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The importance of customer support is widely known and growing in recent years. Freshdesk is one of the most popular choices when it comes to comprehensive customer service and help desk software solutions that can be used by teams of all sizes.
It's designed to be intuitive and easy to use, so even those who are new to customer service software can quickly become productive with Freshdesk. It also offers a range of features designed to make it easier for teams to track their customers’ requests, create tickets, respond efficiently, provide self-service options, and more.
In this blog post, I share with you why we believe Freshdesk can help you streamline your customer support and efficiently help your customers and customer support teams succeed.
What is Freshdesk?
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software developed by Freshworks in 2010 that assists companies in providing better customer support. It has a user-friendly design, an integrated ticketing system, and extensive collaboration features for large and small businesses.
Freshdesk also offers ease of use with its suite of ready-made tools and templates for online forms, emails, and surveys. These make it easy for businesses to start using the service right away with no technical know-how or cumbersome setup processes. It also includes helpful features like analytics and reporting making it simple to track customer engagement trends over time.
Freshdesk users can measure how well their engineering team is performing by monitoring ticket resolution times so they can work smarter on resolving ongoing issues quickly in the future. Freshdesk aims to provide an effective way for companies of all sizes to manage customer relationships conveniently.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
What Features Make Freshdesk The Best for Your Support Team?
The following features make Freshdesk a great choice for customer support teams:
- Freshdesk supports pretty useful features for customer engagement, like:
- Omnichannel help desk
- Team collaboration
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbot capabilities
- Multi-channel communication management
- Self-service support portal for support agents and customers with knowledge base.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
1. Support channels offered by Freshdesk
Support channels play an important role in business operations, helping customers and partners to quickly get the assistance or answer they are looking for. To make sure your support team can provide quality support, it is essential to set up effective and efficient support channels.
Live Chat support is one of the most popular support channels today, and by integrating Freshdesk with Freshchat, you can enable chat in your customer portal and easily turn conversations into tickets. Email support is another very important channel: services like Freshdesk allow you to convert all incoming emails into tickets that can be handled by your agents.
Phone support is also desirable by many customers; with Freshdesk integrated with Freshcaller, you can enable phone calls and always be notified when a customer calls. Additionally, missed calls are automatically listed as tickets in the service so that no customer’s inquiry gets overlooked.
Freshdesk goes the extra mile to offer tools for you to support customers across Facebook and Twitter(Now X). All you do is integrate either your company's Twitter (Now X) handle to Freshdesk and add your Facebook Company page so you can respond to messages and comments
Direct messages, posts, or comments can be converted into tickets. Freshdesk offers the option to place ticket forms either as a pop-up widget or by embedding them to your website.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
2. Increasing Productivity With Freshdesk
Productivity is key for both customers and customer service agents. Having tools on hand that can speed up certain processes within the help desk system will save time and energy.
For starters, tags are an excellent way to classify tickets into different categories so agents can quickly find the issue type and have an idea of how to approach it. Dispatch rules concerning incoming tickets can also be created to automate certain support workflows when appropriate, saving precious time for agents and providing customers with timely solutions.
To further streamline the process, automated email notifications can alert both customers and agents when changes are made in a ticket, while templates or “canned” responses serve as efficient ways to address specific situations.
Finally, customizable help desks enable ticket assignment based on current agent workloads, specific skillset requirements, or channels.
All of these options, when used properly, will help increase productivity throughout the entire customer support system by providing smooth processes across all platforms. Agents benefit from more organized workflows while customers are provided with better support times, resulting in happier users in the end.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
3. Helpdesk management
The helpdesk management feature is a great tool for any business that wants to offer effective customer service. By having the right tools and processes in place, businesses can keep all their support tickets organized and easy to follow. With Freshdesk helpdesk management solutions, companies can more efficiently handle customer inquiries and set service standards.
One of the key features of a helpdesk solution is public and private notes in tickets. Public notes allow customers to remain informed about the status of their inquiry while internal private notes provide support agents with comprehensive information such as instructions or reviews from other team members.
You can view ticket history activities from within the system to track how often a ticket has been modified over time with updates, closures, etc. In addition to being able to view an entire conversation between a support agent and a customer, teams can collaborate using shared inboxes as well as merge multiple tickets for easier navigation and faster resolution.
To-do lists enable users to create tasks within the ticket as well as add them to their dashboard for quicker access later on. All in all these features ensure that support teams quickly respond to inquiries in an efficient manner pushing customer satisfaction levels up for promotional success ultimately.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
4. Self-service (You may Know this as Knowledgebase)
Self-service is becoming increasingly popular with both consumers and businesses. In 2023, 40% of customers prefer self-service over human contact. Because of such trends, many companies are now offering customers the opportunity to engage with their business through a self-service portal. This portal gives customers an easy way to access information and resources that they need help understanding, often quickly and without any delays.
A knowledge base for a self-service portal provides customers with helpful resources related to a company's products or services. Not only can customers access vital information, but it also allows them to turn complex problems into simple ones with support articles written by experts in the field.
Customers can search through categories of resources or even suggest new topics as necessary. Knowledge bases are also critical for businesses because they help capture customer feedback, reduce dual busy customer service agents, update knowledge quickly with email forwarding systems, and customize meta information.
With tools like these available, companies can ensure a hassle-free experience that allows customers to get the answers they need without any worry at all. This is one of the top reasons why Freshdesk made it to our list of the best knowledge-base software.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
5. Reporting
Every business needs a good analysis of data. That is why reporting is an important part of customer engagement. It allows agents, teams, and organizations to measure performance and identify areas for improvement.
The Default Dashboard in Freshdesk provides comprehensive analytics for gauging customer satisfaction and understanding ticket trends. This dashboard includes various metrics like ticket trends, recent activities, arcade, gamification, and community forums along with custom scorecards and automated reports.
Freshdesk Analytics (beta) is another indispensable reporting tool. It allows teams to view performance distribution across their users as well as KPIs such as average resolution time or repeat tickets for each group of agents.
Performance insights are also available through ticket volume trends, customer ratings on surveys, ticket lifecycles, and more. With the help of these robust features, reporting becomes easier and more efficient which can help increase customer service efficiencies at any organization.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
Some more Features that make Freshdesk Great
Freshdesk is a comprehensive customer service platform that offers a wide range of features designed to streamline and enhance the customer experience. One of the major features it provides is Support Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
These policies enable companies to ensure deliveries are met while also helping customers understand the timeline they can expect for resolution. This can lead to improved customer satisfaction as individuals are aware of when their issue will be resolved.
Freshdesk also allows for scenario automation, allowing staff members to quickly route tickets more accurately and efficiently as opposed to manually searching through hundreds of unorganized messages.
By automating certain processes, teams can provide better attention and concentrate on addressing customer issues faster, leading to improved productivity and workflow. Freshdesk also includes an SSL certificate and DKIM configuration which improves overall security when sending emails from the support portal.
Businesses can integrate Freshdesk with other platforms such as Freshsale for CRM functionalities, Freshrelease for project management modules, or PagerDuty for handling escalations and incidents more effectively. All in all, Freshdesk is a powerful platform packed with plenty of features that can benefit support teams looking to improve their services.
The mobile app version of Freshdesk provides users with the flexibility to efficiently work on tickets. This includes creating tickets, attaching canned responses and solution articles to replies, adding notes, and easily navigating through filtered ticket views.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
How Much Does Freshdesk Cost? Pricing
Freshdesk is a customer service and support software that offers businesses five different pricing plans.
The free Sprout plan includes unlimited agents and basic features such as onboarding, ticket management, phone support, and more.
The Blossom plan costs $15/month billed annually, providing all the features in the Sprout plan plus automation, agent collision detection, SLA management, business hours, and more.
For more advanced solutions for growing teams, Freshdesk also provides the Garden plan at $35/month billed annually. This option comes with additional integrations like live chat and social media channels as well as robust reporting tools to monitor customer support performance.
Additionally on all plans users gain access to an extensive library of skills-building courses to increase their knowledge related to customer support best practices. All these options provide an incredibly wide range of functionality based on the needs of any size team or organization while also keeping pricing efficient.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
Choose Freshdesk to Drive Customer Satisfaction
If you’re a non-eCommerce small business owner or a SaaS startup, then Freshdesk may be the customer service platform for you. It has features designed specifically to meet the needs of a small business or startup.
For example, it is relatively affordable and offers customizable features such as ticket routing, automated activities, customer satisfaction surveys, and much more. Additionally, with its integration capabilities, Freshdesk is an attractive option for companies who want to utilize multiple solutions to streamline their support operations.
Freshdesk offers pricing plans for both single consumers and businesses. With the freemium plan, you’ll have access to two agents with limited functionality but enough to get you started on understanding what they offer.
For businesses needing more comprehensive support tools and solutions, Freshdesk has additional paid plans with features such as automation rules, call center integration, multi-brand support, deep analytics, self-service portals, and reporting.
All these things help businesses move from reactive customer service to proactive support by speeding resolution times and enhancing customer satisfaction through a shorter response time.
Pros of Freshdesk include simplicity of use, custom branding options, significant scalability, and accessibility when it comes to helping multiple customers simultaneously. In addition to its affordability compared to similar services and its generous free plan option for individual users.
However, the drawbacks include limited third-party integrations/APIs, a lack of real-time data analysis options, and fewer customization options compared to some other similarly ranked products.
Overall, Freshdesk is an attractive choice for businesses looking to build a powerful customer service solution.
Delight your customers
Engage in more meaningful conversations every day, across every channel, with every customer.
