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Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support suite that helps companies handle assist. Created by Freshworks, this easy-to-use help desk solution has a variety of recent instruments and options. It combines assist tickets from e-mail, social media, and cellphone into one workspace, letting groups deal with buyer inquiries effectively.
With Freshdesk, you’ll be able to automate duties, handle ticket workflows, and collaborate with the remainder of your crew. The platform helps prioritize, categorize, and assign tickets whereas avoiding duplicate efforts. Options like duplicate ticket alerts improve teamwork. You additionally get self-service choices like data bases, group boards, and customizable buyer portals. These sources let prospects discover options on their very own, decreasing ticket quantity.
Freshdesk fits companies of all sizes, from freelancers to massive enterprises. IT management, HR admins, and assist groups profit from its easy interface and scalable design. The platform affords versatile pricing, together with a free plan, making it accessible for any funds. Whether or not you handle a couple of assist emails or international service operations, Freshdesk adapts to your wants.
Freshdesk: Highlights
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Be aware: Freshdesk is a buyer assist answer that is a part of a collection of Freshworks merchandise with completely different focuses — together with Freshmarketer for advertising, Freshsales for gross sales administration, and Freshservice for IT assist.
Freshdesk: Plans and pricing
Freshdesk has a versatile pricing construction with a number of tiers for all enterprise sizes, from small startups to massive enterprises. The platform makes use of a per-agent-per-month mannequin with 4 fundamental plans: Free, Progress, Professional, and Enterprise. The Free plan helps as much as 10 brokers and consists of fundamental options like e-mail ticketing, social ticketing, a data base, and crew collaboration instruments. This plan is ideal for small groups beginning with buyer assist.
For companies needing superior options, the Progress plan prices $15 per agent month-to-month when billed yearly ($18 month-to-month). It provides automation, collision detection, SLA administration, and buyer satisfaction surveys.
As assist wants develop, the Professional plan affords a complete answer at $49 per agent month-to-month with annual billing ($59 month-to-month). It consists of options like a number of time zones, customized roles, customized reviews and dashboards, SLA administration, and multilingual data bases.
For giant organizations, the Enterprise plan is obtainable at $79 per agent month-to-month with annual billing ($95 month-to-month). This plan consists of premium options like skill-based ticket task, sandbox environments, agent shifts, customized roles, and IP whitelisting for higher safety. Freshdesk additionally has an AI-enhanced model of the Professional plan at $78 per agent month-to-month (billed yearly) that gives productivity-boosting AI options.
For omnichannel assist, Freshdesk has a separate product line known as Freshdesk Omni. The Progress tier begins at $29 per agent month-to-month (billed yearly) or $35 month-to-month, integrating net, e-mail, SMS, and messaging channels with clever chatbots out there as an add-on.
The Professional Omni plan prices $69 per agent month-to-month (billed yearly) or $83 month-to-month. It provides multilingual assist, customized reporting, superior ticketing instruments, and customizable portals. The Enterprise Omni plan, priced at $109 per agent month-to-month (yearly) or $131 month-to-month, gives essentially the most complete omnichannel answer.
Freshdesk affords a 14-day free trial throughout all its plans. This permits companies to discover the platform without having a bank card upfront. The trial provides full entry to all options within the Enterprise plan, together with data base approval workflows, customized roles, and customized metrics. In the course of the trial, customers can invite as much as two crew members to affix, which helps in evaluating the platform’s match for his or her group. Freshworks additionally affords free onboarding help all through the trial interval to boost person expertise.
Freshdesk: Options
Freshdesk affords an entire set of instruments for customer support that streamline assist throughout numerous channels. It combines simple ticket administration, sturdy automation, and AI assist to assist companies ship nice buyer experiences.
The options transcend fundamental ticketing. Freshdesk consists of superior workflow automation, crew collaboration, and self-service choices. These instruments assist cut back decision instances and enhance buyer satisfaction. With versatile pricing, from a free tier to enterprise plans, companies can discover options that match their wants and develop as they do.
Shared inbox administration
Freshdesk turns all incoming buyer emails into trackable tickets. These tickets may be categorized, prioritized, and assigned simply. In contrast to fundamental shared inboxes that may get messy, Freshdesk’s system prevents task confusion and stops duplicate efforts with its collision detection characteristic.
The platform helps groups transfer previous color-coded emails by utilizing a ticketing system that retains context clear all through the client journey. By centralizing all messages in a single house, assist brokers can entry buyer historical past, observe replies, and collaborate easily. This results in faster resolutions and happier prospects.
Omnichannel buyer assist
Freshdesk’s omnichannel options let companies provide constant service throughout e-mail, cellphone, chat, social media, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp Business from one unified interface. It retains the context from every interplay, permitting brokers to keep up continuity, irrespective of the channel a buyer makes use of.
Furthermore, the omniroute characteristic neatly directs inquiries to the very best brokers based mostly on their workload and experience. Help groups can meet prospects wherever they’re of their journey whereas preserving observe of earlier interactions.
AI-powered copilot
Freshdesk’s AI Copilot, often called Freddy, serves as a sensible assistant for assist brokers. In contrast to conventional chatbots, Freddy AI evaluations incoming tickets, makes strategies, and automates routine duties whereas preserving people concerned. This teamwork mixes AI effectivity with human empathy and judgment for higher buyer experiences.
The AI Copilot makes use of generative AI, pure language processing (NLP), and machine studying to know buyer queries, draft responses, and supply real-time, context-aware assist. As brokers work together with prospects, Freddy fetches related options, suggests subsequent steps, and even manages post-interaction duties like creating summaries and updating information.
Scalable automation instruments
Freshdesk’s automation options assist companies streamline workflows and do away with repetitive duties that waste agent time. The platform’s workflow automator may be set as much as mechanically categorize and assign tickets, ship notifications, and set off actions based mostly on guidelines. These instruments develop with your small business, dealing with extra tickets without having a bigger crew.
Through the use of Freshdesk’s automation options, assist groups can concentrate on advanced points whereas routine duties are taken care of mechanically. This results in vital enhancements in response and determination instances, enhancing the general buyer expertise. Superior customers can create advanced automation guidelines that match their particular processes, making certain the platform evolves with their wants.
Streamlined collaboration
Freshdesk affords sturdy collaboration instruments that allow assist groups work collectively simply on advanced buyer points. Options like personal threads permit brokers to debate particular notes with out cluttering the principle ticket. This makes it simpler to seek the advice of with colleagues whereas preserving buyer communication clear.
The platform additionally promotes collaboration past the assist crew with integrations to different departments and exterior techniques. For instance, Freshdesk-Freshservice integration lets assist brokers talk immediately with IT groups, sharing full context on points and decreasing back-and-forth messages.
Freshdesk: Analytics
Freshdesk affords built-in reviews and evaluation instruments that can assist you always enhance the standard of your customer support. We thought the platform did a terrific job with its pre-made reviews, which provide customizable charts for assist ticket load, agent and crew productivity, and buyer satisfaction surveys. You may filter these reviews by agent, crew, or assist kind, and it’s easy to export them to a PDF.
In order for you extra detailed analytics, Freshdesk will get much more sophisticated shortly. The platform’s customized report builder permits you to drag and drop evaluation widgets onto a web page to create your individual dashboards. There are some templates to get you began, however for essentially the most half, you’ll add clean charts and tables, after which choose what information to show. You too can add photographs and textual content containers, customise the fonts and colours for every graph, and extra.
The pliability this affords is difficult to beat, particularly if you wish to create a professional-looking report for an enormous assembly. Nonetheless, the training curve is kind of steep when constructing your first few reviews, and it takes loads of time to work by way of all of the customization choices.
Freshdesk: Ease of use
We had been impressed with how easy it felt to make use of Freshdesk, particularly given the breadth of instruments included within the platform. The Help Desk, Messaging, and Contact Heart modules are neatly organized right into a left-hand menu alongside along with your contact database, reporting heart, and administrative settings.
A right-hand sidebar shows customization choices as you navigate by way of Freshdesk, so that you don’t need to take care of pop-ups or buried pages.
Whenever you first log into Freshdesk, an outline dashboard provides brokers a transparent take a look at every little thing that’s on their plates. There’s a abstract of recent, unresolved, and due right now tickets, plus a to-do listing based mostly on what duties you or crew members have been assigned. The dashboard additionally reveals the outcomes of buyer satisfaction surveys, which helps brokers preserve observe of how they’re doing.
We particularly favored the format of Freshdesk’s Help Heart, which is ready up like an e-mail inbox. A tag makes it simple to determine new assist tickets, and each ticket may be assigned a precedence degree. Plus, you’ll be able to filter all tickets in your inbox based mostly on what agent or crew they’re assigned to, what precedence degree they’ve, or when the following response is due.
Freshdesk: Safety
Freshworks, as an organization, appears to take safety very significantly. The corporate claims that its servers are hosted in “world-class information facilities which are protected by biometric locks and 24-hour surveillance”.
All Freshdesk accounts include an SSL certificate, which is enabled by default. Prospects are free to arrange their very own assist area or vainness URL. You too can arrange your individual customized SSL URL – Freshworks declare they will get this characteristic up and working in 72 hours.
If you wish to add a number of portals to your Freshdesk account, these may also use SSL authentication, although it isn’t clear from Freshwork’s Safety web page if this implies your account can assist a number of SSL certificates.
You may lock down your account nonetheless additional by establishing whitelists to solely permit connections from recognized workplace community addresses to your brokers. The whitelist may also be related to a VPN to permit co-workers to dial in remotely if obligatory.
Freshdesk additionally helps easy logins by way of SSO (Single Signal On), so staff can use your present Energetic Listing or on-line accounts like Google to authenticate themselves.
It is also pretty simple to make your information HIPPA or GDPR-compliant. Freshdesk helps creating a number of encrypted fields in types for storing private information. It is also quite simple to export or delete buyer information in response to information safety requests.
Freshworks additionally claims that each one buyer information is encrypted when at relaxation and that they use SHA-256 encoding (presumably for storing delicate information like passwords and bank card numbers).
Freshdesk: Help
Freshdesk assist pages are well-laid out and comprise all of the sections you’d anticipate for navigating such a fancy platform. We had been notably delighted to see a “Getting Began” part which incorporates widespread matters like establishing assist channels and attending to grips with the Admin part.
The ‘Neighborhood’ part permits Freshdesk customers to share “how tos” and “finest practices”. There are contributions from Freshworks employees too, similar to common posts about new options.
The small video library additionally has some glorious directions on the best way to carry out fundamental duties like changing Gmail messages to assist tickets. Freshworks even has a devoted academy the place Brokers can practice the best way to use the platform and earn certification.
If prospects run into additional difficulties, the web site does put up an e-mail tackle and get in touch with quantity. Subscribers can use these to contact Freshdesk assist at any time.
Freshdesk: The Competitors
Freshdesk isn’t the one platform centered on serving to you provide distinctive buyer assist. Zendesk and LiveAgent are two competing software program platforms that offer you instruments for ticketing, dwell chat, and cellphone assist.
We discovered Zendesk to be extraordinarily versatile. It affords greater than 1,000 apps and integrations, and consists of automation options at a less expensive value level than Freshdesk. Plus, it has an inside assist desk, which is a good instrument for bigger firms. The draw back to Zendesk is that it’s not as user-friendly as Freshdesk.
LiveAgent is extra inexpensive than Freshdesk, however we discovered that this platform doesn’t provide almost the identical depth of options. Ticketing takes a backseat to dwell chat assist inside the platform, which signifies that there are fewer reporting choices and automations for ticketing. And it additionally doesn’t provide cellphone assist in any respect.
| Header Cell – Column 0 |
Freshdesk |
Zendesk |
LiveAgent |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Ticketing? |
Sure |
Sure |
Sure (restricted) |
|
Stay chat with bots? |
Sure (restricted month-to-month bot responses) |
Sure |
Sure |
|
Help |
24-hour chat and cellphone |
24-hour cellphone, e-mail, and dwell chat |
24-hour cellphone, e-mail, and dwell chat |
|
Fundamental plan |
$12.99 a month |
$16.99 a month |
$2.99 a month |
Freshdesk: Closing verdict
Freshdesk is high-quality software program suite that may assist your organization arrange a complete buyer assist heart. It helps e-mail ticketing, dwell chat, and cellphone assist, and works throughout all of the channels your organization operates on. Plus, Freshdesk consists of automations and chatbots with its higher-tier plans.
Regardless of the massive variety of instruments and options that Freshdesk brings to the desk, we discovered the software program to be surprisingly simple to make use of. It’s nicely organized, and makes it simple to start out answering tickets and chats straight away. The one space the place we encountered friction was within the superior reporting instruments, which may be tough to grasp.
The one actual draw back to Freshdesk is its price. Options like workflow automation are expensive, so that you’ll want an costly Omnichannel subscription if you wish to add dwell chat or cellphone capabilities to your Freshdesk assist heart. Zendesk affords an analogous set of options at a considerably cheaper price, but it surely’s not as simple to make use of. So if your organization has a big sufficient funds, we’d advocate sticking with Freshdesk.