Freshdesk

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

The platform is relatively user friendly and has a sufficient number of features to work well.

Nachteile

Service is highly unreliable, and if something significant happens - don't expect Freshdesk to be available to help you. It can take 2-4 days to get a hold of someone EVEN IF YOU ARE FUNCTIONALLY SHUT DOWN.

Here was our experience: We had been using Freshdesk for 3-4 years and were relative experts on our plan. We arranged to make a change to our Freshdesk plan to switch to a multi-product platform. We upgraded to a plan costing 7x our current cost per user and requested to speak with a Success Manager to plan to the changes. It took persistence and some time to get on the phone with someone. The person we got has had relatively low product knowledge, but escalated to a very competent product engineer fairly promptly. We confirmed our plan and attempted to implement independently after business hours. We were forced to initiate a backout plan when errors and unpredictable behaviour blocked our completion. Our backout plan partially failed and customers were impacted for 3 days before we were able to get anyone to help us. We heard a myriad of responses via email as to why a phone call was not possible from, "I am not working today" to "I will give you a call next week at your convenience" and "I will have XX get a hold of you to help" - but no call, no chat, no email Q&A -- radio silence. We got the message loud and clear 'you are not that important'.

Be warned - if something go wrong, the documentation is very modest and don't necessarily expect help.

Vorteile

Clean UI. Many settings but well organized so everything is easy to find.
Extremely responsive. Tickets are generated quickly and modifications are saved instantly.

Nachteile

I can't say that I've run into something that I haven't been happy with.

Vorteile

With 5 years in business, we started seeing change in our revenues and employee behaviour in the last 2,5 years of using FRESHDESK.

We stopped for sometime thinking maybe we could continue without these tools and a huge gap opened up thus we had to go back to the tried & tested.

Nachteile

Ease of business
Friendly Interface
Work Anywhere (App or Web)