Freshdesk

Pluspunten

Freshdesk has been a breeze to set up and use effectively. My team loves how easy it is to quickly work through tickets. We heavily use Trello and their integration is top tier.

When issues do come up, the support team is always available to answer my questions. Even when it doesn't support a particular workflow, I've always been given excellent suggestions to work around its limitations.

Minpunten

Many integrations are v1 products that were built years ago and never updated. Salesforce integration needs a lot of work. We had to disable it because it was using too many API calls.

Pluspunten

Learning the software was quite easy for the agents as well which is a huge advantage. This is partially because of their support team as we have always been able to contact then and ask any type of questions regarding their software. The CS Team is always helpful and pretty professional. They did not forger us even after we started using their software (which happens with many companies).

Ticket handling is really efficient and the agent portal has a nice design from a practical viewpoint as well. We like canned responses. A nice little feature is to add support page article links / contents to reply messages just like canned responses. Another huge advantage is the knowledge base / support page which is highly customizable. In general we like ticket automation rules as well and it helped to solve some of our special requests.

Minpunten

At this point we are not able to use our own SSL and we cannot afford to have extra expenses to rent an SSL from Freshdesk (probably third party) or buy their top plan to have their SSL. This is a good indicator that some essential functions are only available if you are using their top plan. It is good that you are able to customize your portal URL, but if you do you are not going to have HTTPS until you pay more. This makes this whole function questionable. I am hoping the development team will solve this soon.
Apparently there are some minor function that we have to solve with a workaround but it is straightforward available for competition.

Pluspunten

I love the analytics and history log in Freshdesk. Freshdesk tracks agents' productivity through out the day and breaks up this information by the hour. We can also look up who has resolved the most tickets or who sends out immediate responses. All of this information is especially helpful when assigning new tickets because we can see a history of our most efficient employees. Previous tickets can be easily searched by key words, agent, or time frame. When multiple people are working on one project, it really helps to decipher who did what and when!

Minpunten

One thing that I believe can be improved is having a group option to send out an email. It's not common when we have to include multiple people on a ticket but when we do, we have to cc them in the very beginning as opposed to adding "Group A". -- The information still gets everyone on the same page, however it is an additional step on the agent's end.

Pluspunten

I love the Freshdesk simplicity of setting up a help desk and knowledgebase with very little friction or custom coding. Once you updated the layout with your brand assets, it's pretty much ready to go out-of-the-box. They have a generous free tier, and can imagine the paid plans are worth upgrading if your needs are more demanding. We've looked into lots of other suites and building our own support desk, but......why?

Minpunten

We don't like the narrow width of the window when browsing support articles in desktop view, and the fonts could be larger be default for accessibility - though fonts can definitely be enlarged with a bit of manual tweaking to each article. Not many cons frankly!

Pluspunten

Modern, Elegant, Google Integrated, Nice iOS & Android Apps, Intuitive. Lots of useful features. (Merging tickets, Splitting tickets, Tags for tickets, KB Articles, Teams, Chat, etc) Nifty videos even at the end of the year. Service up-time is great (I don't think we've ever noticed an outage). Knowledge base Articles are great.

Minpunten

Plans & pricing are a bit annoying. You have to pick from useful features or unnecessary cost for things that should be included without an up charge to a higher plan.

Sales, Support, Development, Billing, basically EVERYTHING, is in India, which isn't by itself bad, and for Freshdesk's part, it's much better than most India based support... But, if you open a ticket about billing, it can be months (literally months) before your issue is resolved.

There are some design flaws with the product, and while you're told changes will be considered, they seldom are - FreshDesk has their own agenda, and your feedback isn't all that important in the development. It would be nice to see the company track, implement, and report back when feedback is actually taken, and this would be nice if it was done in a timely manner, but that doesn't happen.

Some features are a bit confusing to set up and have silly names (Observer & Dispatcher) -- an outside has no idea what those features do, and even after using FreshDesk for a years, it's still a bit opaque.

The concept of ticket fields vs user fields can be a bit annoying.

There are little refinements that are lacking (email alerts that are not as good as they should be, etc).