Introduction
Freshdesk, created by Freshworks, is consistently regarded as Zendesk's main direct rival. Freshdesk is constantly included in the list of Zendesk alternatives in every post. You may constantly see a lot of users switching from Zendesk to Freshdesk on review sites.
For some people, Freshdesk is the ideal Zendesk substitute.
But allow me to share this unpleasant reality:
Freshdesk isn't for everyone, just like Zendesk.
What is Freshdesk?
Freshdesk is an online, cloud-based customer service platform that offers help desk support with all the clever automation needed to complete tasks more quickly. It continues to be a popular option for companies looking to boost customer interaction and manage clients as they grow.
For customer engagement, Freshdesk offers some nifty features like:
- Help desk for all channels
- Chatbot and artificial intelligence (AI) skills for teamwork
- administration of many communication channels
- Self-service portal for customers and support staff
Freshdesk features
Support channels
- Chat support: Integrate Freshdesk and Freshchat to enable chat in the customer portal. You can then turn conversations into tickets.
- Email support: Create tickets from support emails.
- Support for phone calls: Integrate Freshcaller and Freshdesk to enable phone calls. Receive a notification each time a client calls. Missed calls become tickets.
- Support for Twitter: Add your organization's Twitter handle to Freshdesk. Tickets are presented for tweets, direct messages, and brand mentions.
- Support for Facebook: Integrate your company's Facebook page with Freshdesk so you may reply to posts and comments made by visitors. You may create tickets via direct messages, postings, or comments.
- Website assistance: Place ticket forms on your website either as a pop-up widget or by embedding them.
Productivity hacks
- Use tags to categorize tickets so agents can quickly locate the issue type.
- Dispatch: Automate support procedures and create rules based on incoming tickets.
- Automatic email notification: Email customers and agents whenever a ticket is changed.
- Pre-written responses: Make reply templates for particular circumstances and organize them into folders.
- Automate ticket allocations based on agents' current workload, expertise, or channels with a customizable help desk.
Helpdesk management
- Add private remarks for your support personnel or update customers with public notes while creating tickets.
- Activity tickets: View a ticket's history starting on the day it was made.
- Team inbox: Use a shared inbox to communicate with other team members.
- Merge tickets: Sort all of the tickets from various channels by date. Add or remove tickets from the merging as well.
- To-dos: You may add a to-do activity to the ticket itself or your dashboard. Set priorities for your job and cross each item off as it is completed.
- Using Freshconnect, you may collaborate with other team members directly inside of Freshdesk.
Self-service
- Knowledge base: To share with customers, create a self-service portal (knowledge page and FAQs). Create categories for knowledge base articles, manage their visibility, and edit the metadata.
- Email to the knowledge base: As you respond to customers, update your knowledge base. Send previous responses to the knowledge base as well.
Reporting
- Default dashboard: View indicators such as customer satisfaction, arcade, gamification, recent actions, ticket trends, and more.
- Freshdesk analytics(beta): View trends in ticket volume, group performance, agent performance, and ticket lifecycle.
Other Freshdesk features
- Assist with service level agreements (SLAs).
- Automate scenarios to resolve tickets more quickly.
- Provide DKIM settings and SSL certificates.
- Freshdesk and Freshsale integration will enable customer service CRM.
- Connect Freshrelease and Freshdesk to enable project management features.
- To handle escalations and problems, integrate Freshdesk with PagerDuty.
Freshdesk Pricing
- Sprout: No cost. Numerous agents and fundamental properties.
- Blossom: $15 per month with yearly billing. Automation, agent collision detection, SLA monitoring, business hours, and all other capabilities are included in the Sprout plan.
- Garden: $35 per month with an annual bill. Time tracking, a CSAT survey, performance reports, customized apps, and a multilingual knowledge base are all features included in the Blossom plan.
- Estate: $49 per month with yearly billing. Round-robin routing, dynamic ticket boards, portal customization, and additional features are all included in the Garden plan.
- Forest: $99 per month with yearly billing. Sandbox, audit log, agent shifts, IP whitelisting, and additional capabilities in addition to everything in the Estate plan.
Freshdesk: Pros
- Stylish and practical design.
- Easy to use.
- A customer service platform with many features.
- Automating advanced workflows.
- Integration with other Freshworks products is simple.
- Marketplace for Freshdesk with numerous connectors (Salesforce, Slack, etc.).
- The available, free plan.
- Mobile applications for iOS and Android devices.
Freshdesk: Cons
- Instagram and SMS are not integrated.
- Rules and some automation (plus, hard to configure).
- Poor dashboard (Be aware that Freshdesk Analytics is still in beta. The current dashboard only provides essential functionality.
- Support for all essential functionality is not particularly inventive compared to alternatives.
- Only the Estate and Forest plans provide dashboards and analytics.
Conclusion
When it comes to customer relationship management, every organization has its own set of criteria. Small firms lack the financial resources to purchase expensive CRM software. People also look for some distinctive qualities that might be present in various CRM programs.
Therefore, it is essential to be aware of the accessible market choices. Unquestionably, Freshdesk is a fantastic CRM solution but has certain shortcomings. These have incredible characteristics and are available to small and large business houses.
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