Freshdesk

Pros

FreshDesk is one of the greatest ticket management software. It has a marketplace with addins that can expand it's features and possibilities and is easy to use. We deployed FreshDesk looking to upgrade how we managed out customers.They are now impproving with AI features.

Cons

The customer portal is a little bit dissapointing and can't be customized for every client. The contact management and arcade (gamification) features could be better, although they work.

Pros

Freshdesk is an amazing solution that made my daily life easier. I used it as a part of my work as a customer service agent and it helped go through the tickets quickly and efficiently. Mostly I loved how easy it made for me to track the previous interactions with the customer and how efficient it made me.

Cons

We tried the call centre as well, but that did not work so well. We had calls drop randomly after a few seconds so we stopped using that feature.

Pros

For years I've been asking for date filters - something as simple as "see all emails sent by this client between 2020-04-10 to 2020-04-15" - NOTHING.

To make matters worse, when looking at older emails in a list, it doesn't even show the date - it will show some ambiguous phrase like "About a year ago" which lumps in a 6 month period.

If you want accurate tracking of communication, forget it. If you have one off emails that you'll never need to see again once resolved, maybe.

If it weren't for the fact we have so many existing records with this company we'd switch but we are stuck, and years of asking them for a simple feature to either allow date based searches OR at least display actual date of email, has been futile. Regret having chose this as our support desk provider for our team of 8!

Cons

The lack of basic and very simple features such as filtering emails/communication by date, or even displaying an accurate date. What business runs on emails that show the date on a list as "About A Year Ago"?

Absolutely horrible for business management or record keeping. If you want to manage long term relationship with clients and be able to look up conversations quickly, DO NOT USE FRESHBOOKS.

Pros

I set up and administered Freshdesk for a 200+ non-profit agency. There were three departments tracking bugs through it, and we were able to deploy it and announce its use with ease. It was easy to explain to our staff who didn't want to take time to learn something overly complex. As a non-profit, it was important to find a solution that could assist us day-to-day without breaking the bank. We were able to use the first-level with support for our use. The Freshdesk support was highly responsive and helpful if we had questions. Using this platform cut down on time spent fielding immediate requests that were not a high priority. It allowed us to really prioritize, track and automate repeat issues, and cut down on 'putting out little fires everywhere mentality.'

Cons

The automation was helpful, but I think it could have used a bit more complexity. We were able to implement an automated routing for email subjects and user emails so that certain requests or bugs/issues would go to a specific department. We used the platform in Communications, IT, and Facilities for all requests. We didn't have a bug or issue tracker prior to this platform. The Frequently Asked Questions portion of the portal really didn't end up being used, although we did use it when we first started the platform. Higher ups really liked the ability to see numbers in what we were fielding, but there was not enough drill-down in the pay/point we were using--that may have been available within higher paid levels. The automation has a lot of options for sending alerts when a new ticket is created. It can become cumbersome and send A LOT of emails. I'm not sure if there is a better way to automate/cut that down w/o losing that function. Also, the 'archive' user feature was a bit weird. We had a lot of employees that would leave and come back, and if you archived the user, it was a bit of an odd way to get them back into the platform, it's doable, just awkward.

Pros

It's quickly set up and you'll be working with it in no time, especially when you start from scratch and don't need to import (a lot).
As you work more with it, you'll run into a few issues that you'll have to adjust to. Most of it isn't major, it's just these little things that would turn it into a great tool. So without them, it's "only" good.

There are a few nice features when it comes to automation.

Cons

There's quite a few things I find annoying. None of them are bad enough to stop using Freshdesk altogether, but they're annoying.

In no particular order:
- There's no default ticket view for users, information like this is stored in cookies - and lost when a user needs to delete their cookies for one reason or the other.
- Ticket list can be filtered by various criteria, those filters can be saved. But columns are set once, regardless of views. So you can't have different ticket lists where one shows the priority and the other does not for example.
- Speaking of lists: They are hard coded only for contacts and companies.
- The API uses base auth with a very simple password.
- Automations are limited in scope and the rules need to be set up very, very carefully to make sure they don't interefere with each other.
- If you want to change basic SLAs, you need to upgrade to the higher tiers.
- If you want to have different Notification emails per group or type, you need to handle them in Automations (with less formating options) and not via the Email Notification Templates.
- Some things are dictated by the system and can't be changed or turned off: Some notifications, some columns in the ticket views, for example.
- Status codes are shared across different groups and/or products. So if you need a "Pending Approval" status for your Changes, you will have it in Incidents, too.