Freshservice Reviews

I implemented the solution for a client, and it's used in the typical service management processes, including incident, problem, and change management. It's also used for fleet and facilities management. It has a built-in project management functionality, but that isn't used at the moment. Generally speaking, the out-of-the-box modules are used, with customisation.

It has allowed the client to implement service management processes that didn't previously exist in the business and to have more visibility and control of process tickets.

The most valuable feature is the sandbox, which allows the testing of new configurations, automations, and workflows before puting them live on the production system.

The most significant area for improvement is consistency across the different modules, as they are not intuitive. It makes me think the modules have different development teams with no consistent approach. From an end-user perspective, I can do certain operations in one module, such as incident management, but not in problem management, for example, and I don't see why that should be the case. An example would be the way that bulk actions has been implemented. It would be good to see more consistency in the development process. 

An additional feature could be a new module for test management; it would be good to see a module enabling the creation and management of test scenarios, test scripts, test requirements, and scenarios. The solution doesn't do that out of the box, and though it may be possible to do that with a lot of configuration and workflow customisation, it would be great to see a dedicated test management module.  

I have been using Freshservice for just over a year. 

The tool is highly stable; we've never had any outages or downtime. Freshworks employs a continuous delivery method with Freshservice, so new releases and updates are integrated seamlessly as they are released. There is no impact on the end-users or the agents, so the solution is very stable.

The product is highly scalable. The only barrier is the cost. The more agents, the higher the price, although the more we buy, the cheaper the agents become. As the solution is cloud-based, users access it via URL, which helps make it very scalable.

We have 800 to 900 end-users in total, with 20 or 25 admins.

I've contacted customer support on multiple occasions and there are two main considerations; response time, and quality of the response, with their ability to understand the issue being an important factor in the latter.

The response time is pretty good, as the support system is a live chat. Email is available, but live chat is much easier as it offers a more immediate response. I found their ability to understand the issues quite poor; it took a lot of back and forth. Generally, they couldn't solve the problem and had to take it further to the developers, and I think part of that is that the work I was doing was very detailed and in-depth. I encountered many bugs that an average end-user wouldn't, and many of the issues turned out to be bugs, so the resolution took a long time.

Neutral

The client previously used SysAid and the switch was made because SysAid wasn't flexible enough for the new business processes that were to be implemented.

The initial setup is very straightforward, especially the out-of-the-box configuration. Freshworks provided what they call a transition support specialist to assist us, so the setup was simple.

The deployment was relatively seamless; we configured the solution in an offline state which took about a week and deployed it from there. We shared the URL within the company, and end users accessed it using that. In total, it took one to two weeks for the setup and basic configuration. We did a lot of customisation, workflows, and automation, which took much longer than two weeks.

As the solution is SaaS, it's very light in terms of maintenance; we have two staff with global access to monitor it. One staff member could do that, but we use two for resiliency.

I implemented the solution as a consultant for one of my clients, so it was a mixture of in-house IT resources and vendor assistance.

We see an ROI from the product.

I can't recall exactly how much the licences are, but it is somewhere in the middle compared to the rest of the market. The more licences that are purchased, the cheaper it becomes, and I think the solution offers good value for money.

We ran a procurement exercise that began with online research using review and comparison sites like PeerSpot and Capterra, looking into all the major service management tools against a defined set of business requirements.  Based on our requirements, we shortlisted down to six companies - SysAid, Solarwinds, Freshworks, Hornbill, Halo, and TOPDesk.  We then sent out RFI documentation to the six companies.

For the next stage, we had demos from five of the companies, during which the functionality of each tool was tracked, measured, and scored. We had in-depth discussions regarding the scoring and then we ran trials of Freshservice and Hornbill Service Manager.  Further scoring after the trials resulted in Freshservice scoring the highest, so that's the one we went with.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The product is excellent out of the box, but there are inconsistencies in how Freshworks implements it. It works great for organisations that don't want to customise and create their own processes. The out-of-the-box processes with minor tweaks will suit most organisations, but it becomes more difficult for those who wish to adapt their own specific business rules and processes. In hindsight, Freshservice isn't the solution we should have chosen, as it's just not customisable enough.

There is plenty of help available for Freshservice; there's a user forum where you can post questions and get responses from other users. There's also a great deal of online documentation, the links provided by Freshworks, which connect you to their knowledge base.  Additionally, there is an immediate customer chat function, so a great deal of support is available for any issues that may arise. I would advise other users to use the resources and do the required reading.

We're using the product for an HR service center.

We had a historical kind of email-based contact center. What it's allowed us to do is bring everyone in our department into the journey of customer experience and customer service. When you're just dealing with Outlook and mailboxes, those are typically only limited to certain teams. This allows us to scale. It allows us to scale and engage other people that may be required to help support a ticket. We may need a certain level of expertise or help from a subsidiary area, allowing us to bring them into the conversation much more quickly without losing sight of the ticket or the customer. You don't get lost in multiple emails. You can, essentially, manage everything off an initial inquiry.

We really like the Freshchat widget that allows people to engage with our FAQs on any kind of webpage or web property. We really like that. 

We really like the auto-routing. 

The rules-based automation that they've got built into auto triage and auto disseminate to the right groups. 

We really like the auto-responses, as well. 

Their dashboard and their ability to follow the history of the ticket to see who's all engaged is very useful. It allows us to see who's engaged with it.

Their analytics need improvement.

Some of their integration could be better as well. 

Maybe this might be new in some of their newer versions. However, the chat should be an inherent part and shouldn't be a separate module.

The way they run their service portal, it would be nice if you didn't require users to log in. If they could go to a login agnostic model and be able to, using AI, auto triage and recognize if somebody submitted a ticket before, they should be able to do that in an automated fashion. They shouldn't force users to log in anymore.

I've been using the solution for about two years. 

We've had no issues with stability or downtime at all.

The solution can scale well. 

We have a couple of different deployments. In our specific deployment that I'm attached to, we would have about 40 users.

We have seen growth inside of our organization. We're not the only team that uses it. There's a second team, and they're much larger. They have about 150 users.

We've seen other scaled deployments for other purposes because of the success we've seen with Fresh. Will we see more growth in our specific HR area? Probably not. We're a small HR shop.

They're not very good at technical support.

Neutral

I've used some of the Oracle products, like RightNow. I've had some ServiceNow utilization, as well.

The initial setup wasn't easy or difficult. It was kind of in the middle. There's a lot of configuration you can do on your own. There is some stuff where you've got to involve your IT department. Overall,  that's what I like about Fresh compared to something like ServiceNow. It's pretty lightweight. It's pretty scalable and has a much simpler ease of implementation.

It requires very little maintenance. Maybe we had one person attached to it. However, it wasn't a full-time job for them. We don't have to have an in-house Fresh technical expert. It's pretty easy to figure out.

We did it in-house with some of the initial onboarding direct from Fresh.

We have seen an ROI.

I'm not sure of the exact cost. I recall it being pretty small. 

When considering options,  I looked at Oracle again. We were looking at ServiceNow and Fresh, and we decided to go with Fresh, at least for short to medium term.

I don't know what version we are using, however, in terms of what modules we're using, we're using Freshservice and Freshchat.

Like anything, the tool doesn't fix your service issues. It can help, however, you got to have the right philosophical mindset and your process fundamentals in place because the tool isn't always your silver bullet. 

In terms of your process and your philosophy, I find doing an implementation like Fresh should get you in that mindset. The other piece of advice I would give people contemplating this is, for example, where I love dashboards and data, and Fresh doesn't do the best job in this space. It's not implementation and done. There's always fine-tuning required, and there's always room for improvement. That's where it's important to look at your data, look at your utilization, and always go back and challenge some of your concepts once it's implemented.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I was mainly using it for the functionality related to changes, such as tracking and reporting production changes going into our live systems. I also used it for APIs for the automatic generation of changes based on triggers from Jira.

In terms of deployment, I'm pretty sure it was SaaS, and in terms of version, it would've been a fairly recent version because they'd only been using it for about a year or so.

It has a very easy, flexible model. You can open up a particular module and work on the next. That's what we did. Overall, it provides a simple way of getting your support teams up and running. That was one thing that I thought was quite easy to do.

We were able to automate a lot of internal processes, such as onboarding of new users via forms, which had integrated notifications. It was really easy to do. Form management was very good. That was probably the main benefit. The automation of the support calls was the other part from which we got a lot of benefit.

On the changes side, I found the workflow network quite easy to set up. I didn't need a lot of hand-holding in that. I didn't have to go through training as such. The flows were pretty basic to set up, which made it fairly simple.

The additional fields that were required for our change process were easy to set up. I was able to get it up and running pretty quickly. I was working as the head of the project management team. I got a few of the guys onto that, and then we rolled it out.

We did an evaluation of the project functionality. That was a fairly new area they were launching. It was fairly underwhelming, but they were gradually building out this area. That was one area where I felt they still have a long way to go. We did a review of our project management tool internally within the company, and it was one of the choices, but it didn't match up anywhere close to any of the other tools we were considering. It wasn't a good match.

On the reporting side, when we were doing reporting, one thing that was a bit of a limitation was when you had a data list containing a list of changes that have occurred for the whole time and you had to fit the list onto a page. If the list went over the page, it would just truncate it at the page. You wouldn't get all your data. So, it didn't work. That was one big stand-out for me. What we tended to do was convert things into a more readable format, and then we had more targeted exception reporting, but it would be nice to have a full list of things that could be automatically generated and that can flow over pages.

In terms of additional features, their strategy is quite good in that they incrementally change things. They must be using some sort of agile methodology. They tend to be doing these little releases along the way, and then they say, "Oh, we've got this new feature." I would definitely encourage them in that area. It is working for them. So, on the project side, being able to easily add risks and issues and more complex dependencies were probably the key areas in the project space where I saw that they let themselves down, but it was just a burgeoning area that they were launching into. It was just part of their initial offering. The plans for the future were still fine.

I used it in my previous role at another organization. I was there working on Freshservice for about seven months, and I was working with it a few times a week in various capacities. The last I worked with it would be in February.

I didn't see any real issues with it. I was there for about nine months, and I might have seen two outages in that time. I also didn't see any performance issues coming through on that.

Scalability didn't seem to be an issue. It was probably about working out the best licensing model. We had some administrative people, and we had users as well. For Freshservice, we had about 150 users.

I didn't have a direct connection to Freshservice's support itself. I used to go to our local support. Our IT help desk was the first line of support, and then they would contact the Freshservice desk if needed.

I was involved in the changes area. The base of Freshservice was already in place, and that was being managed by our support manager. So, the initial setup for me was around the changes area. It came out of the box and then it involved deciding whether or not we add additional fields. We added the additional fields that we required, and then gradually, we would check out the workflow and then say, "Okay, we want to have an approval step here." We'd then add an approval step. So, we incrementally worked on it as we saw it and then tested it all the way through, and when we were ready, we made it available for a sample group. We could then test it out.

We didn't do it as a big bang approach. It tended to be segregated to a particular system area, and then we rolled it out to other areas after that. That seemed to be a good strategy for us.

In terms of duration, for the changes piece, we had a working prototype within about six weeks, and that included documenting how we wanted it to run. If I had to look at just the configuration time, it probably took about four weeks to work through configurations. That was pretty quick for the changes side. 

For the APIs, it was probably a similar duration. There was a bit of requirements gathering and working out. We had trigger conditions where we wanted to trigger a workflow so that it automatically creates a change based on a trigger condition within Jira. The longer part was just setting up the base integration. The actual configuration with the actual tool was probably of the order of two to four weeks.

In the initial base setup, there was just me and another person. When it came to the rollout, we were up to about six different project managers, and there were a couple of integration people. There were probably 10 people all up. 

We also had API integration. We worked with an integrating company to do that. 

In terms of maintenance, there are definitely patches that come through all the time, but that tended to be managed through the support area. I wouldn't have as much visibility on that side.

It was a middle tier. It wasn't an expensive one. 

It was a tier model usage. Licensing costs varied between admin users and regular users.

ServiceNow was one. It was a much more comprehensive solution as compared to Freshservice, but it was also more expensive. ServiceNow is definitely more robust in terms of features, but Freshservice has a much better ability to configure. It is very flexible that way, from my experience.

Being a smaller company, we tended to keep fairly tight on cost. We didn't really want to spend a lot of money. My understanding was that ServiceNow was much more expensive, but I wasn't close to the details. Freshservice was considered to be about right for what they wanted to pay. It was in the middle of the range in terms of the subscription cost.

I would recommend it if you're looking for a really quick way of getting your help desk up and running with a ticketing system and some pretty cool automation with emails, notifications, etc. It is easy to set up and maintain, and it is reasonably priced for what it is.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. It is a solid product. It doesn't do everything that ServiceNow does, which is my only comparison point, but it definitely has good features for the price.

You can connect the system to an IDR when you receive a call. That was an easy use case to implement. Also, you can use a ticketing system for internal tech support issues within the company. It was oriented toward both the end customer and the internal customer.

It improved the organization's workflow by making managing all the information and tickets in a single system much easier.

One of the things I liked about Freshservice was how easy it was to implement. While it doesn't have extensive customization capabilities, the available options are sufficient for certain sizes of companies. You don't need to customize your ticketing system much. Freshservice is a great solution because you can implement it very quickly. You can upload your catalog, and you're done in maybe a week or two.

I think it would be great if the tool had another version that is more customizable. From what I remember, there were some limitations regarding the number of assets you could track. In a more robust version, the number of assets increases, but I think it would be better to have something more customizable for all versions, especially the most robust version. This would be great for larger customers.

I rate Freshservice's stability as ten out of ten. 

I rate the solution's scalability a seven out of ten. 

I have contacted technical support. It wasn't very easy. Even as a retailer partner, sometimes it was difficult to get someone from tech support to address an issue, especially if it involved changing labels or fields. Getting support for these kinds of issues was challenging.

Neutral

The tool's deployment is easy. I rate it a ten out of ten.

A customer can do it themselves. 

In the Latin American market, companies may not generate the same revenue as American companies of similar size. Therefore, while the return on investment could be good for an American company, it might not be as significant for a Latin American company.

I don't think it's expensive for the US or some European markets. Still, when I used Freshservice in Mexico, some customers found it a bit pricey, especially considering the platform's features. I think the pricing is fair for use in the European market, but it might be perceived differently in Latin America.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

Our company uses the solution to provide service desk assistance to clients. 

One use case is with a client in the insurance industry. Customers who have issues with their insurance send emails for assistance that are routed to us through the solution. We created five support group classifications to address particular insurance issues.

We currently use Azure servers only for connection and to authenticate Office 365 mailboxes. For now, we do not link the solution with Azure's products.

Our company's productivity has improved. 

The solution is very responsive with a 97% success rate in funneling customer tickets. 

A chat bot needs to be added to the portal.

Only one channel is available on the portal for service tickets. We would prefer one channel for tickets and one channel for chat support via a popup that is accessed from smartphones. Other products such as ServiceNow allow two channels. 

The solution has bugs with language translations. For example, our company translated the portal to French but some items remained in English.

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable for users. We currently have 2,000 users and 150 agents who provide service. We utilize PowerShell when creating users and groups because it simplifies the task. 

Scaling to unlock cross-group or other features requires a pack upgrade. 

The technical support staff are responsive and reactive. 

We contacted support when we were having issues with language translation to French. They responded quickly and corrected the bug that was causing some phrases to remain in English. 

I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

We previously used Microsoft's SCSM that is the part of SCCM used for managing tickets. After we were attacked by ransomware, we decided to migrate to the solution. 

The initial setup and implementation are easy. 

It took us a month to create various catalogs of service for our client and fully deploy. 

I installed the solution with assistance from a coworker. 

A team of seven technicians provide ongoing maintenance such as adding users or groups. 

The solution has an annual licensing model.

The standard pack is currently orchestrating 2% of our tenants. Our goal is to use the solution to manage all orchestrations but that requires a bigger budget. 

We also have to upgrade to gain access to cross-group or other features.

Pricing is rated a six out of ten. 

We evaluated the solution, ServiceNow, and a third product. After meeting with a manager at Freshservice, we decided it was the best solution for our needs. 

We purchased the solution's standard pack but it does have limitations. For example, we created five groups to match particular service levels. But, users in group one cannot see group two's tickets unless they are a member of group two. 

This is problematic for our insurance client because tickets for children need to be linked to tickets for parents, even though they are are not in the same service group as individuals. Cross-group features are not available unless we upgrade from the standard pack. 

Environments that require two cloud channels might fare better with ServiceNow. 

The solution is easy to deploy even with no prior experience. The portal is simple to use and customize.

The standard pack provides a good starting place for managing client services. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

At my previous organization, we had an alliance partnership with Freshservice. Part of that alliance involved me implementing Freshservice for North American and Europe clients. Freshservice is an ITSM product. The PLC would be done by the thresholds and as part of the alliance, and we would implement the Freshservice ITSM solution for the clients. It's completely based on the customer requirements, which modules need to be implemented. We will do the data collection, the requirement gathering, et cetera, and we will do the solution and implementation for the Freshservice to cater to the client's needs. As part of this, we'll do the infra, we'll do automation, orchestration, and everything as part of this integration with multiple sources. We'll do the portfolio management.

We like that the product is a SaaS-based service. You can just register and within five to minute minutes, you are ready to go.

It's very intuitive. It's not complex or anything. Anyone with some IT knowledge, IT service management knowledge, can just spin up an instance within the cloud and register for an instance. He can just go through configurations very easily. 

Maximum, within a week, if you have a basic ITL, if you have good technical instance, you can spin up an instance with a basic idea of some incident management for these catalogs.

The product itself comes at 60% to 70% configuration. It's already done for you. Out of the box, there are around 40 plus service catalogs available. You simply need to customize your requirements. The product is loaded with all the features you need.

At the moment, they are adding a lot of functionality to the product. It is beginning to mature. 

This product is very good for small and mid-level markets. However, I'm not sure about the enterprise level. I'm not sure about expanding to a 100,000 to 200,000 user base or more. 

We'd like to see a CMDB, a Configuration Management Database, in the future. 

I used the solution about six months ago at my previous company.

The solution is in the cloud and very stable. there are no bugs or glitches. 

The scalability may be limited. I'm not sure it can handle enterprise-level deployments. 

I've done implementations for up to 2,000 users. 

The users are unlimited. The licensing is based on how many agents and end users you have; there is no limit.

There will be a team managing the tickets. They are mainly on the service desk or customer support. As an end user, you will be raising a ticket and I'll be looking at the ticket. If I need to log into the system and look at the ticket, I need a license. It's based on that agent licensing.

Once you log into an instance, there is always chat support available. You can also email them. they are very easy to get a hold of. 

Neutral

The initial setup is very easy. It's a SaaS product. You just sign up and get going within ten to 15 minutes. 

The licensing is based on how many agents you have or need to manage tickets.

The licensing can be based on a monthly or yearly renewal.

Different payment options are available.

The pricing is available on their website. The pricing plans and everything is available. The cost is completely based on which plan you choose, as there are around four categories. The cost is completely based on the features the company must have.

I was a customer and end-user.

It's a SaaS product. The product is continuously evolving and growing, although I'm not sure how well it would benefit an enterprise-level organization. However, in general, it's good. It's a really agile platform. 

We cater to small and medium-sized clients, and this solution is perfect for us.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We are using Freshservice for IT service management.

The workflow and the change management process are valuable.

Freshservice automation capabilities are improving the way we respond to a few customers. There is a bit of delay when we must respond to the customer.

I have been using Freshservice for five to six years.

The product is stable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

500-1000 users are using this solution. I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten.

Support is quite good.

The initial setup is easy and takes two months to complete. I rate it a ten out of ten.

We have achieved ROI in 12 months.

The solution's pricing is reasonable.

There are different tiers or plans for product selection, so we can simply choose from a list of suitable products. This way, we avoid bundling features we do not necessarily need and do not have to pay for features we will not use.

Freshservice is feasible to implement. A third-party consultant is not necessarily required. The customer service is also quite intuitive and easy to set up. Upon onboarding, the team's productivity increases within three months.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for IT service management. We use it for HR service management. We also use it in an operations capacity in combination with some other tools.

We use a combination of Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshchat. We use the whole suite. We're the third largest customer of theirs. 

We have the Enterprise plan, and we have its latest version. We are in beta testing for another upgrade that they're doing, but it is still in beta. So, it is not live yet. It is a cloud solution. Freshservice owns everything. We just use it as a cloud platform.

Our SLAs are being met way more consistently. We're seeing that customer issues are getting answered in a timelier manner. Our tech issues are resolved in a more timely manner. We have more access to information with the combination of knowledge, tickets, etc. We have integrated it with Jira. So, I can look and say that I have a ticket, and I need to send something to a developer in Jira. I can just do that with a click from Freshservice, which makes it easy. Configuring it is also super simple.

Its ease of use is fantastic. It is just above and beyond, especially when you compare it to something like Cherwell, Salesforce, or anything like that. It is on its own level. It is so easy to administer. The way everything is organized and the way it builds its own documentation is very good. 

It integrates with a lot of things. If they don't have an integration, once you bring it to them, a lot of times, they get that working in their pipeline. They get integration with different software going. They really are looking to do things a little bit better than others, and it shows how much work they put into the platform.

Sometimes, the billing process is an absolute nightmare. That's really frustrating. If you have a straightforward contract and don't need to make changes, it is fine, but if you need to make any changes, it'll take months.

The other piece is that sometimes, they will push out updates without telling you they're doing updates, or they'll just have it as a notification. If you don't go and actively check, you just won't even know it is pushed out. You have to stay on top of it. You can't pick the version you're on. Everybody is on the same version, which is great and makes being an admin and working on the platform a much more consistent experience. For the most part, it is all pretty much the same.

As compared to the Freshdesk knowledge base, it needs work. You can't save knowledge-based templates, which is a little bit ridiculous. For example, you can't have article templates in there. These are IT people. They're not thinking about formatting. We've got to do that for them.

Some of the ways that tasks are reported on and shown can be better. You can't see tasks in your regular ticket list view. You can't see a combo view of tasks and tickets. It is a little bit difficult to get a solid overview of your list of things to do. You can only see them in separate views, instead of one single view.

There should be the ability to add screenshots into a service request without having to download and attach them because that can be really frustrating for users. You can do that in the incident version, but you can't put a screenshot in a service request, which is frustrating. The users certainly don't want to take a screenshot, save it to their computer, and then attach it just to submit the ticket. They could just print the screen.

I would like to see further integrated analytics, which is something that's on their radar. I would also like them to bring back some of the different metrics that they got rid of. I know that's on their radar too, and they're working on it. The unified bot builder is also on their radar. There is so much stuff that I know is already getting ready for deployment in the next year.

The vendor-provided training material has some room for improvement. We disabled the incidents in our portals, and the customizability of all that has also been awesome, but beyond that, it would be good if I could see how a service request goes from end to end instead of being a whole lot of things.

Their support could also be better. We have had some long-drawn-out and unnecessary experiences because of their support.

I have been using it for about two years. 

The uptime is fantastic. We very rarely have any issues with anything going down. Sometimes, it randomly slips into Arabic, which is weird, but it only happens to one user. So, I don't know what the user is doing. After refresh, it goes away. It might be a user problem.

It is scalable. We're their third largest customer, or we used to be. I don't know if we still are. It works very well for us.

We use it very extensively, and we're looking at expanding to additional teams. We have about 300 users. In this instance, I have 200, and then in another instance, I have 30 right now. I'll have another hundred in the next couple of months. We're bringing all of our dispatch operations into it. It is going to be a big list.

From a scalability perspective, it is really good, but Freshcaller isn't. We can't use their full suite of solutions because even though Freshservice is extremely scalable on its own, when we're looking at upselling to Freshcaller, they just can't support the fact that we do a million minutes a month, which is a lot.

We literally have weekly meetings with them, and for the last two years, we've had some hit-and-miss experiences. The response time is great, but when they reply with a knowledge base article, the way we are into the system, we would've already read that before approaching them. That's why we're asking them. I sometimes get a little bit frustrated about that.

Sometimes, there are some communication issues with their support. I spent a year just being like, "No, we shouldn't be in Freshdesk for this." They were telling my bosses that we should be, and I was like, "I'm telling you that's incorrect. Why are you telling my boss that? You don't even work here?" You don't even go here. What are you doing? They don't even check your circumstances. I am a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. I gave them all of our process maps and everything, and they didn't even read over them. They just kept trying to put us into Freshdesk when Freshservice was a better fit because all we do is move around trucks, trailers, and drive. That's what we do all day long. I would like to know how we would do that without asset management or a portal with forums. They were just constantly trying to get us to implement break fix after break fix after break fix instead of putting us in the right product in the first place. It wasted a year's time and money.

I brought a guy onto the call. He said the same thing to them in a guy's voice, and then they were like, "Oh, we get it now." I sent them a PowerPoint, and I said the exact same thing in email all the time. The guy was like, "I literally just said exactly what you said in the exact same words and with the same cadence." They just wanted to hear the guy say it. I said, "Are you kidding me?" And then they asked if he was my boss. He was not. I was training him. That was my one really bad experience because it went on for a full year, but it has been resolved now. Everything is good now, but I was deeply frustrated at the time. I would rate them a three out of five. That was a really long drawn-out experience, and it was so unnecessary.

Neutral

For IT specifically, we used Cherwell. Operations were working out of email, and HR was also working out of email. Cherwell is just a nightmare to work with. It is a nightmare to administer. We were able to stand up and migrate away from them so quickly and easily. It might have cost a little bit more the way that we did it, but it was completely worth it. Our reporting looks better, and our analytics looks better. Everything is drastically improved.

I run two instances of it, and I deployed both. It just depends on the needs of the business. If you need a lot of custom development, then you do, but if you don't, then you don't. It depends on the level of complexity that you have for your buildout such as:

• How many workflows do you need?
• How many admins do you have?
• How many people do you have? 

Because of the size and scope of our group, it took longer. We spent six months on it. Migration from Cherwell for IT and then for operations is an ongoing thing.

It was implemented in-house. There are three of us who work on this and the intranet full-time. It is a combo role, and then I have two people on my team. They just added intranet to my role. So, it takes three of us just to make sure that we can support because we have so many different types of teams, but a smaller team wouldn't need as many. 

We deployed IT into Freshservice about eight months ago, and we reorged IT three times since then. It is a little bit difficult to quantify right now because the teams have been moving so much, but I do know that our teams are way happier with it.

We see that the metrics are getting better. Cherwell metrics were just so bad that even our baseline was so off. We had people who just wouldn't ever close tickets. I found tickets that were three years old in VIP status in Cherwell. It was just that they would just get lost in there. Now, we actually have visibility into that.

There are some additional costs but not that many. For example, we have unlimited assets, which is something for which we pay extra. We also paid for additional orchestration. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing. They are right in the middle.

We went through ServiceNow. We went through Cherwell and then landed on Freshservice. They might have vetted other options, but that was before my time.

I would advise bringing somebody in who knows the product, at least as a part-time consultant. That's because a lot of times, they'll sell it as like, "Oh yeah, sure, just have your director of operations set it up." In some of the instances where I've done consulting work. it didn't work the way it should because one step was missed. It is very fixable, but that's also why it was not working. If you don't have someone who can dedicate time to learning how the workflows work and how to make things talk to each other within it, it can be frustrating.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It is so much better by leaps and bounds than everything else that I've worked with.