Freshdesk

"Great tool, even at the lower price tiers"

Comentarios: Overall, my gripes are relatively minor, and for the most part have usable workarounds. FreshDesk has proven an invaluable tool for our small team, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a solid ticketing system. In fact, I already have!

Puntos a favor: The interface clear and navigable, making it simple to switch from our old ticketing system. It's easy to work together on a single ticket, especially with the ability to create Private Notes visible only to agents. Email templates help speed things up, and time-based rules ensure that tickets don't sit idle too often. Also handy are the apps that allow you to expand some of the functionality or customize features. While the ticketing features are handy, I've recently started delving into the "Solutions", aka knowledgebase. It's easy to format, and gives you some flexibility with HTML. I think we'll be able to leverage it for some very useful tutorials. In the meantime, we have a single page with a picture from The IT Crowd captioned "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" Finally, I'd like to give kudos to FreshDesk support. They are very responsive, usually replying within a couple of hours. I don't think we've had a single ticket stay open (waiting for reply) for more than a day. As an example, another organization we support had difficulty getting outgoing email working. FreshDesk's DKIM service wasn't functioning properly, making it impossible for them to send mail from the tool. They identified the issue quickly, and were able to address the underlying technical issues in a satisfactory timeframe. Overall we haven't had many problems, but where we've had them, they got fixed or explained to our satisfaction.

Contras: Unfortunately, some of the explanations from support have been "That's available in a higher price bracket." We're on the "Blossom" level, the first paid tier, and some features that we'd find useful are only available in higher tiers that are cost-prohibitive for our two-person team. It'd be nice to have an a la carte menu to be able to add a few features for a few dollars, rather than nearly doubling our cost. Still, those features are "nice to have", not necessary, and we are functioning quite well despite their absence. I can definitely see how larger teams would benefit from them though, so I don't begrudge the tiers' mere existence. There are a couple of weird things about the Solutions builder. I wish it was more of a "what you see is what you get" tool, though you do have the ability to preview your drafts before publishing the page. For example, I wanted include some footnotes, using superscript numbers in the text for indexing. This wasn't in the available formatting options, so I used the [much-appreciated] HTML editor. The problem is, the numbers continue to appear as plain text in the standard editor, and only appear as superscript in the preview (and of course the published page). This makes proofing cumbersome.

"Customer Support has gone downhill, and they refuse to fix a perceived security issue."

Comentarios: Freshdesk is a good product. Their technical support is sporadic. Sometimes good sometimes bad. Unfortunately, it is on the downturn again. When I first started, I had to wait days for a support question to be answered, and to contact a salesperson was almost impossible. Their phone support is unusable. It rings forever, and when you do get through since it is impossible to get through though you cannot hear them. The times I have gotten through and left a message, noone has replied to my question. When your a single person business this is frustrating, The support became better and now it is going back downhill again. I feel I have to convince them that something is wrong. What is most bothersome is they don't understand as a single person business I cannot spend days on a problem, and if I tell them there is an issue such as an attack on an email address, which I have no control over and they don't fix it.

Puntos a favor: The software has a great deal of functionality.

Contras: If you do not have a support email on your site, you create a support email address (which you must) on their site. You have no control over it. My account is continuously spammed. They insist the email address is my problem, but I keep telling me the email account is not on my mail server, so how can I filter it. I sent Freshdesk documentation showing the support email address is not on my mail server, but Freshdesk insists it is my email problem. Anyway, you receive lots of spam and no way of filtering it. When we first were attacked, I had over 300 spammed contacts. The other issue is a two-step process to delete the emails. The problem could be abated by requiring any user who creates a contact on the site to verify. The problem is that some of their clients do not want this. So why not put an option that allows their clients to choose if they wish verification emails or not. The additional issue is if someone can spam your Freshdesk site, then they think they can spam any of your sites.

"Great ticket management software"

Comentarios: I would gladly recommend FreshDesk as a very competitive option if you are evaluating ticket management software. The whole implementation could be done by us in a manner of hours and they have an academy where you can get a certification and learn how to deploy it.

Puntos a favor: 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.

Contras: 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.

"You're on your own"

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

Contras: 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.

"TMI-SSP (PTY) LTD"

Comentarios: Wonderful, I really like their 24hrs support system

Puntos a favor: 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.

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