Freshdesk Review 2023: The Best CRM Tool for Customer Support?
Freshdesk is a multi-dimensional cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool by Freshworks that is trusted by 60,000+ businesses all around the world. Freshdesk enables businesses to effectively manage customers’ complaints via email ticketing, live chat, and phone support.
This CRM software is an all-in-one tool that offers a support desk, messaging center, call center, automation, and reporting capabilities for smooth business engagement with their customers. One great thing about Freshdesk is that it is easy to learn and use, which is exceptionally great for customer support agents to begin using it as soon as possible.
Freshdesk Features
Freshdesk is incorporated with great and exceptional features across its three modules: Support Center, Messaging, and Contact Center.
Support Center: This module functions to manage customer support tickets. Via support center, as a business owner or support agent, it is possible to set up multi-platform ticketing across your website, app, social media pages, etc.
The shared inbox feature in the support center module is also worth mentioning as it enables new tickets to be shared among members of the support team and other teams to foster collaboration, division of labour, and faster resolution of complex issues or requests from customers.
The “Thank You Detector” feature is another intelligent feature incorporated into Freshdesk to prevent occurrences of reopening tickets if a customer responds with a “thank you”.
The “Agent Collision Detection” feature is incorporated into this software to prevent the occurrence of multiple support agents working on the same ticket.
Freshdesk is also incorporated with a feature called SLA Management that enables you to set deadlines for ticket responses. The “Ticket Field Suggester” is also another great one that allows the automatic categorization of tickets and makes sensible suggestions for filling in fields.
Messaging: This is Freshdesk’s chatbot module. It enables you to build automated chatbots across several platforms, such as your website, mobile app, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple, and Telegram messages.
Incoming messages as about support tickets can be forwarded via shared inbox to foster collaboration among the support teams.
Contact Center: This is Freshdesk’s voice-over-IP (VoIP) module that enables businesses to answer incoming phone calls from their customers or clients. Freshdesk’s contact center is featured with an automatic call recorder and transcriber and the possibility for agents to switch phone calls to live chat.
It is also possible to have contacts tagged and segmented for database organization and offer priority support to selected customers or clients.
Another interesting thing is that the contact center supports agents in more than 90 countries and also supports the incorporation of your call carrier in case you already have one.
Contact Center also supports an easy conversion of calls into tickets as part of Freshdesk’s Omnichannel.
Having Freshdesk as your CRM tool also empowers you to have a track record of all current and past tickets raised by all of your customers, agent notes, and transcripts of past chat sessions and phone calls.
The Interactive Voice Response (IVR) bots powered by AI is an exceptional feature that enables the reduction of agent workload by answering repetitive queries.
Other notable features of Freshdesk include:
Built-in Report and Analysis Tools: Freshdesk offers a variety of reports and analysis tools that comprise pre-made reports featured with customizable charts for support ticket load, customer satisfaction surveys, and agent and team productivity. It is possible to filter these reports by agent, team, or support type, and intriguingly easy to export them as PDF documents. Furthermore, users can also create custom reports for themselves via the tool’s custom report builder that enables the addition of blank charts, tables, images, text boxes, fonts, graph colour customization, etc.
More than 1000 apps Integrations: Freshdesk has an integration capability with over 1000 popular apps and software used by businesses such as WhatsApp, Slack, MailChimp, Salesforce, Shopify, Microsoft Teams, etc.
State-of-the-art Security: Every created account on Freshdesk has an SSL certificate enabled by default, and this further enables the user to freely set up their support domain without worrying about compromise.
Freshdesk supports SSO (Single Sign On) logins to allow business employees to use their existing online accounts (such as Google) to authenticate themselves or an active directory. It is possible to set up whitelists to allow connections from recognized office network addresses for support agents. Also, in cases where co-workers intend to dial in remotely, the whitelist can be connected to a virtual private network (VPN). Users’ data are also easily made HIPPA or GDPR-compliant, as Freshworks supports multiple encrypted field creations in forms for storing personal data.
Furthermore, on security, Freshworks (Freshdesk’s parent company) also encrypts customer data with SHA-256 encoding when at rest.
Freshdesk’s Pricing Packages
Freshdesk offers a 14-day no-card free trial and has four different pricing plans as follows:
Free Plan (Up to 10 agents):
· Cost per month — $0
· Cost per year — $0
· Integrated ticketing across email and social
· Ticket Dispatch
· Knowledge Base
· Ticket Trend Report
· Out-of-the-box analytics and reporting
· Choose your data center location
· Team collaboration
· 24x7 email support
Growth Plan:
Everything in Free plus…
· Cost per month — $18/agent
· Cost per year — $180/agent (17% discount)
· Automation
· Collision Detection
· 1000+ marketplace apps
· In-depth helpdesk report
· SLA management & business hours
· Custom Email Server
· Custom Ticket Views
· Custom ticket fields & status
· Custom SSL
· Easily track time spent by agents on tickets
· 24x5 phone support
Pro Plan:
Everything in Growth plus…
· Cost per month: $59/agent
· Cost per year: $588/agent (17% discount)
· Multiple products
· Includes up to 5000 Collaborators
· Round-robin routing
· Custom Roles
· Custom objects
· Custom Reports and Dashboards
· Segment customers for personalized support
· Customer Journey
· Canned forms
· Manage versions in knowledge base
· Community forums
· Extendable API Limits
· CSAT surveys & reports
· Multiple SLA policies & business hours
· SLA reminder & escalation
· Multilingual knowledge base
· Custom apps
· Average handling Time (AHT)
· Custom Metrics
· Report Sharing
Enterprise Plan:
Everything in Pro plus…
· Cost per month: $95/agent
· Cost per year: $948/agent (17% discount)
· Assist bot
· Email bot
· Auto-triage
· Article suggester
· Canned response suggester
· Unlimited products
· Sandbox
· Easily manage agent shifts across time zones
· Audit log
· Skill-based routing
· Knowledge base approval workflow
· Flexible knowledge base hierarchy
· IP range restriction
You can try Freshdesk for 14 days completely free by clicking here.
What Brands Say About Freshdesk
“I’m responsible for our chat platform and channel service strategy. The reason why we moved to Freshworks was for the APIs so that we can be our own chat client. I really enjoyed the collaboration.” — Eric Bompas Product Manager, Klarna
“When a customer calls or emails or reaches out over social or Messenger, we can actually see what they’ve done and our people can refer to it. The customer feels as if we know them.” — Mirjam Van Den BergChief Customer Care Officer, Travix
“Freshdesk has scaled with us. What I love most is that I don’t need an administrator to maintain it. Ticket automation, screen-share through the chat, customized portals for different segments of our users — all those things are really helping us bring response times down.” — Kris SundbergVP of Customer Success, Restaurant365
Freshdesk Pros
· Multi-dimensional CRM software consisting of email ticketing, live chat, and phone support functionalities
· Easy to learn and use.
· Automation and chatbot availability
· Free 14-day no-card trial.
· Integration with over 1000 apps
· state-of-the-art security feature.
· Top-notch customer support.
· Budget-friendly for businesses.
Freshdesk Cons
● No 30-day free trial available. However, this is not a con, because users have a 14-day no-card free trial period and access to Freshdesk’s support to fully test all that Freshdesk has to offer.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Freshdesk
How does the 14-day free trial work?
After you sign up, you can access all the features in the Enterprise or Pro Plan for 14 days. This is to make sure that you are completely satisfied with Freshdesk before you buy the product. At any point during your trial, you can add your credit card to purchase any plan of your choice.
Are there any cancellation fees?
No. Freshdesk is a pay-as-you-go service. There are no cancellation fees. You can cancel whenever you want but your cancellation will come into effect only after the end of your term.
Can I upgrade or downgrade my subscription?
Yes, you can choose to upgrade your subscription instantly. If you wish to downgrade or cancel your subscription, you can do so at the end of your term. To do this, click on ‘Plans & Billing’ in your Freshdesk account to modify your subscription details.
What types of payments are accepted by Freshdesk?
Freshdesk accepts Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express. PayPal is not accepted and they are not able to accept purchase orders over the phone. All offline payments follow USD pricing.
How safe is my data?
Freshdesk takes security seriously and you get to choose your data center from the get-go. Their servers are hosted in world-class data centers that are protected by biometric locks and 24-hour surveillance. Freshdesk ensures that their application is always up to date with the latest security patches. All Freshdesk plans include SSL for encryption, for FREE, to keep your data safe.
Conclusion
Freshdesk is top-notch, easy-to-use, and intuitive CRM software for businesses to set up a comprehensive customer support center while building strong customer relationships with customers across various platforms. Its integration with over 1000 apps and budget-friendly pricing makes it even more outstanding when compared with other CRM software. Not forgetting that Freshdesk offers a 14-day no-card free trial for first-time users to test its functionalities to the fullest.
Click here to start a 14-day free trial on Freshdesk and embark on a hassle-free customer support relationship journey with your customers.
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