We are using it for IT support, desktop support, and any issues with any of our applications. We use it pretty extensively. It is the portal that we use for any requests, work being done, questions, bug fixes, and third-party software bug fixes. We even use it for tracking small projects.
It is a SaaS solution, so we have its current version.
We had over-customized HEAT to the point where it was just not very useful for a company of our size. Getting Freshdesk was like a breath of fresh air because it was simple to use. It required zero or negligible training effort on the part of my team. We just started creating tickets. We integrated it with our email so that we can auto-generate tickets. It wasn't too bad as a technical challenge, and it just worked.
Its simplicity is most valuable. It is easy and simple, and it requires negligible training effort. I don't spend all my time goofing around trying to find stuff in the ticketing system.
We have many cases where a ticket comes in, and it ends up having multiple team members working on it. It would be really nice to be able to assign a single ticket to multiple people, rather than having to create the parent-child hierarchy that they have set up. It generates a proliferation of tickets that I really don't want to have. Having to jump from a parent to one child and then to another child makes it harder for me to be able to see the entire case from end to end. A simple example is our new hire process or our termination process. We have people who leave. We also have people who come on board. We have got multiple people participating and doing things related to the leaving or onboarding process. Currently, I have to go to different tickets to be able to see whether all tasks are really done or not. If I could assign lots of people to one ticket, it would be really nice.
I have been using this solution for a year and a half.
We might've had one outage a long time ago. It was down for a fairly brief time. Other than that, it has been solid.
We don't have a huge company, so it is kind of hard to tell, but certainly, I've had zero problems with performance and being able to look at lots of tickets versus a small set of tickets. It should be fine in terms of scalability.
We have eight people in IT who are actively using it. Overall, we have 135 people in the company. They're the ones submitting tickets to us by email or by calling in, and then we create the ticket manually.
In terms of usage, I don't see it going outside of IT to the rest of the company. We use it for basically 100% of our IT work. We're pretty all in.
They were decent. I was CC'd on a couple of emails when we were setting it up initially. There was some stuff about the email integration that was probably the hardest thing we did, and we needed a little bit of technical help on that, and they were timely. We didn't have 14 different back-and-forth exchanges where you felt like they're just answering from a book rather than really listening to the problem that you have and trying to address it.
We were using HEAT. We switched because of the frustration amongst the whole team about how complex our system was. We had over-customized HEAT to the point where it was just not very useful for a company of our size. We needed something easier.
I didn't do it. It was someone from my team. He did it in three or four days in the midst of everything else he was doing. It was simple. You just add in our users. He was able to import the names of everybody from the active directory, so we got all the employees there.
We had to sit down and have a meeting to decide the lists, categories, and groupings, and then he just did it. A couple of days later, I started to use it in the pilot form, and we cut over to it fast.
We implemented it ourselves. You don't need to have anybody else do it.
In terms of maintenance, the only thing that we have to do to maintain it is just to add a new call type or something like that, but any of us can do that. It is very intuitive.
We have absolutely seen an ROI.
It was definitely not expensive. It was two grand or maybe three grand total for a year.
It has just straight and simple standard licensing fees. There is no additional fee.
If somebody is implementing a new IT service desk ticketing system, they should definitely look at Freshdesk. If they just want a lean and mean system, it is really a great option. If you need a lot of ITIL complexity and have a very large team, and there is a lot of back-and-forth with tickets and heavy approval process and stuff, it may not be suitable. We have only one of their products. They may have other products that bolt onto it and add that in. We are using the simple version, and it doesn't necessarily have all those controls, but in our case, we didn't need all that.
I would rate Freshdesk a nine out of ten. I am very happy with it.
The solution is used primarily to report incidents and then to follow up. It's mainly used for ticketing and incident resolution and tasks of that nature. I look at incidents and see the resolutions and report on that.
The solution is reasonably straightforward to use. The only thing I can say about it is, it presents me with the incidents that I've reported, so that's good. I don't have to look through a whole bunch of other incidents that aren't relevant to me. It's very useful in that sense.
The solution is very stable.
I find the way you need to attach things like screenshots and stuff is a bit gimmicky. I'm a casual user. I'll use it once every two months and only when I have an incident that I need to report. You don't get a lot of experience with it when you're just using it once in a while like that. Therefore, it needs to be more intuitive so that you don't have to re-learn how to do simple tasks as the way to do certain things just isn't obvious.
We've been using the solution for around two years now. It hasn't been that long.
The product is extremely stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. It has not been problematic at all.
I can't comment with authority, however, I would say we're a big company and there are probably lots of incidents and lots of demand for it across the company. I'm assuming it's pretty scalable.
We have around 5,000 employees in Canada. However, we're a multi-national. It may not be the case that all countries are on the same platform, however, internationally we have up to 100,000 employees.
it's used quite extensively in our company. On top of that, we are resellers, and we have many clients that we have implemented this for as well.
I've never dealt directly with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are.
I've talked a lot with our groups that implement ServiceNow, and I haven't talked to them specifically about what it's like, or what kind of support they get from ServiceNow when they're implementing. However, I would guess that it's reasonably good, as I suspect it would be a pain point for them if people complain more about things when they're not working due to the fact that it wasn't set up right.
Before the company implemented ServiceNow it was more of a conventional help desk where you as a customer would call in. They might've had a tracking system that they used, however, they didn't give it to us. The thing about ServiceNow is that you get the users to self-serve. We report our own incidents. They never used to do that before ServiceNow.
We have a team in-house that can handle implementation for clients.
I've looked into HEAT. I'm looking to evaluate it with Service Now.
I'm in consulting. I'm not in the group that does the ServiceNow implementation, however, we have people on staff who do it. We've implemented it in our company and I use it as a user, however, I'm not a guy who configures it.
I'd advise new users to get someone, such as a consultant, to help them implement the solution. I don't actually have enough knowledge about it to really give advice. My understanding is it's a good, solid system. In our company, people are quite bullish about it. The best general advice I could give is, if you're getting someone to help you implement it, make sure they're people who know their stuff. If people go for cheap and cheerful support in implementation, they can have problems.
I'd rate the product at a six out of ten. As a self-serve product, it's kind of the middle of the road compared to other online experiences you get as a consumer. It's pretty bare-bones.
