Item: Freshdesk
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Nile as our Customer Ticketing management tool. Freshdesk includes online Chat, 1-800 # call trees and voicemail integration, and direct ticket opening via widget or email. All of the entry points land in the same support queue, enabling our support team to manage the workload in a systematic and efficient manner. This supports how we support our customers today.

Pros and Cons

Converting missed calls into voicemail attachments to new tickets, tagged to customer/company name.
Converting open Chats to tickets while collecting and attaching the full chat history to the ticket.
Automating functionality to process the new tickets to handle basic ticket management workflows without manual intervention (e.g., standardizing the title format, etc.).

Testing out new features is tricky because the Sandbox is not truly different than production.
Some automations are limited because of how Freshdesk envisioned them being used. In our case, we had to change our idea in order to fit how Freshdesk implemented the use case.
If something simple goes wrong, the support team quickly responds and helps. If something complicated goes wrong and your support ticket with Freshdesk gets older than 24 hours, no one wants to touch it. I think metrics internal to Freshdesk drive this behavior.

Return on Investment

I am neutral here as our ticket volume is still low. I cannot say it has or has not accelerated resolution times. I can say that out of the box, it has some good functionality.
I think this is a great starter package for support ticket management.

Implementation Rating

Basic functionality works. If you want to customize in any way you will likely have to open multiple tickets with Freshdesk and get on live Zoom calls to troubleshoot and get help. There appear to be many layers of advanced settings tucked under unexpected menus. Also, in some places you have to look at the JavaScript and edit that directly to make the change needed. This level of configuration comes up surprisingly fast, such as if you want to disable forums on the support portal because you don't have enough customers yet to create a community. There is no documentation anywhere online as to how to do this level of configuration.

Customer Satisfaction

The AI Automations are typically to match the incoming ticket to some support article in the KB. But the only way the AI knows is if you train it. The way to train it is to think up other words for the same article topic and save them for the AI to "know about." This is some heavy lifting. if this worked in a more hands-free and perpetual learning way that would be much better.

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?

Would you buy Freshdesk again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Salesforce CMS, Atlassian Confluence, Jira Software

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a support desk in a small to medium business, or even sales leads online in an SMB, Freshdesk could be a good option. Beyond SMB, I think Freshdesk may not scale due to its pricing per use of certain features like call minutes, and bot use instances, and due to the implementation decisions.

Freshdesk will get you started quickly, but takes some work to customize.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Freshdesk