Help desk comparison Freshdesk Vs. Zoho desk

Start supporting customers in no time

The steep learning curve of a helpdesk shouldn’t bog your team down from doing what they do best. Rather, you and your team should be comfortable with it from day one. This is why you need a helpdesk which is intuitive and easy to use.

With Freshdesk, your team does not need hand-holding to begin using the product. The simple interface alone is enough to guide your agents around the product. Within a few clicks, you and your team can set up workflows and start delivering great customer experiences.
 

Workflow for admins

AUTOMATED TICKET ASSIGNMENT

Manually allocating tickets to agents from a stack of tickets is time consuming and tiring. With Freshdesk, you can automate the process of ticket assignment. You can allot incoming tickets within your team in a load-based or round robin system.

Freshdesk takes ticket assignment a step further by letting you map tickets to agents who are most skilled to handle them. This comes in handy when you receive certain requests that can only be resolved by specific agents from your team. Instead of passing the baton and keeping the customer waiting, you can directly allot the ticket to the right agent.

INTELLIGENT AUTOMATIONS

As an admin, your goal would be to streamline your account and make it easy for your agents to provide support. With Freshdesk’s automations, you can route tickets based on keywords, set properties, follow up on tickets and do much more. The ease of setting up the automation rules makes Freshdesk stand apart.

These automations run round the clock and help you monitor your helpdesk and ensure that your team is functioning smoothly.

 

Workflows for agents
 

Freshdesk offers features that have been specially designed to improve agent productivity. For instance, agents can easily filter tickets based on properties and save them as a ticket view. When they clock in, they can see the tickets in their queue, respond to customers and resolve issues. To keep a track of follow-ups and other tasks, agents can add reminders and make to-do lists. To add on, Freshdesk has exclusive features for agent collaboration.

LET FREDDY ASSIST YOUR SUPPORT TEAM

Answering basic how-to questions feels quite repetitive when done every day. This is why you need a friendly support bot that serves as your first line of defense. The bot deflects basic questions and frees up your agent’s time to take on tougher questions.

Zoho Desk’s Zia focuses mainly on sales and lead gen, and not support, whereas, Freshdesk’s smart bot, Freddy, assists your support team by answering your customers’ questions. Freddy suggests answers from your knowledge base. You can constantly improve Freddy’s performance by mapping the right solution articles and fine-tuning its responses.

Freshdesk offers a true omnichannel experience for your team

 

Customers today reach out to brands using different channels of communication like email, chat, phone, Twitter, and Facebook. So, when a customer raises their issue on email and later follows up via chat or call, your team might scurry around to get context about the issue. This inconvenience could result in a delay in resolution for your customers.


What you need to solve this issue is an omnichannel helpdesk. Freshdesk provides a true omnichannel solution as it comes with an in-built chat and telephony system. So, with Freshdesk, you can fully enjoy the benefits of a powerful omnichannel solution, unlike Zoho Desk that requires you to use a telephony system which isn’t native to the helpdesk.  

Automatically route tickets from different channels


Omniroute, a trademark feature of Freshdesk extends the omnichannel experience to the account administrators. With Omniroute, incoming tickets, chats, and calls are automatically routed and distributed within the team. This saves admins the hassle of allotting calls, chats, and tickets to agents individually.

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Collaborate effortlessly using Freshdesk

Features that let you collaborate with no hassle are at the heart of a helpdesk. If the helpdesk you are evaluating cares about collaboration, here are a few questions that you should have answers to:

  • Instead of replying to tickets in one shot, does your team spend time responding to each and every ticket when there’s a flurry of tickets caused by an outage or downtime?
  • When an agent is looped in on a ticket, do they get enough context of the issue in one glance?
  • Does your team reply to all the tickets that have the same issue in one shot?
  • Do you have the option to split a complex customer query into smaller sub-tasks for easier and faster resolution?
  • Are dependencies between teams smooth?
An ideal helpdesk will have features that support collaboration for all these instances and more. Here’s what you can do with Freshdesk:
Collaborate with context

Our collaboration tool, powered by Freshconnect, is all about collaborating with context. You can tag individual agents, groups, or someone who isn’t a part of your system on a ticket that you need help with. The person looped in will have enough context of the issue as opposed to depending on a summary of the issue for context.

Link similar tickets and resolve them in one shot

During outages or downtimes, your team is likely to be bombarded with questions from your customers. With an inbox that’s overflowing with complaints from customers, it would be a nightmare for your team to reply to each ticket individually.

 

However, Freshdesk provides an option for you to efficiently handle this. You can link similar tickets together, broadcast messages to the concerned customers, and resolve their issues in one go.

Use shared ownership to carry out dependencies smoothly

Do you often depend on another team to resolve certain issues? Well, then you might be tired of sharing each ticket with them and losing visibility of it.

To make this dependency easy and effortless, Freshdesk lets you create a custom status and map a group to it. For instance, when you require the dev team’s help to resolve a ticket, you can create a custom status called ‘requires dev effort’ and map it to them. This way, you no longer have to fight for visibility or dread such dependencies.  

Solve a complex problem by splitting it into subtasks, using parent-child ticketing

Sometimes, when there’s a huge task at hand, you need to split it into smaller tasks and work on them in parallel. Similarly, when you receive a complex ticket, using Freshdesk you can break it down into smaller tickets and resolve them in parallel.  

For instance, onboarding a new employee requires effort from different teams like HR, finance, admin, and more. When all the teams involved work independently, there’s a back and forth conversation. However, using parent-child ticketing, you can create a parent ticket called ‘onboard new agent’ and create child tickets for the tasks of different teams. This is an easier way to collaborate as all teams can stay up-to-date with the status of the ticket.   

Thus, with Freshdesk, you can iron out your workflows and collaborate better.

Draw insights and conclusions easily with Freshdesk’s reports

As a support manager or a support admin, you need to be able to generate reports within a few clicks. Freshdesk’s reports let you do just that. You can easily monitor your team or teammate’s performance, trace patterns in ticket volume, ticket trends reports, and more. You needn’t be a data scientist to generate reports. All you have to do is choose the type, the time frame, and Freshdesk will generate the report for you.

Monitor real-time metrics with the dashboard

Your dashboard is a one-stop source that tells you that things are running smoothly across your team. While most dashboards are used to track tickets in different queues, spot bottlenecks and prevent them from snowballing, each team might have its own set of metrics that they’d need to keep an eye on. Which is why, Freshdesk lets you fully customize your dashboard. You simply have to drag and drop widgets, name them, and start tracking. Unlike Zoho Desk, we offer complete flexibility with dashboards. This way, you can stay on top of metrics that matter the most to you and your team.

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A helpdesk that grows with you

As your team scales, you’ll need a helpdesk that grows along with you. The responsibilities of your team and the demands of your customers will rise exponentially. Freshdesk offers features that cater to the needs of a growing team.

Play around with changes using sandbox

When your business starts expanding, you cannot afford to mess up while making changes on your account, as things could go haywire. To ensure this does not happen, you can test your changes in a secure demo environment using a sandbox account. A sandbox is a replica of your Freshdesk account. You can change different settings and configurations in your sandbox account without affecting existing workflows in your live Freshdesk account. Once you’re happy with the results, you can copy the changes to your Freshdesk account in a single click.

Track changes with audit log

Tracing the changes that were made to your account can get quite challenging with a huge team. So, you will need a record of all the changes made along with the details like the name of the agent or admin, the time at which the change was made, etc. With audit log, you can take stock of all the changes made on your account right from updates on automation rules to deleted ticket fields and contacts.

Stay safe with the safety blanket

As an enterprise, you cannot compromise on safety. You’ll need a helpdesk that offers complete security. Freshdesk offers complete data security and lets you host data in data centers across the globe. You can restrict access using role-based access, IP whitelisting, custom email servers and SAML SSO. Freshdesk is also HIPPA compliant, thus protects sensitive customer data.

There's a lot more you can do with Freshdesk

Extend your capabilities

Integrate with 500 plus apps from our marketplace like SugarCRM, Shopify, and more to make the most out of Freshdesk.

Build your community

Foster an active community using the Freshdesk forums to engage better with your customers.

Encourage self-service

Document how-tos and FAQs in the knowledge base where customers can find answers to their questions by themselves.

Make the switch to Freshdesk today

Sign up for a free 14-day trial of Freshdesk. If you’re already using Zoho Desk, migrating all your data from Zoho Desk is as simple as a click. So, what are you waiting for?

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