Freshservice Review

If you're looking for a robust internal IT help desk solution, Freshservice almost certainly has the features you're looking for: powerful agent help desk capabilities, asset management, and granular performance analytics. However, the add-on fees for each managed device can add up quickly and likely make it too expensive for smaller businesses.

When you first started your business, information technology (IT) support may have consisted of you figuring out solutions to problems on your own. Or perhaps you were able to yell out a question across the office to that one tech-savvy person.

Then, one day you looked around to see that you had a lot more employees, and they were using multiple devices and various licensed software solutions -- ad hoc support was not going to cut it anymore.

That's when you know you need system as a service (SaaS) help desk software to manage IT activities across your company.

While there are many vendors offering help desk software solutions, Freshservice is one of the most popular. We'll go over its features and pricing below so you can determine if it's a good option for your business.

Who is Freshservice for?

Freshservice is a robust IT service management (ITSM) solution that provides a wide range of features and options within four basic categories:

• IT service desk
• IT asset management
• IT project management
• Analytics and reporting

Freshservice is used to manage internal IT service and support for companies that typically have 50-500 employees and annual revenue ranging from $10 million to $200 million. It is most commonly used in the computer software, IT services, and construction industries.

Freshworks, which produces Freshservice, also offers a wide range of additional software products for customer service, project management, sales, marketing, and customer relationship management (CRM).

Freshservice's features

The backbone of Freshservice is its agent service desk dashboard. It provides a clear and concise overview of each agent's existing workload: open help tickets, overdue tickets, VIP tickets, customer responses, and upcoming service changes.

Beyond that, agents will see their current levels of customer satisfaction (positive, neutral, and negative). They will also be prompted to earn customer support achievement badges through a gamification module.

The Freshservice agent desk provides an overview of outstanding tasks and tickets broken out by category as well as agent performance metrics. Image source: Author

You'll also use the service desk to plan all of your IT projects: organize workflow, assign tasks, check progress, add comments, have conversations, and set related service level agreements (SLAs).

Asset management

In addition to its help desk capabilities, Freshservice provides a wide array of IT asset management (ITAM) features that include auto discovery of connected devices, configuration management, and asset lifecycle management.

You can also manage IT-related contracts so all of your software licenses and website security certificates will remain up to date.

Freshservice can track all IT contracts and send out automated alerts when they are nearing expiration. Image source: Author

In addition, many of these ITAM processes can be automated, so you won't be unduly burdened with manually tracking or updating information about your hardware, software, and related assets.

Analytics and reporting

A cornerstone of effective ITSM is performance analytics and reporting as measured against SLA requirements.

While agents can see current customer satisfaction and related metrics in their personal dashboards, the help desk analytics dashboard provides overall IT support performance data: tickets by month, tickets by category, agent performance, average first response time, average resolution time, and more.

The Freshservice help desk analytics dashboard provides a top-level view of IT support performance but can also drill down to more granular data. Image source: Author

Plus, you can easily build custom reports by utilizing Ask Freddy, Freshwork's built-in artificial intelligence (AI) platform. Using natural language processing (NLP), Ask Freddy responds to your queries by collecting granular level data to include in your reports.

Freshservice's ease of use

Your IT techs will appreciate the easy-to-use agent dashboard that clearly shows new and overdue help tickets that need to be resolved. In addition, the inclusion of customer satisfaction metrics and gamification features to improve agent performance will encourage everyone to keep the quality of their work high.

The asset management features, which include automated device discovery, device lifecycle management, and contract management, will give IT managers more time to focus on overarching IT concerns.

In addition, the analytics dashboard provides data showing overall IT department performance and breaks out incidents by type, department, average time to resolve, and more.

Freshservice is designed for use by the rest of your employees, too. Its self-service portal allows users to create help tickets, check the status of older tickets, receive alerts, and read knowledge base articles.

While users are creating tickets, the knowledge base can also suggest articles to read to help them resolve issues on their own.

Freshservice's pricing

Freshservice offers a 21-day free trial, and after that, there are four plans to choose from:

• Blossom ($29/month per agent) -- Comes with incident management, a knowledge base, self-service portal, basic analytics and reporting, and unlimited end users.
• Garden ($59/month per agent) -- Adds a service catalog, asset management, unlimited mailboxes, multiple SLAs, and domain whitelisting.
• Estate ($99/month per agent) -- Adds software license management; advanced security; customizable agent roles; and change, problem, and release management.
• Forest ($99/month per agent) -- Adds a customer success manager, IP whitelisting, audit logs, request for change (RFC), and a one-hour support SLA.

Each managed "asset" -- that is, device, not software -- in the Blossom tier costs $0.20. The other plans come with 100 assets each, and if you need more than that, you'll pay an extra fee each month ranging from $40 per month for 250 total assets up to $1,500 per month for unlimited assets.

Be aware: Given the likely number of assets in a company with 100 employees or more, your monthly costs could escalate quickly no matter which tier you choose.

Freshservice's support

You'll find plenty of readily available help and information, which makes sense as Freshworks specializes in customer support software. All plans come with customer support by email 24/7, but only 24/5 by phone.

Additional Freshservice support includes onboarding and agent guides, community forums, training videos, webinars, and an extensive knowledge base.

Freshservice has a wide range of customer support resources in addition to its phone and email customer service. Image source: Author

Freshworks Academy offers even more Freshservice training as well as certification options. Other courses cover additional Freshworks products as well as more general topics.

The estimated time to complete each training course is clearly stated, which makes it easy to schedule training and professional development.

Freshworks Academy offers courses specific to its software as well as more general topics. Image source: Author

Benefits of Freshservice

In addition to the features discussed above, Freshservice's benefits also include access to its application programming interfaces (APIs), which belong to the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) category.

That means the Freshservice API can be used to create new tickets, read tickets, apply filters, answer questions, assign and escalate tickets, and have conversations about them.

Plus, Freshservice recently released its redesigned mobile help desk app, which is compatible with iOS and Android devices. Agents and managers can address a full range of issues on the go: quickly receive alerts, instantly approve or deny requests, and continually track assets.

On a more conceptual level, another one of Freshservice's strengths as an ITSM is its alignment with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices.

ITIL principles are neither business- nor technology-specific. Instead, they set out a series of IT processes to measure competence, demonstrate compliance, and improve performance via five recursive service activities:

• Design
• Transition
• Operation
• Continual improvement
• Strategy

The ITIL service lifecycle provides a high-level overview of the assessment and improvement of IT processes. Image source: Author

Freshservice's ITIL alignment is evident in its overarching project management and service management capabilities. That is, beyond efficiently resolving submitted help tickets, Freshservice offers the ability to mesh IT activities with business processes and goals.

For example, its problem, change, and release management features allow for proactive incident management, cross-department collaboration, and the coordination of new releases across the entire company.

Choosing your help desk software solution

When it comes to selecting an IT help desk software solution, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the number of vendors and myriad options available. Remember: You need to first clearly identify your specific needs and goals at the present time as well as look ahead to the future.

Then, you can determine which available SaaS solution is the best fit for your business.