A customer support desk is a tool or piece of software that assists customer service departments in managing incoming service requests. The customer service desk, also known as a help room, is the company’s single point of contact with customer service. This system enables the support staff to engage with the company’s clients, whether they be potential customers or internal employees. A helpdesk software solution allows you to monitor errors, feedbacks, and spot room for growth. Freshdesk has these various features and goes beyond basic customer support ticketing service. Let’s take an in-depth look at this Freshdesk review and see how it empowers customer satisfaction for your brand or business.

Key Features Of Freshdesk

Ticketing Solutions: Introducing the Omnichannel Helpdesk

Freshdesk allows businesses across multiple verticals to manage their customer service with an organised ticketing system so you can prioritise key clients and filter emails accordingly. When you are starting out with a new client, Freshdesk can implement Service Level Agreement policies as part of your onboarding workflow and sequences. Freshdesk also has a unique feature called Omnichannel, where your customers can interact with your business via social media, live chat, phone, self-service, emails, and more. These services are managed in one dashboard for all users. Instead of your team being redirected to another tab or window, you can directly view these tickets on one platform. 

Automate Your Emails And Responses

You can auto-assign pending tickets to your teams with a sorting filter for time efficiency and a higher resolution rate. Automation in Freshdesk is easy to set up and manage with an AI-powered system that knows exactly what to do per incoming ticket or replies. 

Collaboration With Team Members

Live coaching and team collaboration for support is possible with Freshdesk to discuss tickets or split these tasks and work on different aspects. Complex tickets can be separated into sub tickets and assigned based on the available agents’ keywords or skill level for that shift. Moreover, you can also link active tickets with similar solved tickets to declutter spam and double tickets.

Reporting and Analytics

Tracking your team’s performance is crucial to ensure they can meet customer satisfaction while hitting your other KPIs. For Freshdesk, you can set up unique dashboards for your team with 20 internal metrics to choose from. You can also create a drag and drop interface for your reports and include your personalised details to be added to each email. Freshdesk also generates timesheets for your team to ensure punctuality for every goal per week, month, or year.

Freshdesk Security

If your concern is data privacy and security, Freshdesk has a top-tier security system that will keep your data safe. All of Freshdesk pricing plans come with custom SSL certificates and a simplified authentication process. Moreover, you can apply whitelisted IPs with VPNs and have single sign-on (SSO) scripts to authenticate each of your team members. 

How Much Does Freshdesk Cost?

Freshdesk supports many startups and SMBs with a free-to-use plan that offers email & social ticketing, data centre location, and ticket dispatch. For growing companies, there are paid subscriptions available to maximise your customer support capabilities. Their Blossom subscription tier ($15 per user per month, billed annually) has features like automation, SLA management and marketplace apps for all of your startup customer support service needs. The Garden subscription tier starts at $35 per user per month with time tracking, CSAT surveys, and a multilingual knowledge base. Additionally, the Estate subscription tier costs $49 per user per month with features like custom reports and dashboards, portal rebrand, and five products with separate portals. 

Their popular subscription tier, Forest, is perfect for enterprise support and costs $99 per user per month and has IP Whitelisting, agent scripts, and skill-based routing. Freshdesk also offers add-ons for businesses that need extra features for just that dat with ‘Day Passes’.  There is also a 12-day free trial so you can test this out against Freshdesk alternatives.

Which Apps Can You Integrate With Freshdesk?

Running your customer service solutions with different app integrations makes your service faster and more accurate. Maximise the potential of your team with these app integration examples for Freshdesk.

Bots & Workflows

Steps

Office365

Flock

Rezo.ai

Amazon EventBridge

Issue Tracking and Alerts

Atlassian JIRA

Kanban Board

Gitlab

Harvestr

Lateshipment.com

Data Sync & Migration

Gmail Migration App

Migrate From Zendesk

FullContact 2.0

Intercom Integration

Microsoft Outlook Contacts

CRM, Sales & Marketing

FreshSales

Meteorik

iFrameit

Nimble-CRM

LoyalGuru

Time Tracking, Accounting & Billing

Harvest

AHT Plus

Contract Management

Stripe

Paypal

User & Access Management

Hide/Disable Ticket Fields

NoPassword

Aquera

OneLogin

Microsoft Azure Active Directory

You’ll even find more app integrations from Freshdesk’s App marketplace apart from our Freshdesk review with various categories to choose from. Visit Freshdesk’s app integration page for more details on your favourite available apps.

Freshdesk Alternatives

While many users love Freshdesk for their quick and easy helpdesk solutions, they found some limiting factors so we will cover some Freshdesk alternatives to give you another perspective on the helpdesk software out there:

Drag

If you like working within your Gmail Inbox, Drag is the best customer service solution for your business. Drag is also one of the simplest helpdesk solutions that cater to small businesses and provides an excellent way to collaborate using kanban boards. With this great feature, you can track, drag, and drop between columns and collaborate all tasks while monitoring your workflow’s progress. Additionally, it is also possible to flag any errors while solving tickets through a shared inbox for you and your teams. Hence, Drag is an efficient help desk centre that provides team reports and analytics to monitor everyday performance. 

Drag is free for startups and small teams. But, if you want more powerful features, you can pay $8/user/month with features like unlimited shared inboxes and boards, workflow, consolidated billing, and remove the “sent by Drag” on every email.

SupportBee

SupportBee offers simple email-like interface for easier customer support management. SupportBee also encourages collaboration between agents with features like notifications, comments, and filtered groups. Furthermore, users have a shared inbox for organising and prioritising support emails, a knowledge base software, and customer satisfaction ratings that eliminate a steep learning curve. Business owners can start using SupportBee for $13 /user/month to start nurturing valued customers. 

Kayako

Kayako is the only Freshdesk alternative that provides free collaboration on users to view and process customer conversations while leaving internal notes in real-time. One limiting factor for collaborators is not being able to send outbound messages. You can also integrate Kayako with your Facebook or Twitter for quick responses to your customer’s questions. The standard live chat support on your website or mobile app version is also possible. Moreover, if you are looking for a self-hosted solution while providing better customer activity reports, Kayako is the best customer service software for your business. Kayako starts at $15 per agent per month with a 14-day free trial for any plan available. 

Final Thoughts

Customers like the pace of a digital response, but it is customized service that has them coming back time and time again. Offer them an authentic one-on-one experience by offering customer service that both meets and exceeds their needs. Keep in mind that your customer service desk is now your most valuable point of contact with your clients, and it is more of a development hub than a cost centre. It’s a guide to help you represent your customers more proactively and develop a customer-centric market. Without a help desk solution as stated in our Freshdesk review, you may fail to meet your sales and marketing goals so give Freshdesk a try today.