Freshdesk for Business
Customer support plays a crucial role in the success of any business. It’s essential to provide efficient and prompt assistance to customers, and Freshdesk offers a comprehensive solution for managing customer support inquiries. Freshdesk is a powerful customer support software that helps businesses streamline their support processes, improve customer satisfaction, and build strong customer relationships.
In this blog post, we will guide you through the process of setting up Freshdesk for your business, ensuring that you can provide exceptional customer support right from the start.
What is FreshDesk?
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support software and helpdesk solution that streamlines processes and provides multi-channel support to help businesses support all the needs of their customers. Its main features include a thorough ticketing system, support team collaboration and communication tools, omnichannel support, artificial intelligence features for more productive and streamlined work, self-service solutions, and powerful analytics and reporting. Freshdesk is considered one of the best customer support software solutions in the market, with over 40,000 clients around the globe, including Hp, Unicef, Honda, Team Viewer, American Express, Hugo Boss, and Cisco.
Key Features of FreshDesk
Freshdesk is a customer support software that offers a wide range of features to help businesses efficiently manage their customer interactions. Some key features of Freshdesk include:
- Ticket Management: Freshdesk allows businesses to create, track, and manage customer support tickets from various channels, such as email, phone, chat, and social media. Agents can prioritize, assign, and collaborate on tickets, ensuring timely and effective resolution.
- Multi-channel Support: With Freshdesk, businesses can provide support across multiple channels, including email, phone, live chat, social media, and even self-service portals. This enables customers to reach out through their preferred channel, enhancing their overall experience.
- Automation: Freshdesk offers automation capabilities to streamline support processes. Businesses can set up rules and workflows to automate repetitive tasks, route tickets to the right agents, and send automated responses, reducing manual effort and improving efficiency.
- Knowledge Base: Freshdesk enables businesses to create a knowledge base with FAQs, articles, and self-help resources. Customers can access this knowledge base to find answers to common queries, reducing the need for direct support and empowering customers to find solutions independently.
- SLA Management: Freshdesk helps businesses define and enforce Service Level Agreements (SLAs). It allows setting response and resolution time targets for different types of tickets, ensuring that customer issues are addressed within specified timeframes.
- Reporting and Analytics: Freshdesk provides comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities to track and measure support team performance, customer satisfaction, response times, and other important metrics. These insights help businesses identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.
- Collaboration Tools: Freshdesk offers collaboration features, such as internal notes, agent collision detection, and shared ownership, to facilitate seamless communication and collaboration among support agents. This ensures that agents can work together efficiently to resolve customer issues.
- Integrations: Freshdesk integrates with various third-party applications and tools, including CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, project management tools, and more. These integrations enable businesses to streamline workflows, access customer data, and provide a personalized support experience.
- Mobile Support: Freshdesk provides mobile apps for iOS and Android devices, allowing agents to manage tickets and provide support on the go. This flexibility ensures that support teams can stay connected and resolve customer issues regardless of their location.
- Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Freshdesk includes built-in customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to collect feedback after ticket resolution. This helps businesses gauge customer satisfaction levels, identify areas of improvement, and provide better support in the future.
Getting Started With Freshdesk
Step 1: Choose the type of business you are in
To choose the type of business you are in while setting up Freshdesk, simply select the appropriate category from the drop-down menu on the “Get Started” page. This will help Freshdesk tailor its features and settings to best fit your business needs. Be sure to choose the category that most closely aligns with your business, and consider any relevant subcategories that may apply. This will ensure that you have access to the most relevant features and settings for your business type.
Step 2: Select the plan that fits your needs
When setting up Freshdesk for your business, it is important to choose the right plan that suits your needs.
Freshdesk offers four pricing plans: Sprout (Free), Blossom, Garden, and Estate.
- The Sprout plan offers basic features such as email and social ticketing, ticket dispatch, a knowledge base, and ticket trend reports.
- The Blossom plan includes additional features such as canned responses and collision detection.
- The Garden plan offers time tracking, satisfaction surveys, and multilingual support.
- The Estate plan provides advanced features such as custom roles and permissions, custom apps, and skill-based routing.
Step 3: Set up your account credentials
To set up your account credentials when setting up Freshdesk for your business, simply click the ‘Free Trial’ button on the top right corner of the platform’s main website.
From here, you will be asked to provide basic information such as your company name, email address, and password. It is important to select a secure password that is difficult to guess and contains a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols.
To ensure that your account remains safe from potential security threats, it is recommended that you enable two-factor authentication, which requires a unique code in addition to your password to log in.
Step 4: Install and configure Freshdesk
To install and configure Freshdesk for your business, follow these steps:
- Go to the Freshdesk website and click the ‘Free Trial’ button to create an account.
- Log in to the software and click the Admin icon on the far left of the user interface.
- Customize your helpdesk by creating different support channels, adding agents, and setting up automations.
- Set up your email settings by configuring your email address and SMTP server details.
- Set up specific and advanced features such as service level agreements, customer portals, knowledge base, and customized dashboards.
- Optimize your Freshdesk setup for maximum efficiency and productivity by using powerful automation that reduces repetitive tasks, plugging in tools from the Freshdesk marketplace, and taking advantage of Freshdesk’s round-the-clock support.
Step 5: Set up your agent pools and rules
- Create agent pools based on their expertise, experience, and workload.
- Set up rules for automatic ticket assignment based on the pool and the ticket’s priority, channel, or type. This ensures that tickets get assigned to the right agents who can resolve them quickly and effectively.
For example, you can create a rule that assigns high-priority tickets to your most experienced agents. Or, you can set up a rule that assigns tickets from social media channels to agents who excel in social media management. You can also customize the rules to suit your business needs, such as adding a rule that automatically assigns tickets to agents who speak a specific language.
Step 6: Add customers, tickets, messages, and notes
- To add customers in Freshdesk, you’ll need to either create a new contact or find an existing record by typing the name in the contact field. Adding customers is important because it allows you to keep track of who is submitting tickets and to provide personalized support.
- To create a ticket, click New in the top right corner and select New Ticket from the dropdown. Adding tickets is important because it allows you to receive, track, and resolve customer concerns.
- To add messages and notes, you can communicate with your team members directly inside a ticket, sharing notes and information about the customer or specific problem. These notes can either be private or public. Adding messages and notes is important because it allows you to collaborate effectively with your team and provide better support experiences.
Step 7: Manage leads, queries, and opportunities
Freshdesk offers a range of tools and features to effectively manage leads, queries, and opportunities. Here’s a concise guide on how to manage them using Freshdesk:
- Create custom objects: Gather all business-critical information unique to your organization and create custom objects. Associate them with other custom or standard objects to bring in complete context without switching multiple tabs or tools.
- Use filters: Use a rich variety of filters to slice and dice your custom and standard objects. This will help you prioritize, categorize, and assign tickets to the right agents and leverage the power of your entire organization to deliver customer delight.
- Knowledge base: Create a self-service portal (knowledge page and FAQs) to share with customers. Categorize knowledge base articles, control their visibility, and customize meta information.
- Email to the knowledge base: Update the knowledge base as and when you’re replying to customers. Also, forward older replies to the knowledge base.
- Scheduling dashboard: Freshdesk offers a scheduling dashboard for users to get a bird’s-eye-view of their field team workflows, allowing users to reduce downtime, drag-and-drop appointments, balance workloads, and streamline tasks.
- Mobile access: You can add notes, and photos, update your service tasks, and keep Help Desk agents informed from your mobile phone.
- Reporting and Analytics: Freshdesk offers reporting and analytics tools that allow you to view and analyze data to make insights-led decisions.
Step 8: Optimize your site performance
To optimize your site performance when setting up Freshdesk for your business, there are a few key steps and best practices to follow.
- Optimizing Site Performance for Freshdesk Setup:
- Set up a well-organized knowledge base with categorized articles.
- Customize meta information for articles to enhance searchability.
- Implement a self-service portal to reduce support ticket volume.
- Utilize Freshdesk SLA Policies:
- Standardize agent performance using Freshdesk’s SLA policies.
- Set response and resolution time rules for different priority tickets.
- Monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
- Utilize the default dashboard to monitor ticket status, average response time, and customer satisfaction scores.
- Implement Analytics for Performance Tracking:
- Use analytics tools to track performance and forecast customer support volume.
- Overall Benefits:
- Reduction in support tickets through a well-structured knowledge base.
- Improved customer satisfaction by providing self-service options.
- Standardized agent performance and adherence to response/resolution time rules.
- Efficient monitoring of KPIs through the default dashboard.
- Enhanced performance tracking and forecasting with analytics tools.
Managing Tickets and Ticket Channels
Freshdesk offers multiple ticket channels to centralize customer inquiries from various sources.
- Start by configuring your email integration to receive and manage support emails directly within Freshdesk.
- Set up forwarding rules or connect your mailbox using IMAP/POP3 settings to ensure all customer emails are captured as tickets.
- You can also set up ticketing through other channels like phone calls, live chat, social media, or website forms.
Once you’ve set up your ticket channels, it’s important to establish efficient ticket management practices.
- Assign tickets to the appropriate agents or teams based on their expertise or workload.
- Prioritize tickets using predefined rules or manual assignments to ensure urgent issues are promptly addressed.
- Track ticket statuses to monitor progress and keep customers informed.
Creating and Managing a Knowledge Base
One of the key features of Freshdesk is its knowledge base, which allows you to provide self-service support to your customers.
- Start by creating knowledge base articles that address common customer queries or provide step-by-step guides.
- Write informative and concise articles that are easy to understand.
- Organize your articles into categories to help customers navigate and find the information they need quickly.
- Use relevant keywords and tags to optimize searchability within the knowledge base.
To enhance the usability of your knowledge base,
- Customize its appearance and layout.
- Choose a clean and intuitive template that matches your brand’s style.
- Add a search bar to facilitate quick information retrieval.
Automating Workflows with Freshdesk
Freshdesk offers automation capabilities that can greatly streamline your support workflows and save time for your team. Take advantage of features like ticket assignment rules and canned responses to automate repetitive tasks. For example, you can create rules that automatically assign tickets to specific agents or teams based on criteria such as ticket type, category, or customer location. This ensures that tickets are routed to the most appropriate resources for efficient resolution.
Canned responses allow you to create predefined replies for common customer inquiries. Instead of typing the same response repeatedly, you can simply select the appropriate canned response and personalize it as needed. This not only saves time but also ensures consistent and accurate responses to customer queries.
Integrating Freshdesk with Other Tools
To maximize the benefits of Freshdesk, consider integrating it with other software tools your business is already using. Integrations allow for seamless data flow between systems, reducing manual work and enhancing productivity. Freshdesk offers a range of integrations with popular tools such as CRMs, e-commerce platforms, live chat systems, and more.
To integrate Freshdesk with other tools, explore the available plugins or APIs provided by Freshdesk or consult the documentation for step-by-step instructions specific to each integration. Choose the integrations that align with your business needs and enhance the customer support experience.
Freshdesk can also be integrated with e-commerce apps like Shopify & BigCommerce. Freshdesk integration is also available for team collaboration apps like Office 365 App, Slack app, and Microsoft Teams App. Other integrations are also available for Salesforce, Google apps, & Whatsapp.
Does FreshDesk Offer Mobile Apps?
FreshDesk offers dedicated mobile apps for both iOS and Android platforms. These apps provide an instant overview of all customer service help desk activity, detailed views of each open ticket, ticket prioritization features, ticket routing to the best reps, one-click automation scenarios, ticket time tracking and logging, push notifications, and daily calendar management. Mobile apps are particularly useful for controlling every pending service task. Overall, FreshDesk is a leader for small businesses that need customer-style problem resolution.
What are the Benefits of Using Freshdesk?
1. Create a self-service portal for your customers
A self-service portal can be a game changer for your business, providing customers with instant solutions to their questions and concerns without waiting for an agent. With Freshdesk, creating a self-service portal is easy and customizable to fit your business needs.
- To get started, go to Admin and click on your portal’s name next to the headphones icon. Here you can change the public-facing name, add a logo, set the language, and customize the URL. You can also add your company’s colors to the background, tabs, and fonts with options to further customize how all of the pages, sections, and forms look using HTML.
- To create a knowledge base, go to Admin > Knowledge Base > Categories and create categories that make sense for your business. Then, create articles and FAQs within those categories. You can control their visibility and customize meta information.
- To enable your customers to initiate and track tickets, go to Admin > Customer Portal > Tickets and enable the option to submit tickets from the portal.
2. Create a system to handle customer queries efficiently
Freshdesk is a multichannel help desk software that offers businesses a unified system to handle customer queries efficiently. With Freshdesk, customer support channels are multichannel or omnichannel, which means that businesses can offer email support, phone support, live chat customer service, social ticketing via social media messaging sites including Facebook and Twitter, website support that includes self-service like a knowledge base, and finally, SMS support via WhatsApp. Freshdesk also provides users with a self-service portal that includes a knowledge page and FAQs to share with customers.
3. Collaborate across your team
Freshdesk offers several features to promote collaboration within teams, including ticket sharing, sub-ticketing, and team chat. With Freshconnect, agents can tag team members in the ticket’s chat, review their suggestions, and share them with the customer. The ticket-sharing feature allows for sharing ownership with the technical team’s assigned personnel, keeping both parties updated on the ticket’s progress. Sub-tickets can be created for multiple teams to work on in parallel. These features increase efficiency, reduce back and forth, and ensure that all team members are on the same page. Consider using Freshdesk to streamline your team’s collaboration and improve customer support experiences.
4. Track and analyze customer queries
Freshdesk is a powerful help desk software that offers a variety of features to help businesses track and analyze customer queries. With Freshdesk, businesses can receive tickets from multiple channels, including live chat, email, phone, social media, and website support. This allows agents to respond to tickets quickly and efficiently. Freshdesk also offers a knowledge base where businesses can categorize articles and control their visibility.
5. Have a customizable support platform
Freshdesk’s customizable support platform offers numerous benefits to businesses. With the ability to customize the support portal’s design and layout, add custom fields to forms, and create personalized support journeys based on customer categories, businesses can offer a more tailored and efficient customer support experience. Additionally, integration with popular software such as Slack, Google Calendar, and Mailchimp enables businesses to streamline their support processes. The platform’s clean and uncluttered UI makes it easy to find information about customers and their issues, while unlimited mailboxes and multiple language support allow for seamless communication with customers around the world.
6. Access to a range of tools
Freshdesk offers a range of tools that can benefit your business. The ticketing tool allows you to manage customer inquiries effectively, while the automation tool streamlines repetitive tasks, saving time and effort. The reporting tool provides insights into customer behavior, helping you make data-driven decisions. The collaboration tool enables you to collaborate with your team and resolve customer issues quickly. The gamification feature appeals to younger customer service agents, adding an element of fun to the process.
7. Integrate with other systems
Integrating Freshdesk with other systems can greatly benefit your business by improving customer service and streamlining workflow. Freshdesk supports integrations with various third-party software such as Slack, WhatsApp, Shopify, Salesforce, Jira, Microsoft Teams, and Mailchimp. This allows for easy communication and collaboration between different systems, resulting in a more efficient and effective workflow. For example, integrating Freshdesk with in-house ERP systems allows agents to see the full communication history with a customer in each ticket, providing valuable context for every agent. Integrating with social media accounts also allows for better tracking and management of customer interactions.
8. Have a customer-facing interface
Having a customer-facing interface in Freshdesk can greatly benefit businesses by improving customer satisfaction and streamlining communication between businesses and their clients. The interface allows customers to register, search for information, track tickets, and interact on forums, all in a clean and uncluttered UI. This creates a positive user experience that can increase customer loyalty and retention.
9. Use a ticketing system to simplify customer service
Freshdesk’s ticketing system simplifies customer service for businesses by providing a collaborative platform for agents to receive, track, and resolve customer inquiries through various channels such as email, phone, live chat, social media, and SMS. The system allows agents to prioritize urgent tickets by keywords, assign them to specific agents and groups, and filter them based on specific properties. With collision detection, agents can see who else is viewing or replying to the ticket, and canned responses can be used to save time and provide consistent responses. The system also offers smart notifications and custom ticket views to ensure timely responses.
10. Have a team dashboard to help improve collaboration
Having a team dashboard in Freshdesk can greatly improve collaboration within your business. The dashboard provides an overview of your helpdesk’s performance and key performance indicators (KPIs) for items such as ticket status, average response time, unresolved tickets by group, and customer satisfaction scores. With up to 15 customized dashboards available, you can create specific dashboards for different teams or agents, making it easier to stay on top of important metrics.
The dashboard also includes widgets such as a scorecard, ticket trends, SLA trends, and an agent leaderboard, each with customizable options. This allows you to track and share specific metrics with your team, encouraging healthy competition among your reps and keeping everyone motivated and productive.
Conclusion
Setting up Freshdesk for your business not only streamlines your customer support processes but also ensures that your clients receive top-notch service, ultimately driving your business to new heights. Don’t leave your company’s success to chance; leverage the power of Freshdesk with the assistance of Ubique Digital Solutions. As a trusted partner, we can help you unlock the full potential of this powerful platform, providing tailored solutions that cater to your unique business needs. Reach out to us today.
FAQs
Q: How much does Freshdesk cost?
Freshdesk offers various pricing plans starting from a free plan for small teams with limited features. The pricing plans to scale based on the number of agents and the features required. For detailed pricing information, visit the Freshdesk website or contact their sales team.
Q: Can I customize the Freshdesk interface to match my brand’s look and feel?
Yes, Freshdesk allows you to customize the support portal’s appearance to align with your brand. You can add your company logo, choose colors that reflect your brand identity, and customize the layout of the support portal.
Q: Does Freshdesk support ticket assignments to specific agents or teams?
Yes, Freshdesk provides ticket assignment functionality. You can assign tickets manually to specific agents or teams based on their expertise or workload.
