Freshdesk is a SaaS based customer support software designed to provide businesses of all sizes with the tools they need to wow customers - robust multichannel capability, integrated game mechanics to supercharge agent productivity, smart automations, self service portals, community forums and more.
A full-fledged cloud based customer support solution, and built with an emphasis on usability, Freshdesk offers everything a business needs to deliver exceptional support. Unlike competing products with steep pricing tiers and hidden strings, Freshdesk is priced affordably, and is free forever for the first three agents.
Freshdesk offers four pricing plans: Sprout is ideal for small businesses, and is free forever for unlimited number of agents. Businesses that want to go proactive with customer support can avail the Blossom plan for $19/agent. For $35/agent, the Garden plan is targeted at businesses that are growing and diverging into multiple products. The Estate plan ($49/agent) is for larger enterprises that care about providing their customers a personalised support experience. We also recently added a more comprehensive Forest plan ($89/agent).
Pros
Freshdesk has been a breeze to set up and use effectively. My team loves how easy it is to quickly work through tickets. We heavily use Trello and their integration is top tier.
When issues do come up, the support team is always available to answer my questions. Even when it doesn't support a particular workflow, I've always been given excellent suggestions to work around its limitations.
Cons
Many integrations are v1 products that were built years ago and never updated. Salesforce integration needs a lot of work. We had to disable it because it was using too many API calls.
We have moved from Desk.com half a year ago. The decision was made based on our comparison. We have selected Freshdesk as it seemed to give the best value for the price and people also seem really satisfied in general.
To me Freshdesk is a developing underdog on the CRM market with some huge advantages and opportunities. We selected them because we can have some top notch solutions just like we had Freshdesk or Zendesk, but we do not have to leave a fortune there. They still need to spend a lot to improve the software as the market is really competitive with other companies like Salesforce, Zendesk but it seems they have the ambition to be the best.
Moving to Freshdesk still seems a great decision.
Pros
Learning the software was quite easy for the agents as well which is a huge advantage. This is partially because of their support team as we have always been able to contact then and ask any type of questions regarding their software. The CS Team is always helpful and pretty professional. They did not forger us even after we started using their software (which happens with many companies).
Ticket handling is really efficient and the agent portal has a nice design from a practical viewpoint as well. We like canned responses. A nice little feature is to add support page article links / contents to reply messages just like canned responses. Another huge advantage is the knowledge base / support page which is highly customizable. In general we like ticket automation rules as well and it helped to solve some of our special requests.
Cons
At this point we are not able to use our own SSL and we cannot afford to have extra expenses to rent an SSL from Freshdesk (probably third party) or buy their top plan to have their SSL. This is a good indicator that some essential functions are only available if you are using their top plan. It is good that you are able to customize your portal URL, but if you do you are not going to have HTTPS until you pay more. This makes this whole function questionable. I am hoping the development team will solve this soon.
Apparently there are some minor function that we have to solve with a workaround but it is straightforward available for competition.
In general, I think there are plenty of customizations and features with Freshdesk. The real selling point for our company was the analytics because we can see the history of our tickets and prevent them from reoccurring in the future.
Pros
I love the analytics and history log in Freshdesk. Freshdesk tracks agents' productivity through out the day and breaks up this information by the hour. We can also look up who has resolved the most tickets or who sends out immediate responses. All of this information is especially helpful when assigning new tickets because we can see a history of our most efficient employees. Previous tickets can be easily searched by key words, agent, or time frame. When multiple people are working on one project, it really helps to decipher who did what and when!
Cons
One thing that I believe can be improved is having a group option to send out an email. It's not common when we have to include multiple people on a ticket but when we do, we have to cc them in the very beginning as opposed to adding "Group A". -- The information still gets everyone on the same page, however it is an additional step on the agent's end.
It's hard to argue with Freshdesk. We've been using it for 2 years now (free version), and have very few complaints. The mobile app keeps us on top of support tickets, and our support portal is branded with our logo and brand colors. Freshdesk is simply polished and professional, and it's hard to find reasons to build a support desk elsewhere.
Freshworks (owns Freshdesk) has a suite of services (Freshworks 360) similar to Zoho One. I'd love to learn more about 360, but they don't publicize the price.
Pros
I love the Freshdesk simplicity of setting up a help desk and knowledgebase with very little friction or custom coding. Once you updated the layout with your brand assets, it's pretty much ready to go out-of-the-box. They have a generous free tier, and can imagine the paid plans are worth upgrading if your needs are more demanding. We've looked into lots of other suites and building our own support desk, but......why?
Cons
We don't like the narrow width of the window when browsing support articles in desktop view, and the fonts could be larger be default for accessibility - though fonts can definitely be enlarged with a bit of manual tweaking to each article. Not many cons frankly!
FreshDesk is a great ticketing system.
We use FreshDesk to support all the schools in our school district.
Integration with Google (SSO, profile info, etc) works wonderfully.
Knowledge base Articles are great. If we had to do it all over again, we would pick FreshDesk again.
Our users love FreshDesk, they often comment how easy it is to place a ticket.
Pros
Modern, Elegant, Google Integrated, Nice iOS & Android Apps, Intuitive. Lots of useful features. (Merging tickets, Splitting tickets, Tags for tickets, KB Articles, Teams, Chat, etc) Nifty videos even at the end of the year. Service up-time is great (I don't think we've ever noticed an outage). Knowledge base Articles are great.
Cons
Plans & pricing are a bit annoying. You have to pick from useful features or unnecessary cost for things that should be included without an up charge to a higher plan.
Sales, Support, Development, Billing, basically EVERYTHING, is in India, which isn't by itself bad, and for Freshdesk's part, it's much better than most India based support... But, if you open a ticket about billing, it can be months (literally months) before your issue is resolved.
There are some design flaws with the product, and while you're told changes will be considered, they seldom are - FreshDesk has their own agenda, and your feedback isn't all that important in the development. It would be nice to see the company track, implement, and report back when feedback is actually taken, and this would be nice if it was done in a timely manner, but that doesn't happen.
Some features are a bit confusing to set up and have silly names (Observer & Dispatcher) -- an outside has no idea what those features do, and even after using FreshDesk for a years, it's still a bit opaque.
The concept of ticket fields vs user fields can be a bit annoying.
There are little refinements that are lacking (email alerts that are not as good as they should be, etc).
Freshdesk is priced per support agent per month, and has 5 different plans.
Sprout - €0 (unlimited free agents)
Blossom - €19/agent/month billed monthly or €15/agent/month billed yearly
Garden - €35/agent/month billed monthly or €29/agent/month billed yearly
Estate - €65/agent/month billed monthly or €49/agent/month billed yearly
Forest - €125/agent/month billed monthly or €109/agent/month billed yearly
Intuitive - Freshdesk is refreshingly easy to use, and takes very little time to get started with - if you need something it's right there where you need it.
Integrated game mechanics - Turn every ticket into a chance for agents to score points. Support managers can even set up quests for agents to complete specific tasks like filling up the knowledge base, etc.
Affordable pricing - Freshdesk is free forever for three agents. Four other affordable plans for you to choose from as you grow.
Configurable and customizable - A gallery of themes to choose from to make your customers feel at home, and the ability to automate workflows and manage escalations
Great support - If you ever have a problem, you can write to us, send us a tweet or just call us.
Freshdesk offers a host of tools for sorting and prioritizing help requests in a more efficient manner. The help desk software augments two-way communication between your customer services reps and their clients, providing a more user-friendly experience to both staff and customers. Freshdesk helps small to mid-sized companies build a fully-functional help and support desk through their highly customizable, cloud-based software.
This help desk and customer support application is adaptable, allowing a business to customize their Freshdesk sites with company logos and other elements specific to their business, as well as to define their business rules and processes. The software’s core functionality is centered around its ticketing system which sorts through customer help requests, distributing ticket numbers to each client and routing them to the correct agent, whilst assuring them that am agent will be with them promptly.
You can support your customers through multiple mediums using Freshdesk, inclusing phone, email, your website and social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Freskdesk also offers your customers a self-service portal through which they can find solutions to common issues, get access to articles and company documents, and view shared tips left by other users.
Freshdesk offers a way for businesses to organize, prioritize and sort client requests without expanding their work force. Though a smart ticketing system and the ability to set custom business rules, customer experiences can be tailored to match each client. Freshdesk also provides your clients with the ability to help themselves, by automatically creating a company knowledge-base based on archived emails, conversations and ticket resolutions. The knowledgebase can be designed to reflect your company´s branding.
Freshdesk offers a number of customization tools. Upon signing into Freshdesk, you will be given a unique URL to reflect your company name. Alternatively, you can set up Freshdesk to point to your preferred domain. The Freshdesk help desk solution also includes a customizable dashboard that gives users a summary of all tickets and recent activities. Freshdesk is multilingual offering customer support tools in 18 languages, including popular languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portugese and Polish. Multi-time zones are also supported.
Freshdesk provides an automated ticketing system which reads and sorts through all incoming tickets, assigning them to the most appropriate representative,.
Freshdesk uses a common policy called SLA (service level agreement), with pre-defined parameters for service workflows. You can use a standard SLA policy for all of your customers, or you can also create custom SLAs for priority customers with specific needs and requirements. Through the Ticket tab you can set all your ticketing rules and workflows for your ticket system.
In order to keep the lines of communication between your team and your clients in need of help open, Freshdesk allows you to transform your company email into support tickets. These emails are set up as automatic response to requests emails, letting your clients know that their request has been received and queued, and that an agent will contact them promptly. You can also define behavioral rules for requests so that certain tickets are routed to the most appropriate support personnel.
Freshdesk gives you the option to use your own branded email address when sending request responses, rather than the one that Freshdesk automatically assigns you when you first sign in. To help ensure that your help desk emails are not treated as spam, Freshdesk recommends that you create an SPF record of your emails in your DNS zone file if you are using your own domain.
Freshdesk’s FreshThemes feature enables companies to offer a consistent visual experience across their company and helpdesk webpages. This can be done through pre-defined themes or you can customize themes through the use of Javascript and CSS code.
Freshdesk’s Self Service Portal provides your clients and agents with a singular place to find all the information they need to get answers to the most frequently asked questions with a knowledge-base of technical and training advice. The Self Service Portal in Freshdesk serves as a space that holds all your important company documents, such as fact sheets, company handbooks, and brochures, as well as self-help tips and articles. You can create a knowledge-base for either public consumption or exclusively for staff, or both.
Through the use of forums, Freshdesk continues to encourage conversation and feedback between your help desk team and your clients. The Forum section provides several tools to keep these lines of communication open. Tools included within the forum section include Announcements, Report a Problem, Tips and Tricks and Feature Requests. You can use these tools to post important updates and make announcements, as well as to receive feedback from your colleagues and clients. Within each of these tools you have the ability to create a topic, you can input information to each topic and save it within the portal for further discussion.
Freshdesk helps users to automate tasks and save on ticket resolution time through integration with multiple platforms. This includes email integration, a feature which allows agents to manage, update, reply to and assign tickets directly from their email accounts as requests come in. You can configure the settings in Freshdesk so that all emails sent to your account are logged as tickets, they can then be categorized, prioritized and assigned to the correct agent. You can also set up automated email actions such as sending acknowledgement emails or notifications.
Another emailing features of Freshdesk includes “Email to Knowledge base”. This feature automatically converts email threads or ticket replies into articles in the knowledge base article. These emails are saved as drafts which can be edited before sending them to the knowledge base for publication.
Other channels supported by Freshdesk include social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. You can be notified of all customer activity associated with your brand on either channel and reply directly to these in real time. You can also use Freshchat, Freshdesk’s live-chat solution and Freshfone, the software’s integrated voice telephony system to provide further support channels to your clients, as well as to track tickets from multiple sources.
The Freshbooks software offers a number of reporting features for measuring time and productivity. These features include an integrated time tracking tool which allows your agents to measure the time they spend on various support tasks. This tool can use this information to automatically generate time-sheets, even differentiating between billable and non-billable time spent.
Agents can assign themselves to tasks and then start the task timer to measure the time spent on each task. Admin supervisors can also assign agents to specific tasks, subtracting and adding total time spent on overall ticket resolution. Freshdesk data can be automatically fed to other third-party applications, including Freshbooks or Harvest, and compiled to generate client invoices and payments.
Freshdesk’s At-a-Glance Reports feature allows you to get a quick overview of the activity of you entire helpdesk, as well as individual customers, agents and teams. Freshdesk also provides reports that let you identify your top performing agents and teams, as well as your based clients. You can use this tool to compare agents and customers using key metrics to see how they perform against each other.
The Freshdesk help desk solution includes an agent collision prevention feature. If another agent opens up a ticket you are working on, you will be alerted through a flashing icon next to your open ticket. If another agent is already writing back to a customer, a pen icon lights up on the screen to inform you of this. If you have a ticket open and an update occurs, then the refresh icon will light up. If you click on this you will get access to all the latest information associated with that ticket.
The “Ticket Watchers” feature alerts you to tickets that are of specific interest to you. For example, this might be a ticket that was assigned to you at an earlier stage, or one that addresses your area of support. You can set up email notifications associated to ticket topics and specific ticket activity. With this information, your sales teams can prepare valuable metrics for use during their next call with a client.
One of the newer features that Freshdesk added last year includes Freshdesk Arcade, providing the ability to gamify your help desk activities. By using the Freshdesk Arcade feature you can incentivize your staff to meet targets and send staff on certain “quests” to earn points. The tool will reward teams and agents based on a point system that determines the quality of their service performance, based on speed and customer satisfaction.
For example, teams or agents that solve customer issues in a more timely manner get certain badges, virtual trophies and a number of points that send them climbing up the leader board, an appropriate reward system can then be determined by the company.
Freshdesk offers a growing number of native and 3rd party integrations. Native integrations include Facebook and Twitter; Saleforce, Highrise, Zoho CRM, Sugar CRM and Capsule; Freshbooks and Harvest; Atlassian from Jira; Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Gmail Gardets, Google Hangouts and Google Drive; HelpOnClick and Snap Enagae; MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Constant Contact; Olark, Survey Monkey, Dropbox, Zapier and Shopify, among others.
Third party integrations include Magento, Talkdesk, Kipfolio, Pipeliner, OneSky, Userlike, Woo Themes, Timecamp, and Fromcrafts.
Freshdesk also offers a service called Freshplugs so companies can create custom integrations.
Freshdesk also has a help-desk plugin for its mobile app called MobiHelp that comes in the form of both an Android app and an iOS app. The app functions on all mobile devices including iPhones, Androids, iPads and Blackberries.
Freshdesk offers 5 different pricing plans. The most basic plan is the Sprout plan which is offered for free and can be used for up to 3 agents, it includes email support, phone support and a knowledge base. Additional agents on the Sprout plan costs €12 per month.
The Blossom plan costs €14 per agent per month and includes social support, community forums and game mechanics. The Garden plan costs €20 per agent per month and include live chat, multiple products and multiple locations. The Estate plan costs €32 per agent per month and includes enterprise reports, portal customization and custom agent roles. The Forest plan costs €56 per agent per month and includes IP whitelisting and custom email servers.
A free trial is available for 30 days on the Estate plan for an unlimited number of agents.
Below are some frequently asked questions for Freshdesk.
Freshdesk offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: €19.00/month
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Free Trial: Available
Freshdesk is priced per support agent per month, and has 5 different plans.
Sprout - €0 (unlimited free agents)
Blossom - €19/agent/month billed monthly or €15/agent/month billed yearly
Garden - €35/agent/month billed monthly or €29/agent/month billed yearly
Estate - €65/agent/month billed monthly or €49/agent/month billed yearly
Forest - €125/agent/month billed monthly or €109/agent/month billed yearly
Freshdesk offers the following features:
Freshdesk has the following typical customers:
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Public Administrations, Small Business
Freshdesk supports the following languages:
Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish
Freshdesk has the following pricing plans:
Free, Subscription
Freshdesk supports the following devices:
Android, iPhone, iPad
Freshdesk integrates with the following applications:
Bitium, Constant Contact, HelpOnClick Live Chat Software, Instapage, Nimble, Olark live chat, Pipeliner CRM, SeamlessGov, WorkflowMax, Zapier
Freshdesk offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
