk's Support team. Other ticketing systems have the ability to set a default value or template text for ticket fields as standard, and adding this feature would make Freshdesk even more awesome.
The Jira plug-in is pretty decent, but there are some improvements that could be made. First of all, it would be good if syncing used some kind of default administrator account such that comments synced from Jira to Freshdesk appeared from "Freshdesk Admin" instead of the Freshdesk administrator who set up the account. Secondly, when the plug-in creates a Jira ticket, the text of the description in Jira often appears different from that of the original Freshdesk ticket description and has to be manually formatted to make it readable (bullet points and line breaks specifically). These are minor points but would help to make the plug-in more robust and make for a better user experience overall.
Reporting functionality does not have any way of visualizing cumulative totals. So while it is possible to generate reports on incoming ticket number that is filtered by week/month/quarter/year, there is no simple way of seeing a cumulative total over time to see trends better.
There is no simple way to manage attached files. If you want to see attached files in a ticket, then you have to go through every single response with an attached file and then manually download the files one by one. Yes, there is a paid extension that helps with this, but this kind of functionality should be built into the product itself.

Return on Investment

Visibility on incoming tickets and monitoring of responses. Before we used Freshdesk, we used to work with customers via guest Slack channels, so we had no way of knowing if a customer's message had been responded to, and we had no way of measuring response times.

Implementation Rating

In addition to being fairly straightforward to set up (admittedly, I set up a trial first, so I had a reasonably good idea of what I was doing), someone from Freshdesk contacted me to help with the setup, answer any questions that I had and to assist with any custom configuration that I wanted to put in place. This was done by an initial Zoom call followed by email correspondence. I was very impressed with the level of service provided as part of the license fee, although, in hindsight, this may have been related to the subscription level we were paying for, and someone using the very basic service may not have received the same assistance. If this service is provided to all users, that is a selling point.

Customer Satisfaction

Unfortunately, this is not a question that I can answer in any detail since we have only been using Freshdesk for about six months and we were not using any customer ticketing service before Freshdesk and so cannot make any comparisons. On the other hand, we have not received any complaints about Freshdesk from our customers, so I would consider that a good sign!

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk Support Suite and Jira Service Management (Jira Service Desk)

Jira Service Management Configuration was incredibly complicated and would have required significant time and effort to set up properly. Customer Portal customization is very limited compared to other solutions. No integrated voice solution is available, which was something that would be necessary for the future Zendesk KB is not included in the Support only package (costs an extra $15/agent/month). Read-only users are only included in Zendesk Suite, which includes more functionality that we needed (and was expensive as a result) and so was ruled out Custom reporting functionality also required an additional fee VOIP is only available as part of Zendesk Suite (an extra $30/agent/month).

Key Insights

Do you think Freshdesk delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Freshdesk's feature set?

Yes

Did Freshdesk live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Freshdesk go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Freshdesk again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Google Workspace, Zoom, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

Setting and monitoring SLAs - in addition to simply setting SLAs, Freshdesk provides an extensive set of notifications that can be configured to notify when a ticket is close to breaching SLA (up to a minimum of 30 minutes). We use these notifications to notify managers and team leads about possible first response SLA breaches and to notify agents working tickets about possible update response breaches. Reporting - coming from a background of using Tableau, the reporting is a little more fiddly. Still, it was fairly straightforward to set up some simple reports on ticket numbers that we use in customer-facing reports (it would be nice if you could make a series of changes without having to save at every single step, but that's a minor quibble).

Great value for money and easy to setup and administer, but with room for improvement.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Freshdesk