Freshdesk-- The Best Helpdesk Tool To Provide Great Support

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What is FreshDesk?

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support software that helps companies deliver outstanding customer support.

Here is a walkthrough of a generic Freshdesk demo. There are three different ways Freshdesk can help you.

1. How can you make it easy for your customers to get help?

2. Second, how your team can efficiently provide excellent support.

3. Lastly, how will team leads and admins find it easy to set up and scale with Freshdesk?

1. Customer Portal

First, consider how you can provide excellent customer support. When customers need to contact you, they first go to your website. What you're looking at right now is an e-commerce demo website.

Now, as a customer, if I have a question and try getting in touch with Saul's, the page it redirects me to is a Freshdesk customer self-service portal.

A Freshdesk customer portal can be styled to look like any other part of your website, so your visitors don't feel they're being redirected.

Now, your customers can just search your FAQs to find an answer to their questions right away.

Now, if this doesn't help, you can always give them the option of getting in touch with you using a 'Contact Us' form, asking them all the questions that your customer support team would need to get back to the customer quickly, without any back-and-forth emails.

You'll notice that when I type my question, Freshdesk automatically suggests related FAQs.

So even for visitors and customers who don't consult your knowledge base, you can still help them with the FAQs and redirect them there.

So this way, not only are they getting answers quickly instead of having to write to your team and wait for a response, but you're also saving your team's effort by answering simple questions that are already in your FAQs.

You might have noticed how the chat prompts me to speak with someone on the team. What you're looking at is our chat solution, Freshchat.

Depending on what your customers are interested in or need help with while they're on your website or portal, Freshchat can proactively prompt your team to engage. And while I wait, a friendly bot can gather customer information.

Regardless of how your customers get in touch —via chat, email, or a form on your website —they might call you or mention you on social media. Any customer inquiry is converted to a ticket in Freshdesk.

In the same way, you can see the history of orders you've made on an e-commerce website; customers will be able to know the history of conversations they've had with your team.

This way, they can always check whether someone in the team is working on the question, and they don't have to worry about following up with you. Freshdesk will improve your customers' experience.

2. AGENT DASHBOARD

Now, move on to see how your team will find Freshdesk helpful.

Call anyone working with you to support your customers, an agent on Freshdesk.

Now, as soon as an agent logs in to start their day, the dashboard will give them a sense of what the day will look like. So, for every inquiry that comes in, there's an SLA associated with it — a deadline. How long can your customers wait to hear from the team and get a complete answer to their question?

So, in my case, 34 customers are waiting to hear from me, of which one has been waiting longer than three days, the SLA that I've set for my team.

So the rest of the dashboard is for anyone on your team to see how the day is looking and for supervisors (team leads) to understand how busy the team is, whether they're available, and how happy your customers are with the support you've provided.

3. Ticket Inbox

What you're looking at right now is Freshdesk's ticket inbox.

It has all your customers' inquiries from the support channels you've opened.

Depending on how they've written to you, a response from Freshdesk would return to the same channel.

For example, if you reply to a post on your Facebook page from Freshdesk, it would be added as a comment on Facebook.

An email response would look like any other email in your customer's inbox. For every ticket, an agent takes complete ownership.

So, you know who is working on what, and they can handle the customer's inquiry going forward. Now, there are statuses associated with a ticket to help you understand the question's stage.

An open ticket means a customer is waiting to hear from your team. If your team has fully answered their question and it's no longer something they need to worry about, they can mark the ticket as closed.

You can customize this inbox to show only what you're interested in. For example, you can filter your inbox to show a list of medium-priority tickets handled by the support team and save this view on the fly.

Now, you can take this inbox customization one step further with Freshdesk. You need to open each ticket to understand what it's about and to see all the specific information at a glance.

As and when someone sends you an inquiry, it can be automatically assigned to the right agent.

For example, emails containing the word 'refund' would be automatically assigned to the team members best suited to handle refund-related questions.

You can also have Freshdesk distribute tickets evenly across your team based on their workload, so you're using your time wisely by picking tickets, finding out who's available, and assigning them.

Each agent on your team can have a clear inbox view that shows only the tickets they're responsible for and those where customers are still waiting to hear from them.

Right, so every person on your team can have their own inbox view, and as and when customers write to you, depending on whether they're available or the best person to take care of it, it will drop into their inbox.

Instead of opening a ticket, you can hover over your inbox to see what your customers have written to you about.

From your inbox view, if you realize that more than one person has written to you about the same question, you can respond to all of them in one go.

Freshdesk can automatically identify the name of the person who wrote to you, so although you're sending the same email to several people in a matter of seconds, it appears as a personalized email to each of them.

4. Ticket Details

It is now working with a single inquiry.

While working on a question, an agent can see all the necessary context that they might need about a customer without any effort. While replying, you'd notice the basic salutation is already populated, so your team wouldn't have to worry about typing it again.

Now, you can redirect your customers to the self-service portal for straightforward questions. But in my case, Cindy has already had a chance to review the FAQs on the portal.

Now that you can see your customer's journey on your portal, you can decide whether to redirect them back there.

You can insert a pre-recorded response for the responses you repeatedly type.

So, you can quickly get context about a customer and respond to them.

But more often than not, when working with customer support, you'd need help from people on your team, within the company, in a different department, or from outside the company — a third-party vendor or a distributor, for example.

If you need help from someone on your team, you can quickly connect with them via chat.

You can use either loop in just a single person — a mentor or a buddy, or someone who's already worked on that ticket — or an entire department, so whoever sees it first can respond to you.

Suppose teams often work together, and you'd like to establish an internal process. In that case, you can assign two people to a single ticket.

The second agent will also drop into their inbox view when looped in. Now you can set up reminders and internal deadlines, so your customers won't have to wait longer because of internal dependencies in your company.

Now, when you need the help of someone who isn't an agent on Freshdesk, you can write a private email to them from within a ticket.

No, when this lands in their Gmail or Outlook inbox, and they respond to that email, it would be added as a private note in Freshdesk.

So, within a ticket, you can have a direct conversation with the customer and a discussion with the team that the customer needs to be made aware of.

Now you'd be notified about these the same way you get notifications on Facebook.

Now, for every phone conversation you have, you can append the phone call and the notes you take during the call as part of the ticket to maintain context.

So far, the journey of a customer's inquiry, how it'll immediately find its way to the right person's inbox, and how your team will be able to collaborate and get back to the customer quickly.

Earlier, you saw how a ticket could be associated with an open or closed status.

But to understand exactly where the ticket is, you can customize the statuses. For example, you might be waiting for the customer to get back to you, or for another team within the company to provide more information to help the customer.

Now, what Freshdesk can do is, for example, if you're waiting for another team, you can have Freshdesk send reminders to them, saying, "Hey, we still haven't gotten an update. It'll be great if you can help!"

So this way, your agents don't have to worry about manually following up with the team, and Freshdesk can handle it.

Now, every ticket has properties associated with it. To understand what your customers are writing to you about and which part of your business they're from, you can customize this to add your drop-downs, checkboxes, etc.

So Freshdesk can improve your customers' experience and your team's day-to-day work.

5. Reports

Now, move on to see how team leads and admins will find Freshdesk helpful in drawing insights into your customer support trends and how your team is performing.

The first report, 'Helpdesk In-depth,' provides complete details on any metrics you might need — the average time your team takes to respond to customers, what customers are writing to you about, your SLA compliance, and more.

Right. Now, every report you see in Freshdesk can be customized based on some ticket properties. For example, if the team lead for a particular group wants to see reports that only specify their team members, you can filter the information.

And save it as my report view — going to call it 'Customer Support.' If you're the kind of person who doesn't log into

Freshdesk on a day-to-day basis, but you're responsible for supervising the team; you can have a PDF version of this report automatically land in your inbox, either the first of every month or every week.

So, there are several reporting modules; we'll focus on a few today.

If you're looking for quick answers rather than a deep dive, you can ask Freshdesk.

The Agent Performance and Team Performance will give complete details on every team member's performance — how busy they've been, how fast they respond to customers, their SLA compliance, etc.

So when you have a one-on-one with the team, Freshdesk will help you deep dive and give you details on the tickets they could comply with on time and the ones the agents violated.

For every ticket, there is an activity log. So you know exactly when the key came in and how long it took for access to be assigned, so you can get to the bottom of things.

The other reporting modules in Freshdesk will help you understand trends over time, identify outliers, see where your tickets are spending the most time, and analyze survey results — how happy your customers are.

6. Settings & More

Now, have a quick look at the other modules Freshdesk has.

A. The Contacts tab details every customer who gets in touch with you. So it's like an automatic phonebook.

You can customize it to add more details for each customer —for example, their region, support plan, etc.

Now, if you already have a database of existing customers, you can import it.

So starting from day one, your team has all the information they need about your customers.

B. The Social tab.

You can manage your social presence from within Freshdesk. You'd notice any activity you can perform on Twitter; you can do it from here. You can also filter out relevant keywords that are being mentioned on Twitter. This way, you can proactively watch for what people are talking about you, industry trends, or even your competition.

C. The Solutions tab.

Earlier, you saw how you could have a self-service portal for your customers.

Once you're done making it look like your website, adding FAQs is as simple as composing an email.

You have the convenience of pushing articles immediately without having to go through the process of having something published.

Your team can submit suggestions as well. If they think something is worth having on the portal, a supervisor or team lead can quickly have it reviewed and published. You also have the option of opening forums for your customers, as you've noticed Google, Apple, and Microsoft do: their customers talk to each other and share suggestions.

Today, there are three ways a customer could talk about you: they could speak directly with your team by writing you an email or calling you, they could talk about you on social media, or they could be talking with each other.

You can open forums, facilitate them, and have your customer support team dive in and engage with them as and when necessary.

D. Last, the Admin tab.

Although Freshdesk is rich in features, setting up and bringing your team on board is as simple as possible.

You'll notice the Admin tab is organized into four categories.

The first part is setting up how your customers get in touch and the channels they write to you — email, phone, social media, etc.

II. The next bit is getting your team on board, creating the SLA properties, and adding those ticket fields.

III. The third bit is intelligent automation.

So the first automation, Dispatch, is very similar to the USA's 9 1–1 dispatch system. So when you call 9 1–1 in the USA, someone at the dispatcher's desk answers, finds out how urgent it is, whether the person needs an ambulance or the police, or whether it's just spam.

Similarly, this Dispatch will review every inquiry that comes in. You can have Dispatch handle it based on where you want it redirected, how you'd like to prioritize it, and any other actions you'd like it to take.

Similarly, the Supervisor is a time rule. Working every hour helps you when sending out reminders, escalations, and so on.

IV. The last bit is the Account Settings.

It will be a one-time job for you to import your data from a different help desk if you're already using one.

Conclusion

You can sign up for a free trial at www.freshdesk.com.

During your trial, you'll have a dedicated account manager who'll help you achieve your support goals and assist with onboarding your teams.

For more details on features, look at the support portal (support.freshdesk.com).

You can also have the Freshdesk Academy. It offers courses on product features and customer service skills.

If you have any questions at all, do reach out to support@freshdesk.com.