Free Help Desk Software by Freshdesk

What are the advantages of free help desk software for small businesses and startups?

As the owner of a small business or a startup, you’re focused on nurturing customer relationships to retain and attract customers. You need to be there for your growing customer base as they face questions and issues while using your product or services. However, sometimes these customer inquiries may slip through the cracks. Occasionally, you might find an inquiry hours after a customer contacts you.

We understand that it can get difficult to manage your customer issues and stay connected with them at all times. With access to capital and resources being a major constraint for SMBs and startups, onboarding a cloud-based free help desk software like Freshdesk will help track and respond to all your customer conversations from a single screen.

Your customer service team will find it easy to send prompt and personalized responses to every customer, contributing to stellar service experiences and greater customer satisfaction.

What are some essential features you need in a free online help desk software?

What you can do with Freshdesk’s free helpdesk software

Knowing the basic elements required to provide good customer service, Freshdesk offers a forever-free plan—for up to 10 agents—that’ll help small businesses and startups to start off on the right foot when it comes to delivering effortless customer experiences. Here are the list of features you’ll benefit from when you sign up for the Freshdesk free plan.

1. Organize and manage tickets across channels effectively

With Freshdesk, you can work with customer inquiries coming in from email, Facebook, Twitter, your web portal, or help widget from the convenience of a single window. Streamline all your customer requests and view them as support tickets with detailed ticket fields in our ticketing system.

Team inbox for agents to have visibility on the progress of customer requests.
Track customer inquiries and brand mentions on Twitter and Facebook.
View ticket activity history for every customer request.
Categorize customer problems automatically with ticket tags.
Export and merge tickets to speed up resolution.
Send outbound emails to customers for critical downtime announcements or proactive help.

multi channel support in free helpdesk software

2. Help your team do more with useful automations

Save time and effort by automating repetitive tasks and organizing customer conversations based on your convenience. In Freshdesk’s free helpdesk plan, automation prioritizes inquiries based on what your customers write to you about and assigns the support requests to the right person in your team.

Set up simple workflows to automate the entire ticket creation process, right from prioritizing and tagging the requests to optimal ticket routing.
Auto-trigger personalized email notifications to agents and customers in the event of ticket updates.
View basic customer contact details within the ticketing interface to simplify contextual support.
Insert personalized canned responses with a single click.
Avoid repeating ticket details within the team by collaborating contextually.
Create to-do lists and add public or private notes within tickets to capture upcoming tasks and critical information.

Automated ticket assignment in free helpdesk system

3. Offer helpful self-service options to customers

Help your customers get answers to their questions instantly while reducing your ticket volume by deflecting simple, repetitive inquiries with self-service. The Freshdesk free plan comes with the provision to build a knowledge base that’ll allow customers to find answers by themselves.

Create a knowledge base curating FAQs and guides for common customer questions.
Keep your knowledge repository updated by turning agent responses to newer issues into solution articles directly.
Toggle help center docs to private and build an internal knowledge base to assist agent self-service.
Embed solution articles and contact forms on help widgets within your website to offer proactive customer support.

4. Track, optimize, and improve your support team’s performance

Keep a tab on what’s going on in your customer support team and ensure that customer issues are resolved promptly with the default ticketing dashboard and reports available in the free plan.

View ticket volume metrics over time on intuitive dashboards.
Monitor the number of tickets received, resolved, and reopened in real time.
Allocate and manage your resources by drilling down the ticket volume trends report on a daily, monthly, or quarterly basis.
Identify agent productivity peaks or ticket load spikes through a week or a day.

Best free helpdesk software comparison chart

Here’s a list of top help desk tools that come with a forever-free plan to meet the basic customer support requirements of businesses.

Please note that we haven’t considered help desks that offer only a free trial for a limited time period and then nudge users to upgrade to continue using the product.

Help desk	Shared inbox	Social media support	Automated ticket assignment	Real-time collaboration	Public knowledge base	Mobile app	Reporting
Freshdesk
LiveAgent
Hubspot
Zoho Desk
Solarwinds
Spiceworks

Why 60,000+ companies of all sizes choose Freshdesk

Hear it from our customers

“We began looking for a new tool in autumn and were keen to get one in place and optimised ahead of the Christmas peak period. Freshdesk ensured that the implementation process was as smooth as possible, and the team were up and running within 48 hours.”

Vaughan Potter

Head of Customer Services

Hamleys

Read full case study

“We were blown away when we saw Freshdesk. The combination of social, email, knowledge base, mobile, and gamification all together is what sealed the deal for us.”