TestBox lets you test-drive different software products before you invest in one. To help you get started, we’ve been sharing our favorite features and things we’ve struggled with (along with workarounds) in popular customer support solutions that are available for testing on TestBox today.

If you missed the earlier posts, you can find them here:

• Our three favorite Zendesk features
• Our three biggest challenges with Zendesk
• Our four favorite HubSpot features
• Our four biggest challenges with HubSpot

This week, let’s take a look at our favorite features in Freshdesk, including intuitive navigation, pre-configured settings, and a useful dashboard. Stay tuned for our post about our three biggest challenges with Freshdesk as well. 

1. Intuitive navigation

Opening Freshdesk, our first impression was that the user interface looked really easy to use. This was confirmed as we continued to configure the environment.

Features are named intuitively and behave exactly as you’d expect, and similar configurations are grouped together. For example, from the Automations settings, you can create automations that are triggered when a ticket is created or updated or after certain conditions are met. These three options are clearly labeled in the menu at the top of the Automations page.

All of the key sections of the user support tool are accessible in the left navigation bar, including Solutions (i.e., knowledge base articles). There’s no need to open a different app or visit a different dashboard or settings page — everything is available in the one interface.

2. Pre-configured settings

While learning how to set up key features in Freshdesk, we were delighted to discover that several useful configurations were already configured out-of-the-box. For example, Freshdesk has a feature to collect customer satisfaction input — a customer satisfaction survey is configured to be sent automatically after an issue has been resolved. The default survey contains three options for the customer to select from, but you can add additional options if you choose.

Another feature that is on by default is the Freddy chatbot “Thank you detector”. In Freshdesk, when an agent sends a message alerting the customer that their request or question has been resolved, they will mark the ticket as “Resolved”. If the customer subsequently responds, the ticket will be reopened.

This is an important function because there will be times when an agent believes they’ve resolved an issue, but the customer still needs more help. The ticket is reopened to ensure that the customer’s message isn’t overlooked (when ignored, this could lead to an SLA breach). Of course, there will also be times when a customer responds with a “Thank you!” or an automated “out of office” message. In these cases, the Freddy chatbot is intelligent enough to not reopen the ticket, continuing to save agents time and make sure reporting is accurate. 

Another out-of-the-box feature we particularly liked is the To Do list. When an agent is working on a ticket, they can access a small “To Do” window on the right of the ticket view. If they have to perform a task before they can resolve the ticket, they can enter it on the list with (or without) a reminder date. To Do items also appear on the dashboard.

3. A useful dashboard

The dashboard, the first page an agent sees when logging into Freshdesk, has a simple but comprehensive overview of what’s going on in the helpdesk. The dashboard:

• Indicates the number of tickets that are unassigned, on hold, open, due today, overdue, and unresolved. 
• Lets agents filter the list to see metrics for a specific group or all groups. 
• Displays the agent’s To Do list, across all of their tickets.
• Provides customer satisfaction survey results. 
• Can be easily customized based on an agent’s needs. 

For managers, the dashboard makes it easy to see at a glance how each group of agents is performing, as well as trends in support requests and time to resolution. Dashboard widgets link directly to tickets, so if you notice an uptick in overdue tickets, you can simply click on that widget to see the list of all overdue tickets. There’s also a widget for agent support gamification metrics, which lets managers give agents recognition for their hard work when they go above and beyond what’s expected. 

In conclusion

Freshdesk has a simple and sleek user interface that’s intuitive to use. We did struggle in a few places where we wanted to build more complex features, but we’ll talk more about that in our next post. Overall, Freshdesk appears to be a great fit for smaller teams with fairly simple requirements.