FRESHDESK.COM – An Evolved Ticketing Tool

As the title suggests, before we start with what Freshdesk is, let’s first get acquainted with 2 important terms that will be often used in this article, namely, ‘Application support’ and ‘Ticketing tool’.

What is Application support?

Application Support, in IT, is a streamlined process defined to assist the business users of a particular application to successfully execute their tasks without any obstructions, with the help of the application support team.

What is a Ticketing Tool?

Ticketing tool can be defined as a platform/application which is used to track issues raised by the business users which captures details related to the issue like the description, request date, status, owner and other relevant information.

Now that we know what application support is, and the role a ticketing tool plays in application support, we will proceed further to what ‘Freshdesk’ is:

‘Freshdesk (http://www.freshdesk.com/) is a ticketing tool which is used by over 150,000+ customers for application support and ranked in various lists of top customer services software’

Let’s have a look at what Freshdesk bring to the table based on the below criteria: 

Features – 

• Agents –Freshdesk classifies application support team members as ‘Agents’, which can be created through the ‘Admin’ panel. As there can be multiple ‘agents’ working on a single application support project, Freshdesk provides features like ‘Intelligent ticket assignment’ which automatically assigns a ticket to a relevant agents based on their skills, workload and other relevant criteria. Along with this, automatic email notification, event triggered actions are provided.
• Various communication channels – Multiple modes of communication can be configured in FreshDesk and business users can contact the application support team via emails, phones, live chat, social media and website as well.
• Task Automation – Freshdesk provides the ability to convert the ticket responses into KBase (Knowledge Base) to be referred for future use. This feature provides ‘automatic pop up solutions’ on new tickets raised having similar nature of the issues which have been encountered before.

Ease of use / UI:

Freshdesk provides a very user friendly UI which presents all the important features in one screen. For e.g. All required admin features are made available in one tab and switching to various windows for performing certain operations is not required which saves a lot of time and efforts and increases productivity.

Figure 1 - Freshdesk - Dashboard

Reporting:

Even though reporting is one of the many features provided by any ticketing tool, we are considering it as a whole different module, as it is a very important feature in application support, as the application support process includes lots of reports generated and sent to the client at different time intervals for various purposes, which give valuable insights into the status of the tickets and the project based on various parameters.

Freshdesk provides a significant number of readily available reports which will give you an important insight into the current working of your application support project. Along with this, it also provides the ability to slice-and-dice and generate reports as per required fields and criteria.

Flexibility / Adaptive:  

Freshdesk is flexible and adaptive to a great extent according to the respective business processes as it provides a feature called ‘SLA Management’ which allows the user to set and define processes, workflows and deadlines for ticket response and resolution on the basis of your business working culture, hours and other important aspects.

Additional features provided by Freshdesk –

• Available in 33 different languages
• Provision to prioritize tasks according to SLA policies
• Available as a mobile application

Conclusion:

Freshdesk comes out as a very well rounded ticketing tool that helps to enhance the overall quality of the application support process. It offers a significant amount of features in its ‘freemium (free)’ version and also serves many more functionalities in its paid version.

About Author:

Shreyas Sagvekar is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: shreyas.sagvekar@spluspl.com