Freshdesk Reviews

Freshdesk is an integrated tool that provides an omnichannel option to its users. Along with its automation functionality, the solution has a marketplace where they offer multiple solutions. So, asset management in the solution is one such area that provides its users with the capacity to maintain the database of their organization.

Omnichannel is one of the most valuable features of the solution. It also has certain built-in features similar to the ones provided by ManageEngine. So, it is now highly configurable in terms of workflow.

Asset management and branding are two areas in the solution that have scope for improvement. Branding is one major area that needs to improve because previously, when we recommended Freshdesk to one of our customers, he stated that he hadn't heard of the solution before telling us that he would like to opt for ManageEngine. So, he told us that Freshdesk was not a well-known brand. Even though we told him that it's equally functional, somehow, he wasn't inclined towards it.

The solution's asset management needs to improve since it does not have an automated asset discovery feature, making it not a very sound tool. Also, Freshdesk depends on a third party for integration. In short, the integrations within the solution should be made available to its users as a default feature.

I have experience with Freshdesk. Our company is a reseller of Freshdesk. It has been almost a year since we have been working with Freshdesk. Freshdesk's growth and enterprise plans are the versions with which I have worked.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate it a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate it an eight out of ten.

The technical capabilities of the support team are good. However, they rely heavily on their partners to fill their knowledge or expertise gaps. I rate the technical support team a seven out of ten.

Since the solution's initial setup was straightforward, I rate it an eight out of ten. It can be considered complex only when the workflow is complex. Freshdesk's deployment is done on the cloud.

The solution's initial setup phase takes around three to four days, while the configuration process may take some time, maybe around three to four weeks.

In our company, we evaluated both Freshdesk and Freshservice.

I would advise those considering the solution that it is both good and user-friendly. It is not a bulky or complex application, and its compatibility with different operating systems and hardware makes it an efficient solution. This compliance also adds to its effectiveness and is a significant advantage. Freshdesk needs to focus on branding, providing a user-friendly experience, and opting for an aggressive pricing model. Owing to the functionality and configurable nature of the solution, along with the fact that since it is a marketplace where I can plug in multiple addons, making the tool robust enough to fit into many organizations, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We are using the product for communication with the clients. We use it for opening tickets and communicating.

It is very easy to make reports. There are a lot of tags on every ticket. As a supervisor or as a head of a certain department, you can easily make reports for every agent on your team. 

The solution is stable.

It's scalable and is able to handle big workloads. 

Having so many tags makes everyday work a lot more complicated, and a lot more time-consuming.

If I'm going to contact a client, then I have to put all of these tags, and that ticket is closed as the ticket has been sent. It's similar to when you send an email. That ticket has now been sent and therefore it's closed. If the client responds, the ticket will come back as open. However, if we send a ticket to a different department, let's say, then we have to put the ticket on as open to the different department and I'm not going to be able to see it unless the other department sends it and replies, and puts it back on my name as open. The ticketing feature is a bit complicated. 

In order to send a simple email to a client, I need three minutes. And due to the fact that we send a lot of emails, that amount of time required is time-consuming for us.

Freshdesk has a feature called Freshchat. I would like to have translation services inside the chat. We get a lot of clients from different countries speaking different languages.

I've used the solution for five to six months.

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Its performance is reliable.

The product is scalable. We handle quite sizable workloads and it is able to work well regardless.

While we have 100 users, not everyone uses this solution. We use it for customer support, finance, the operations department, and the partner's department, which may be up to 15 people. We do use it on a daily basis. We do not plan to increase usage until we hire more people. 

Prior to this solution, we were using Zendesk. 

For us, the difference is you can see all of the tickets in Zendesk. That's really important, as you can also see tickets from a different department. You can see how a certain specific case is being handled. Is it being handled well? What are the updates? 

With Freshdesk, the tags are really time-consuming. You have to check with different departments and ask "Hey, have you checked this ticket, this ticket number?" You have to save the ticket number so you will be able to actually ask them. 

I'm not responsible for the setup. That said, it's my understanding that we did have a couple of issues when it comes to workflow. For example, certain tickets should come to a certain department, and we have issues with that. 

The company handled the initial setup in-house. 

I'm not familiar with the pricing aspect of the product.

I would recommend Zendesk. I prefer Zendesk and would recommend it to everyone. Freshdesk I do not like as much. It's much more time-consuming. It's much more complicated. If you have a big workload, then that can get in the way of actually getting work done.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. We've gotten used to it, however, it's too time-consuming. Choosing this solution was a management decision. It's not ours. It's not an ideal ticketing system.

We have many regional locations and one central HR team sitting in our head office. They receive a large number of queries from staff via email across a broad range of confidential topics. Using Freshdesk, we have been able to effectively manage both internal and external communication to this team using IDs and HRMS data. For example, once a staff member has left the company, their IDs are deactivated and their access to confidential information is prevented. 

We have used Freshdesk to group and assign similar queries to particular team members who are available. This has ensured that no one is receiving unnecessary emails. We have also been able to ensure that if a query has received no response for a certain period of time, that it is passed to the next available team member. Our teams are able to engage using the app which is easy and doesn't require them to log into their email. 

Freshdesk has allowed us to measure and track the response and resolution time of tickets which has been reduced from seven to eight hours down to 30 minutes to one hour. This information is valuable for board meetings. 

The easy integration, open APIs, and their overall product, which can be integrated with in-house applications have been valuable. We have also been able to connect and integrate our social media accounts into our in-house ERP system. 

Using Freshservice, our agents are able to see the full communication history with a customer in each ticket. This provides context for every agent, even in instances where we have new agents join the team. The solution also allows for the grouping of communication by employee ID which has been useful. 

This solution allows us to auto-assign and close tickets if there's no response within 48 hours. We can upload separate holiday calendars and time zones for India, Europe, the UK, or regions that update times stamps for customer communication based on these different times.

Freshdesk releases new features every few months based on the needs of their customers or the market.

Finally, very little code is required to make changes to the system.

For integrations, we need to write code that communicates with their system in order to enable certain functionality in the system. This is a lot of work for their customers. For example, when we implemented Freshdesk, my team needed to write coding for four or five API integrations. The need to write this code also caused some difficulty as we write code on a different platform. Minimizing code for all integrations would make a big difference.   

We would like to give access to Freshdesk for contract employees but this requires an email ID, which these employees do not have. Logging into Freshdesk is based on email login only. A year ago, we requested a different way for such employees to log in such as a mobile-based login but this is not yet possible. 

I have used this solution for three years. 

In three to four years, we have only had one incident in which emails were blocked which stopped our ticketing system from working. This impacted us for two to three days. Apart from this, we have not had any other severe issues. 

In total, we have 300 agents using Freshdesk across seven different teams. As this is a SaaS-based solution, it is easy to scale your use of the solution. 

There is no direct contact number to reach a designated person. We need to call their tech support and deal with a different person each time. We usually need to reiterate what our issues are or write an email and the support phone numbers are UK numbers.

I have previously used Zendesk.

The initial setup is not complex. The user manual and initial demo given by the sales team of Freshdesk is good. Our non-technical team members were able to understand how it works within one to three weeks.

The initial setup took around two to three weeks. What took the most time was writing the rules to manage the ticketing system. 

We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only. 

Before implementing Freshdesk, I would recommend understanding exactly which parts of the system you will need. You will need to know whether you will use the ticketing system only or need the whole management system including tracking all interactions, social media engagement, and the many other features Freshdesk has. It is important to first understand all of your own requirements. 

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

I've implemented it at multiple companies. Currently, our service bot lives in there, and it is able to answer questions for people. 

We have the Enterprise plan and the latest version. They're always on the latest. I don't even know how I would prevent that.

It is a little bit of a sore subject. We were with them because of some of what they had tried to implement in it, but it wasn't the appropriate solution.

In some ways, it has improved the way our organization functions, but anything would do that because we only had Outlook. If you're on the phone for a million minutes a month, you're getting a lot of emails too. For managing that, anything is an improvement from just working through emails. People were working just on distribution lists. It was not even a group email; they had just distribution lists with 50 agents on them. That's impossible.

I met one of their customers at a conference, and they love it for their customer support. That's because their support cases are not like, "Hey, I need to know where everything is in this logistics space right now." Their use case was like, "Hey, I don't like these pants. Can I return them please?" It is a very different use case than we had. So, for retail operations and anything like that, it is a perfect solution.

When it is the appropriate solution, Freshdesk is fantastic. It is a fantastic product for basic customer support use cases, but trying to stretch it, at least a year ago, was just so time-consuming and frustrating. If you have the right use case for it, it is the perfect solution.

Their knowledge base is phenomenal. The way that it learns from our users is awesome, and responses are really awesome as well. It does a pretty good job of picking up what's needed. The knowledge bases are great.

Its simplicity is valuable. It is straightforward and very easy for people. When we brought it in and moved from Outlook to ticketing, the concern was that a lot of our teams are older folks. They've been doing the same job for 15, 20 years, and they're not as likely to be as happy about the change. It was interesting to me that the older folks loved it and caught on to it so fast. The old timers, the people who've been there and doing their job, loved it. They never wanted to go to anything else. They absolutely loved it. The younger folks were like, "I wish it did more." When the younger people came into it and they realized that they could actually configure their own custom workflows for their stuff, they loved that. It was a lesson learned for me on what to train them on and what to give them access to because there are really good ways to set it up where it is not putting the system at risk.

If Freshdesk had forms in it so that I could go to the portal and fill out a service request, that would improve it immensely and make it more valuable for enterprise customers, but that's not a current functionality. You can't have a certain catalog of any type. You can't be like, "Hey, I want to just go submit a ticket," and then type in. You can't prompt them to ask anything. It is just a blank form.

Their sales team all the time tries to convince you that this is the only product that they have. I don't know why. I really don't get it. I spent a year just being like, "No, we shouldn't be in Freshdesk for this." They were telling my bosses that we should be, and I was like, "I'm telling you that's incorrect. Why are you telling my boss that? You don't even work here?" You don't even go here. What are you doing? They don't even check your circumstances. I am a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. I gave them all of our process maps and everything, and they didn't even read over them. They just kept trying to put us into Freshdesk when Freshservice was a better fit because all we do is move around trucks, trailers, and drive. That's what we do all day long. I would like to know how we would do that without asset management or a portal with forums. They were just constantly trying to get us to implement break fix after break fix after break fix instead of putting us on the right product in the first place. It wasted a year's time and money.

We are using it because the bot can't live in Freshservice. The bot has to live in Freshdesk. I wish the bot could live in Freshservice or be its own thing. If it was its own thing, it would be much easier, but you have to go into Freshdesk and go into the bot builder. It is weird. 

It is scalable if your use case is appropriate for it. We have some people who are using it, but they're using just a bunch of workarounds in it. Currently, there are only 200 people using it in Operations. So, there is a team that is still using it. It is technically working, but they are moving away from it.

They were using Outlook. Outlook is really good for emails to and from, but Outlook is not a ticketing system. You can't really compare the two. They just didn't have a solution before.

They had a VP set it up, at which point I was hired to come in and fix it. They just didn't know what the consequences were of, for example, letting every single manager build the enterprise workflow that applied to everybody. So, it was constantly breaking. It just needed going in and just saying, "Hey, you don't need to go do that anymore. We can simplify this." That had to do with the wrong use case.

It is a customer support tool. If you try to do enterprise support or logistics in it, there could be issues. All of my use cases have been B2B, and I've had it work really well. It did work really well at a smaller company with a smaller team where our account managers used it. That worked really well, but recently, I have been just a little bit removed from it. I'm now working on a deployment of it. So, we'll see how that goes in a couple of weeks or months.

In a straightforward use case, one person is fine for deployment. In a not straightforward use case, you need three people or maybe more because it is a lot of custom development.

We use a combination of Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshchat. We use the whole suite. Weirdly enough, we pay more for Freshdesk than we do for Freshservice. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing.

You can get different bundles, and you can always move to different plans that are standard. Freshservice can go anywhere from $19 up to $120 per agent, per month. There is such a wide range, and it is very customizable to your needs.

It was done before my time.

I would advise looking into the suite of products and using the right tool for your job because they all talk to each other really well. They're well built out. There are really good tools for different work functions. So, look into what a product gets used for. For your HR team, it is Freshteam. That's what it's for. So, all of those things exist, and they have really good purpose-built tools to build out a full suite, but trying to just configure something into something that it is not meant for is not a great idea. Just use the product that's meant for your function, and you'll have a much better time. Their sales team just wants to sell Freshdesk, and I don't know why.

It is hard to rate it in a use case where they just kept saying, "No, you need to use this." And we're like, "Why? I don't want to." And they go, "Yes, you should." If somebody is vetting it for customer service, which is what it is for, then I'd rate it high, but if it is not being used for its intended purpose, then it is a very low score. 

It wasn't the right use case at my current company, but when I implemented it at another company, it worked great there. I loved working with it. I really enjoyed the product. If you're looking at a customer support function, it is great, but if you're trying to solve problems and use assets and do these other things, then it is not great. 

Overall, I would rate it a six out of ten. It is a great product when used correctly.

We are using it for IT support, desktop support, and any issues with any of our applications. We use it pretty extensively. It is the portal that we use for any requests, work being done, questions, bug fixes, and third-party software bug fixes. We even use it for tracking small projects.

It is a SaaS solution, so we have its current version.

We had over-customized HEAT to the point where it was just not very useful for a company of our size. Getting Freshdesk was like a breath of fresh air because it was simple to use. It required zero or negligible training effort on the part of my team. We just started creating tickets. We integrated it with our email so that we can auto-generate tickets. It wasn't too bad as a technical challenge, and it just worked.

Its simplicity is most valuable. It is easy and simple, and it requires negligible training effort. I don't spend all my time goofing around trying to find stuff in the ticketing system.

We have many cases where a ticket comes in, and it ends up having multiple team members working on it. It would be really nice to be able to assign a single ticket to multiple people, rather than having to create the parent-child hierarchy that they have set up. It generates a proliferation of tickets that I really don't want to have. Having to jump from a parent to one child and then to another child makes it harder for me to be able to see the entire case from end to end. A simple example is our new hire process or our termination process. We have people who leave. We also have people who come on board. We have got multiple people participating and doing things related to the leaving or onboarding process. Currently, I have to go to different tickets to be able to see whether all tasks are really done or not. If I could assign lots of people to one ticket, it would be really nice.

I have been using this solution for a year and a half.

We might've had one outage a long time ago. It was down for a fairly brief time. Other than that, it has been solid.

We don't have a huge company, so it is kind of hard to tell, but certainly, I've had zero problems with performance and being able to look at lots of tickets versus a small set of tickets. It should be fine in terms of scalability.

We have eight people in IT who are actively using it. Overall, we have 135 people in the company. They're the ones submitting tickets to us by email or by calling in, and then we create the ticket manually.

In terms of usage, I don't see it going outside of IT to the rest of the company. We use it for basically 100% of our IT work. We're pretty all in.

They were decent. I was CC'd on a couple of emails when we were setting it up initially. There was some stuff about the email integration that was probably the hardest thing we did, and we needed a little bit of technical help on that, and they were timely. We didn't have 14 different back-and-forth exchanges where you felt like they're just answering from a book rather than really listening to the problem that you have and trying to address it.

We were using HEAT. We switched because of the frustration amongst the whole team about how complex our system was. We had over-customized HEAT to the point where it was just not very useful for a company of our size. We needed something easier.

I didn't do it. It was someone from my team. He did it in three or four days in the midst of everything else he was doing. It was simple. You just add in our users. He was able to import the names of everybody from the active directory, so we got all the employees there.

We had to sit down and have a meeting to decide the lists, categories, and groupings, and then he just did it. A couple of days later, I started to use it in the pilot form, and we cut over to it fast.

We implemented it ourselves. You don't need to have anybody else do it.

In terms of maintenance, the only thing that we have to do to maintain it is just to add a new call type or something like that, but any of us can do that. It is very intuitive.

We have absolutely seen an ROI.

It was definitely not expensive. It was two grand or maybe three grand total for a year.

It has just straight and simple standard licensing fees. There is no additional fee.

If somebody is implementing a new IT service desk ticketing system, they should definitely look at Freshdesk. If they just want a lean and mean system, it is really a great option. If you need a lot of ITIL complexity and have a very large team, and there is a lot of back-and-forth with tickets and heavy approval process and stuff, it may not be suitable. We have only one of their products. They may have other products that bolt onto it and add that in. We are using the simple version, and it doesn't necessarily have all those controls, but in our case, we didn't need all that.

I would rate Freshdesk a nine out of ten. I am very happy with it.

We are a health insurance company that uses the solution to communicate with our customers through chat, as well as health providers and other prospects. We use it according to teams; the customer success team is divided into three teams: those who attend to voice only, those who attend to emails only, and those who attend to chats only.

For every request that comes in via any of these channels, the agents in these channels take charge there.

We currently don't use calls for Freshworks because of our IT provider in Nigeria. However, we use email and chat, and they both work well. Some new features that they recently released will give the chat, Freshchat, more functionality than Freshdesk. We were using Freshdesk before, but we are right now on Freshchat.

The UI is also easy to use.

Currently, they have Freshchat as the central platform. But for email, I would still like to have assistance around how our agents can assist our customers, such as on-the-go translation; as we are expanding to the emerging market, we would not be able to hire and pay customer support agents in those areas immediately, so we won't be able to attend to their conversation if we do not speak the same language. That is something similar platforms have, which I would like to have included in Freshdesk.

We have been using Freshdesk for over three years.

I rate Freshdesk's stability as eight out of ten. There is room for improvement with the chatbots.

It is scalable. We currently have about 16,000 chatbot sessions monthly, which keeps growing every month.

Support is very knowledgeable, so they know their products very well. They can almost always resolve your problem immediately.

The initial setup was relatively easy.

One of the issues we are looking into is the cost. As we keep on expanding, it means that we will need more licenses. Currently, that would blow our budget. That's the main concern right now because the cost is very expensive.

Aside from the license, we have chatbot conversation costs.

One should go for the solution if cost is not a problem or if they will not expand to major markets and require many licenses. There is still room for improvement, but the UI is easy to use, compared to some other platforms. I rate Freshdesk a seven out of ten.

It's a simple application for trouble tickets.

The solution is very easy to configure. It will not take a lot of time to configure.

It's a product that is very easy to use and very user-friendly. 

It's free of charge for us. For our scale of business, it's very important. We don't have a lot of tickets. Right now, we are in a big development stage with our business. 

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is good.

While it's good for a small number of tickets, definitely in the future, we will require something more powerful.

I would prefer to have a lot more functionality. There's a bit of a trade-off between the price and the functionality. When we do choose the new solution, we will have costs go up. 

I've been using the solution in this company for about a year. 

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution can scale. 

We have 100 users on the product currently.

As we grow and get more tickets, however, we likely will need a bigger product and will move away from this one. 

The solution has been great. We haven't needed technical support. 

As a cloud-based solution, the initial setup is very easy and very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

For us, the solution is free to use. We do not need to pay for something bigger. If we want more functionality, it will cost us more. 

We did look at other solutions, however, I cannot recall their names. We chose this solution as it was free to use and fit our requirements. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I'm pretty happy with its capabilities. 

While it does depend on the company's requirements, I would recommend this product to other organizations. 

It is mainly used for customer support via email or chat.

I am able to use more analytics to track the performance. I also noticed that the overall speed of the platform is improved compared to our last CRM tool provider.

The feature that I have found most valuable is the way that it connects to various folders especially because we use it as a CRM tool. We can connect it with our phones and our chat, and also with the API and have it as an email service. Freshdesk just makes our life easier.

We were previously using OTRS on the on-premise server and there was limited space for us. With Freshdesk, we don't have to worry about that because they actually have a cloud version where you can store more information. Also, the analytics of Freshdesk, for me as a manager, make my life easier tracking the performance of the customer support team.

There are some features I would like to improve. For example, I would like to be able to change the subject in emails for ourselves. We use a lot of third parties. So if we want to handle an email from one of our suppliers or one of our clients, we have to have two tickets, and it would be easier if we could only have one ticket to handle everything. With Freshdesk, that's very difficult because we can't change subjects. So, if we could have the option to do that, it would improve our speed and the overall cleanliness of the CRM.

I have been using Freshdesk for about a year and a half.

The stability is fairly good. We have had some small issues with system crashing but it was resolved quickly by the Freshdesk support.

We had one issue that we had to escalate to the technical support. It crashed and we had to have their help to fix it. Their support wasn't the best, it took a little bit for the person to understand what I was trying to say. And they seem to have a lot of layers between the customer support and their tech team. But once it reached the tech team, they were very fast to solve it.

The initial setup was fairly simple. We had about a month of trial and then it was fairly simple when we launched. We had an onboarding person that gave us overall training for it, and then they have the Freshdesk Academy, where they have training videos on their platform that I could use. It would just direct my team to see it as well, so it's fairly simple. It didn't take too long.

There were five people involved and it took about a month and a half.

I think the pricing is fair. I don't think it's cheap, but I also don't think it's too expensive. It was one of the best values for your money that we found when we were checking the possibilities of substituting the old CRM tool.

I think there is also a monthly fee, and if we want to have more features, we would have to also scale up the license.

We switched to Freshdesk to have the possibility of having everything on the cloud. We used to have a physical server in our office and it just didn't make sense anymore.

My advice to anyone thinking about Freshdesk is to test it a lot. There are some features that are very different from other tools. And make sure that you understand everything that you need. Also to talk with the sales personnel at Freshdesk to understand what they can offer. In our case, there were a couple of things that we had to adapt because I wasn't very clear with our needs on the onboard process. So, it was more of my fault than theirs but then we had to adapt it because Freshdesk just didn't have some options. For example, with their ticketing process.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Freshdesk about a seven.