Welcome to Freshdesk! This advanced ticketing product empowers your support teams to deliver timely and consistent support at ANY scale.
To get the most out of Freshdesk, take some time to understand the following concepts:
| Your Benefit | How Freshdesk Helps |
|---|---|
| Channels: Talk to your customers everywhere they are | |
| Manage all your conversations in one place | Every query from each channel you configure is converted into a ticket. |
| Let customers contact you however they want | Set up support emails, feedback forms, and more. Integrate Facebook, WhatsApp, and more. |
| Let customers stay where they are | Replies to tickets are seamlessly sent back through the channel they came from. |
| Collaboration: Distribute the workload among your team | |
| Control access for each of your team members | Add team members as Agents, sort them into Groups, give each a Role, and define their Scope. |
| Understand a customer's request easily | Customize your Ticket Forms and Fields to standardize the request and add helpful metadata. |
| Set your company's standards for excellence | Define your Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Business Hours. |
| Make mundane tasks easier | Create pre-defined replies with Canned Responses and run macros with Scenarios. |
| Seamlessly integrate with other tools and products | Explore the Apps in the Freshdesk Marketplace. |
| Automation: Reduce labor and maintenance | |
| Intelligently assign tickets to agents | Use Automatic Ticket Assignment to distribute tickets equally or based on the agent's workload or skills. |
| Automate repetitive tasks | Define Automation Rules that run when tickets are created or updated, or based on time triggers. |
| Freddy: Leverage the power of AI | |
| Get personalized suggestions and optimizations | Use Freddy AI across Freshdesk to make your agents' lives easier. |
Of course, Freshdesk can do a LOT more...
...but we recommend you take your time. Set up features as you need them.
Order of setup
Each step below is linked to a detailed step-by-step guide. If you're unsure, follow our recommendations in order. If you're confident, choose the steps that best suit your business.
Minimal setup—start like a small team
- Configure your support email.
- When you sign up, Freshdesk creates a default support email for you. We recommend modifying it.
- Add your support team as Agents. You may want to review the following articles:
- Set up some members as Occasional Agents.
- If your agents will handle different types of tickets, we recommend organizing them into Groups.
- Understand Roles and Scope.
- Train your agents to handle tickets. These 3 articles will get them started:
- Start with an Overview of Automation Rules, and explore the three types to set up rules that work for your business. You can also explore Automatic Ticket Assignment.
| Features mentioned in this section | Plan availability |
|---|---|
| Support email, agents (up to 2), groups, automation rules, default roles | Free and above |
| Occasional agents, agents (more than 2), ticket scope | Growth and above |
| Custom roles, Automatic ticket assignment | Pro and above |
With this, your minimal setup is complete! You are now able to receive requests via email, have them automatically assigned to a team member, and respond to the request. Your agents understand how to navigate Freshdesk, manage ticket properties, collaborate on their assigned tickets, and respond to customers.
Intermediate setup—make Freshdesk your own
After you complete the minimal setup, you're ready to start being more professional and setting your standards. You're also ready to customize your Freshdesk portal.
- The first thing to do is set your Service Level Agreements. These are the standards of performance you set for your support team.
- You'll first want to understand Business Hours and then configure them.
- Once you have your business hours defined, start exploring SLAs.
- Have a lot of Customers? Import them.
- Understand Ticket Fields and modify your Ticket Forms. Forms allow you to add structure to the feedback you receive from customers.
- Start with the Basic Guide, and customize with the Advanced Guide.
- When ready, Use your Ticket Forms.
- If you talk to customer in other ways, now is the time to set up those Channels.
- Phone
- Help widget—this is different from a Chatbot, which is in the advanced setup.
- Ready to brand your support portal? Get started with Portal customization.
- At this point, you'll also want to make life easier for your support agents.
- Create reply templates with Canned Responses
- Perform macro actions with Scenarios
- Track time on tickets
- You're also ready to start using Freshdesk Analytics. We recommend starting with Curated Reports.
| Features mentioned in this section | Plan availability |
|---|---|
| Default ticket fields and form, Facebook, Help widget, canned responses, Analytics (curated reports) | Free and above |
| Business hours, SLAs, Custom ticket fields, multiple forms, WhatsApp, Phone, Portal customization, Scenario automations, time tracking | Growth and above |
| Multiple business hours | Pro and above |
As you get familiar with these features, remember to revisit the basic setup items and optimize them.
With this, your medium setup is complete! You are now able to talk to your customers in a variety of places, standardize their feedback into tickets, and have enabled your agents to handle those tickets efficiently and meet standards of success. You've also customized your support website to match your brand.
Advanced setup—scaling up, self-service, collaboration, and more
Once you've finished the Medium setup, you are now equipped for everything else. Feel free to explore our Knowledge Base and find features that work for you. We recommend starting with:
- Freshdesk Marketplace: explore integrations and expand your toolset.
- Create a data structure for anything with Custom Objects.
- Leverage Freddy AI to make things easier for your agents.
- Enable your customers to self-serve with a Knowledge Base and Community Forums.
- Need advanced ticketing support? Explore Collaboration features.
- Explore Freshdesk's Analytics suite.
- Create more powerful automations with webhooks.
| Features mentioned in this section | Plan availability |
|---|---|
| Knowledge base, Collaboration (threads) | Free and above |
| App integrations, webhooks in automation rules | Growth and above |
| Custom objects, Community forums, Collaboration (other features), Analytics (custom reports) | Pro and above |
| Freddy AI | Add-on |
We won't say that your advanced setup is complete, because more optimization is always possible. However, you're now leveraging the power of Freshdesk to streamline your customer support operations and reducing the load on your support agents. For any other help, contact us any time at support@freshdesk.com!