I tested Freshdesk CRM - read what I thought of this powerful customer support center

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service suite that helps businesses manage support. Created by Freshworks, this easy-to-use help desk solution has a range of modern tools and features. It combines support tickets from email, social media, and phone into one workspace, letting teams handle customer inquiries efficiently.

With Freshdesk, you can automate tasks, manage ticket workflows, and collaborate with the rest of your team. The platform helps prioritize, categorize, and assign tickets while avoiding duplicate efforts. Features like duplicate ticket alerts enhance teamwork. You also get self-service options like knowledge bases, community forums, and customizable customer portals. These resources let customers find solutions on their own, reducing ticket volume.

Freshdesk suits businesses of all sizes, from freelancers to large enterprises. IT management, HR admins, and support teams benefit from its simple interface and scalable design. The platform offers flexible pricing, including a free plan, making it accessible for any budget. Whether you manage a few support emails or global service operations, Freshdesk adapts to your needs.

Freshdesk: Highlights

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Note: Freshdesk is a customer support solution that's part of a series of Freshworks products with different focuses — including Freshmarketer for marketing, Freshsales for sales management, and Freshservice for IT support.

Freshdesk: Plans and pricing

Freshdesk has a flexible pricing structure with multiple tiers for all business sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. The platform uses a per-agent-per-month model with four main plans: Free, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise. The Free plan supports up to 10 agents and includes basic features like email ticketing, social ticketing, a knowledge base, and team collaboration tools. This plan is perfect for small teams starting with customer support.

For businesses needing advanced features, the Growth plan costs $15 per agent monthly when billed annually ($18 monthly). It adds automation, collision detection, SLA management, and customer satisfaction surveys.

As support needs grow, the Pro plan offers a comprehensive solution at $49 per agent monthly with annual billing ($59 monthly). It includes features like multiple time zones, custom roles, custom reports and dashboards, SLA management, and multilingual knowledge bases.

For large organizations, the Enterprise plan is available at $79 per agent monthly with annual billing ($95 monthly). This plan includes premium features like skill-based ticket assignment, sandbox environments, agent shifts, custom roles, and IP whitelisting for better security. Freshdesk also has an AI-enhanced version of the Pro plan at $78 per agent monthly (billed annually) that offers productivity-boosting AI features.

For omnichannel support, Freshdesk has a separate product line called Freshdesk Omni. The Growth tier starts at $29 per agent monthly (billed annually) or $35 monthly, integrating web, email, SMS, and messaging channels with intelligent chatbots available as an add-on.

The Pro Omni plan costs $69 per agent monthly (billed annually) or $83 monthly. It adds multilingual support, custom reporting, advanced ticketing tools, and customizable portals. The Enterprise Omni plan, priced at $109 per agent monthly (annually) or $131 monthly, provides the most comprehensive omnichannel solution.

Freshdesk offers a 14-day free trial across all its plans. This allows businesses to explore the platform without needing a credit card upfront. The trial gives full access to all features in the Enterprise plan, including knowledge base approval workflows, custom roles, and custom metrics. During the trial, users can invite up to two team members to join, which helps in evaluating the platform's fit for their organization. Freshworks also offers free onboarding assistance throughout the trial period to enhance user experience.

Freshdesk: Features

Freshdesk offers a complete set of tools for customer service that streamline support across various channels. It combines easy ticket management, strong automation, and AI support to help businesses deliver great customer experiences.

The features go beyond basic ticketing. Freshdesk includes advanced workflow automation, team collaboration, and self-service options. These tools help reduce resolution times and boost customer satisfaction. With flexible pricing, from a free tier to enterprise plans, businesses can find features that fit their needs and grow as they do.

Shared inbox management

Freshdesk turns all incoming customer emails into trackable tickets. These tickets can be categorized, prioritized, and assigned easily. Unlike basic shared inboxes that can get messy, Freshdesk’s system prevents assignment confusion and stops duplicate efforts with its collision detection feature.

The platform helps teams move past color-coded emails by using a ticketing system that keeps context clear throughout the customer journey. By centralizing all messages in one space, support agents can access customer history, track replies, and collaborate smoothly. This leads to quicker resolutions and happier customers.

Omnichannel customer support

Freshdesk’s omnichannel features let businesses offer consistent service across email, phone, chat, social media, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp Business from one unified interface. It retains the context from each interaction, allowing agents to maintain continuity, no matter the channel a customer uses.

Moreover, the omniroute feature smartly directs inquiries to the best agents based on their workload and expertise. Support teams can meet customers wherever they are in their journey while keeping track of previous interactions.

AI-powered copilot

Freshdesk’s AI Copilot, known as Freddy, serves as a smart assistant for support agents. Unlike traditional chatbots, Freddy AI reviews incoming tickets, makes suggestions, and automates routine tasks while keeping humans involved. This teamwork mixes AI efficiency with human empathy and judgment for better customer experiences.

The AI Copilot uses generative AI, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning to understand customer queries, draft responses, and provide real-time, context-aware support. As agents interact with customers, Freddy fetches relevant solutions, suggests next steps, and even manages post-interaction tasks like creating summaries and updating records.

Scalable automation tools

Freshdesk’s automation features help businesses streamline workflows and get rid of repetitive tasks that waste agent time. The platform’s workflow automator can be set up to automatically categorize and assign tickets, send notifications, and trigger actions based on rules. These tools grow with your business, handling more tickets without needing a larger team.

By using Freshdesk’s automation features, support teams can focus on complex issues while routine tasks are taken care of automatically. This leads to significant improvements in response and resolution times, enhancing the overall customer experience. Advanced users can create complex automation rules that fit their specific processes, ensuring the platform evolves with their needs.

Streamlined collaboration

Freshdesk offers strong collaboration tools that let support teams work together easily on complex customer issues. Features like private threads allow agents to discuss specific notes without cluttering the main ticket. This makes it easier to consult with colleagues while keeping customer communication clear.

The platform also promotes collaboration beyond the support team with integrations to other departments and external systems. For example, Freshdesk-Freshservice integration lets support agents communicate directly with IT teams, sharing complete context on issues and reducing back-and-forth messages.

Freshdesk: Analytics

Freshdesk offers built-in reports and analysis tools to help you constantly improve the quality of your customer service. We thought the platform did a great job with its pre-made reports, which offer customizable charts for support ticket load, agent and team productivity, and customer satisfaction surveys. You can filter these reports by agent, team, or support type, and it’s simple to export them to a PDF.

If you want more detailed analytics, Freshdesk gets a lot more complicated quickly. The platform’s custom report builder lets you drag and drop analysis widgets onto a page to create your own dashboards. There are some templates to get you started, but for the most part, you’ll add blank charts and tables, and then select what data to display. You can also add images and text boxes, customize the fonts and colors for each graph, and more.

The flexibility this offers is hard to beat, especially if you want to create a professional-looking report for a big meeting. However, the learning curve is quite steep when building your first few reports, and it takes a lot of time to work through all the customization options.

Freshdesk: Ease of use

We were impressed with how simple it felt to use Freshdesk, especially given the breadth of tools included in the platform. The Support Desk, Messaging, and Contact Center modules are neatly organized into a left-hand menu along with your contact database, reporting center, and administrative settings.

A right-hand sidebar displays customization options as you navigate through Freshdesk, so you don’t have to deal with pop-ups or buried pages.

When you first log into Freshdesk, an overview dashboard gives agents a clear look at everything that’s on their plates. There’s a summary of new, unresolved, and due today tickets, plus a to-do list based on what tasks you or team members have been assigned. The dashboard also shows the results of customer satisfaction surveys, which helps agents keep track of how they’re doing.

We especially liked the layout of Freshdesk’s Support Center, which is set up like an email inbox. A tag makes it easy to identify new support tickets, and every ticket can be assigned a priority level. Plus, you can filter all tickets in your inbox based on what agent or team they’re assigned to, what priority level they have, or when the next response is due.

Freshdesk: Security

Freshworks, as a company, seems to take security very seriously. The company claims that its servers are hosted in "world-class data centers that are protected by biometric locks and 24-hour surveillance".

All Freshdesk accounts come with an SSL certificate, which is enabled by default. Customers are free to set up their own support domain or vanity URL. You can also set up your own custom SSL URL - Freshworks claim they can get this feature up and running in 72 hours.

If you want to add multiple portals to your Freshdesk account, these can also use SSL authentication, though it's not clear from Freshwork's Security page if this means your account can support multiple SSL certificates.

You can lock down your account still further by setting up whitelists to only allow connections from known office network addresses for your agents. The whitelist can also be connected to a VPN to allow co-workers to dial in remotely if necessary.

Freshdesk also supports simple logins via SSO (Single Sign On), so employees can use your existing Active Directory or online accounts like Google to authenticate themselves.

It's also fairly easy to make your data HIPPA or GDPR-compliant. Freshdesk supports creating multiple encrypted fields in forms for storing personal data. It's also very simple to export or delete customer data in response to data protection requests.

Freshworks also claims that all customer data is encrypted when at rest and that they use SHA-256 encoding (presumably for storing sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers).

Freshdesk: Support

Freshdesk support pages are well-laid out and contain all the sections you'd expect for navigating such a complex platform. We were particularly delighted to see a "Getting Started" section which includes common topics like setting up support channels and getting to grips with the Admin section.

The 'Community' section allows Freshdesk users to share "how tos" and "best practices". There are contributions from Freshworks staff too, such as regular posts about new features.

The small video library also has some excellent instructions on how to perform basic tasks like converting Gmail messages to support tickets. Freshworks even has a dedicated academy where Agents can train how to use the platform and earn certification.

If customers run into further difficulties, the website does post an e-mail address and contact number. Subscribers can use these to contact Freshdesk support at any time.

Freshdesk: The Competition

Freshdesk isn’t the only platform focused on helping you offer exceptional customer support. Zendesk and LiveAgent are two competing software platforms that give you tools for ticketing, live chat, and phone support.

We found Zendesk to be extremely versatile. It offers more than 1,000 apps and integrations, and includes automation features at a cheaper price point than Freshdesk. Plus, it has an internal help desk, which is a great tool for larger companies. The downside to Zendesk is that it’s not as user-friendly as Freshdesk.

LiveAgent is more affordable than Freshdesk, but we found that this platform doesn’t offer nearly the same depth of features. Ticketing takes a backseat to live chat support within the platform, which means that there are fewer reporting options and automations for ticketing. And it also doesn’t offer phone support at all.

Freshdesk: Final verdict

Freshdesk is high-quality software suite that can help your company set up a comprehensive customer support center. It supports email ticketing, live chat, and phone support, and works across all the channels your company operates on. Plus, Freshdesk includes automations and chatbots with its higher-tier plans.

Despite the large number of tools and features that Freshdesk brings to the table, we found the software to be surprisingly easy to use. It’s well organized, and makes it easy to start answering tickets and chats right away. The one area where we encountered friction was in the advanced reporting tools, which can be difficult to master.

The only real downside to Freshdesk is its cost. Features like workflow automation are pricey, so you’ll need an expensive Omnichannel subscription if you want to add live chat or phone capabilities to your Freshdesk support center. Zendesk offers a similar set of features at a significantly lower price, but it’s not as easy to use. So if your company has a large enough budget, we’d recommend sticking with Freshdesk.

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