Item: Freshdesk
Rating: 10
Author: Rusty Wilson

Overall Satisfaction with Freshdesk

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Freshdesk is deployed as the primary case management tool used by technical support and engineering.

Pros and Cons

Pros

From the agent standpoint Freshdesk is highly optimized for all the tasks a support agent does on a regular basis. The team that designed the UX clearly spent a lot of time talking to folks in the support world.
From the user standpoint the UX is also very optimized. Customers have told me its very easy to open cases, get updates and see status across all cases.
The system is hosted and thus required no infrastructure on our part - a huge benefit. In addition, we've had no issues with the system being unavailable for either agents or customers.

Cons

The reporting in Freshdesk is sufficient but not enterprise level. You can do a lot of filtering on the built in reports, but there's not a lot of flexibility to create custom reports from scratch. They've done their research and the built in reports will likely be satisfactory for all but large enterprises. However, if you are a data/analyst junkie - investigate reporting heavily before you purchase.
The community/ecosystem for Freshdesk while growing is still a bit small. Many, but not all of the major apps have integrations but you should look at their published integrations list carefully to make sure any anticipated integrations will be relatively easily to implement.

Return on Investment

The impact of Freshdesk has been highly positive. We had no reporting in place prior, but customer feedback has indicated both our response and resolution times (both of which we can now report on) have improved greatly. This has led to an increase in customer satisfaction ratings.

Freshdesk plays very well against it's competitors. There is always more than one tool for any job - and it's about choosing the right tool. Freshdesk is less expensive than its competitors - orders of magnitude less expensive than Salesforce, and has about 80% of the functionality.

Likelihood to Recommend

Freshdesk is best suited for small and medium businesses. It also plays well with many large business, but is likely not an ideal candidate for very large enterprises where integration with other apps and custom development is a likely requirement.

Freshdesk is also well suited for very small businesses and sole proprietorships as their have both free and very inexpensive plans. Even if you are only a 1-person support shop, just having cases kept in a case management system, instead of email, will make your life much easier.

Comments

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Freshdesk is a less expensive and fully capable support ticketing system

Software Version