Freshsales was founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy in Chennai, India. Intended to overcome the shortcomings of a poor customer experience on account of a broken TV, Freshdesk seeks to provide tools for brands to communicate readily with customers and vice versa. Shortly after its launch, Freshdesk won the Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge and celebrated its 100th customer. In the years since, the company has grown to over 800 employees globally. Its platform is used by over 80,000 business and organizations worldwide. Freshdesk has won numerous rounds of investment and recently made acquisitions to strengthen its data integration ecosystem.  

Freshdesk Pricing and Services

Intended Customers Small to Midsize Businesses, Enterprises

Free Trial 30-Day Free Trial on Estate Plan

Features

• Ticket Management

• Multichannel Integration

• Helpdesk Management

• Customer Self-Service

• Customer Relationship Management

• Reporting & Analytics

• Free & Paid Extension Marketplace

• Security

• Service & Support

Plans & Services Freshdesk offers five subscription plans which can be billed monthly or annually. The following chart indicates features included in out-of-the-box Freshdesk subscriptions. The add-ons listed can be obtained through the Freshdesk app marketplace in addition to others.

Editor’s Bottom Line of Freshdesk

Freshdesk was launched in 2011 to provide companies of any size a platform to deliver streamlined, consistent, personalized customer service. Despite some criticism to its resemblance to an established helpdesk solution brand, Freshdesk has grown to become a credible, capable helpdesk platform in its own right. In certain cases, it even exceeds the established platform to which it was compared. Some of Freshdesk’s current clientele include Honda, SolarCity, Unicef and Cisco; suffice to say, the platform has achieved a level of functionality suitable for very large organizations. Yet at its core, Freshdesk remains a helpdesk solution for the everyman business (even as its pricing has grown closer to its traditional helpdesk rival). Freshdesk is intuitive, simplified, gamified and offers a free version with unlimited users. It’s probably the only helpdesk solution of its class that offers a free version, and while an argument can be made that free versions indirectly detract from the quality of service for paying customers, the presence of a free option lends credence to Freshdesk’s ethos of improving customer support regardless of company size or budget. That being said, Freshdesk’s free option is nice but probably only adequate for a customer service department of a few agents handling a couple dozen requests. An ambitious company would likely outgrow that version and need to upgrade - which Freshdesk is happy to oblige - at which point they enjoy the platform’s ticket management tools, such as ticket merging and splitting, custom fields and tags, custom views, and the ability to assume an agent’s identity. Two of those features are notably absent from Freshdesk’s chief rival, and while workarounds for missing features are usually available through extensions in each platform’s respective marketplace, it’s nice to have them in the out-of-box software. Freshdesk makes it very easy to integrate multiple channels; email accounts, social media accounts, the web widget can all be set up in a few clicks. The advanced Twitter integration (available in Blossom, the first paid plan) allow tickets to be created via direct message; users can be notified about brand mentions and can reply from within the helpdesk. In general, Freshdesk provides features at lower price points than its main competitors; SLA management and light agents, notably, although light agents must be purchased day passes (which are relatively cheap). The platform is certainly easy to use, and its main dashboard - showing a ticket summary, activity feed, to do list, live chat activity and more - puts essential information at an agent’s fingertips. In addition, Freshdesk incorporates a more typical CRM feel - there’s a Customer page where users can import or export contacts, filter by tags, and by opening an individual customer or company profile, view contact details and their ticket history. Features and dashboards in Freshdesk ‘make sense’ where they are - there’s little onboarding required. Moreover, the built-in game mechanics, available starting with the Blossom plan, also incentivize the learning process for newbies. There are some limitations in the platform. Freshdesk’s reporting capability remains somewhat superficial. Its marketplace of approximately 80 paid and free extensions include 11 reporting and analytics applications that extend aspects of Freshdesk’s reports; nonetheless, the lack of custom reports in any of their plans is a shortcoming. Moreover, when it comes to data security, Freshdesk seems comparatively lax alongside its more established peers. And when it comes to measuring or predicting customer satisfaction, Freshdesk’s capabilities are firmly status quo - they are not pushing the envelope when it comes to innovation. All in all, Freshdesk offers a considerable degree of helpdesk performance - not to mention a high degree of individualized email and phone support, even for its free plan. The plan that really brings it into its own is the Estate plan, which you can test on a 30-day free trial. It’s a robust helpdesk solution with a visually-pleasant user interface and low barrier to entry for support agents, which means your department can hit the ground running shortly after adoption. While certain features come up short compared to more established rivals, if you don’t need those features, and prefer a friendlier price point, Freshdesk is a very worthwhile investment.