Ultimate Guide For Freshdesk: Pro, Cons and Alternatives

Freshdesk: what is it?

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service platform offering assistance desk support alongside clever automation to speed up processes. It's a go-to option for companies that want to keep their customers engaged and organized even as they expand.

For client interaction, Freshdesk offers some handy tools, such as

1. Support Center That Works Across All Channels
2. Collective effort
3. Intelligent machines (AI) and conversational interfaces (chatbots)
4. Controlling interactions across multiple channels
5. Help desk ticketing system enabling both staff and consumers to use independently

Advantages of Freshdesk

The many functions offered by Freshdesk are divided into the following six categories:

1. Methods of Assistance

1. Integrating Freshdesk with Freshchat provides live chat support for your client portal. Then, you can turn those discussions into tickets for further investigation.
2. Convert emails for email support into tickets for easier tracking.
3. Integrating Freshdesk and Freshcaller provides phone help. Listen for incoming calls and respond quickly. The system records missed calls as tickets.
4. Get Freshdesk's Twitter support by linking your company's account with the social media platform. Tickets are shown in tweets, direct messages, and brand mentions.
5. Support for Facebook allows you to manage your company's page directly from Freshdesk, making it easier to reply to your customers' posts and comments. Tickets can be created from private communications, public posts, and public statements.
6. There is built-in help for websites, so you may add ticket forms as a floating widget or an embedded form.

2. Shortcuts to more efficiency

1. Tickets can be categorized using tags, allowing agents to locate the correct issue to resolve quickly.
2. Automate your support processes by setting up rules for receiving tickets with Dispatch.
3. Send out emails to clients and staff members automatically whenever there is an activity in a ticket.
4. Canned responses: make folders with pre-written responses for various scenarios.
5. Adjustable support center that can distribute tickets mechanically based on staff availability, expertise, and communication methods.

3. Helpdesk Management

Two types of notes can be added to a ticket: private notes for the support team and public remarks for the consumers.

1. See what has happened to a ticket since it was first created through activities on a ticket.
2. A shared mailbox for the team allows for accessible communication and collaboration among members.
3. Tickets from all channels should be merged and sorted by time. Modify the merging by adding or removing tickets.
4. Assign a to-do task inside the ticket itself or on your dashboard. Organize your tasks by importance and tick them off when you complete them.
5. Collaborate with your team in real-time within Freshdesk by utilizing Freshconnect.

4. Self-service

1. Information repository helps you publish a frequently asked questions website and knowledge base for patrons to use independently. Organize the articles in your knowledge base, set their visibility, and modify their metadata.
2. Sending an email to a knowledge base is a great way to keep the database up-to-date while also helping customers. Remember to add those old responses to the database of knowledge.

5. Reporting

1. You may check ticket tendencies, recent actions, an arcade, gamification, community forums, customer happiness, and more on the default dashboard.
2. View distribution of performance, group performance, agent performance, ticket volume trends, and the ticket lifecycle using Freshdesk analytics (beta).

6. Complementary Freshdesk Functions

1. Help Maintain SLAs (SLAs).
2. Automate common scenarios to reduce response times for support requests.
3. Facilitate the installation of SSL certificates and the setting of DKIM.
4. Create a customer service CRM by connecting Freshsale with Freshdesk.
5. Add in project management features by connecting Freshrelease to Freshdesk.
6. Bring Freshdesk and PagerDuty together for streamlined incident and escalation management.
7. Pricing for Freshdesk

Freshdesk Pricing Tiers

Sprout. You can have as many agents as you like, and access to the essentials is free.

Blossom is $15.00 per month, charged yearly. Includes everything in the Sprout plan, such as automation, agent collision detection, SLA management, extended business hours, and more.

The Garden costs $35 per month. Time monitoring, a customer satisfaction survey, performance reports, an in-house app, and a multilingual knowledge base are some of the extras included in the Blossom plan.

Estates is taxed annually at $49.50. Round-robin routing, interactive ticket forums, portal personalization, and more are all part of the expanded feature set with the Garden plan.

The rate for the Forest is $99 per month, with billing done once a year. Full access to the Estate plan's tools, a sandbox, audit log, agent shifts, IP whitelisting, and more.

Additional modules such as Freddy Ultimate, Self-service, and Field Service Management are available for purchase.

Pros and Cons of using Freshdesk

Pros

1. The interface is sleek and simple.
2. The simplicity of use.
3. Quite the customer service hub, packed with features.
4. Automation of complex processes to increase efficiency.
5. Simple to combine with existing Freshworks tools.
6. Numerous add-ons are available in the Freshdesk market (Salesforce, Slack, etc.).
7. The readily available, cost-free option.
8. Apps for smartphones and tablets, specifically Android and iOS.

Cons

1. Unfortunately, connecting your Instagram account with text messages is impossible.
2. Minimal rules and automated processes (plus, hard to configure).
3. Bad control panel (Note: Freshdesk Analytics is in the beta version. The current dashboard offers fundamental features only).
4. All required features are available; however, more must be done to distinguish it from the competition.
5. Only the Estate and Forest plans can access the dashboards and analytics features.

Some alternatives to Freshdesk There's no disputing that Freshdesk has the potential to be a useful tool for some companies, but it's not the right fit for everyone. Although it may seem good, the app's abundance of functions is a major drawback. However, most groups rely on only a small subset of traits; the rest is unnecessary noise.

So, following suit, here are some great alternatives to Freshdesk.

1. Help Scout.
2. Keeping.
3. ProProfs.
4. Zoho Desk.
5. Zendesk.
6. Intercom.
7. HubSpot Service Hub.

Suggested Reading: 

Definitive Guide to choose between BotPenguin and Freshdesk

Conclusion

Choosing the best help desk software usually boils down to the finer points. If your company is considering growing into a full-fledged call center, Freshdesk may be a good fit.

However, you might conduct operations exclusively via online channels like social media, email, and chat. Whatever the case, it's important to consider your company's requirements and the resources at your disposal when searching for a remedy.

Almost all companies nowadays provide free trials or basic plans, so you can try out different options and find the one that works best for you.