Freshservice

What I liked most about Freshservice was the no-code setup and design of most of the services within the tool. It is very easy at being able to design the functionality that you would need your Enterprise Service Management tool to undertake and then implement it within a matter of days. This was very important to our organization because our experiences with other tools that did this were that they were either too simple to undertake the task or they required advanced knowledge or development to complete. Additionally, Freshservice is pretty simple from the administrative side too. For example, there were lots of options to set up users automatically and integrate with tools in their marketplace. We were able to automatically create and delete our employee accounts via Okta but there are more options that you can use. We also needed workflows that synced with our development tool, Jira. Instead of agents having to switch between the two tools, we have provided options so they can simply just use Freshservice to create and update these tickets from our side. We see a lot of value in things like this being added without having to pay extra to do so. Finally, I think the end user experience is second to none. The portal is easy to navigate and search. While it is certainly not the best looking, it is still pretty competitive with the best ESMs available in the world. The no-code portal designer does allow you to customize the look and feel as much as possible though, so you can build what you need. Also, using Business Teams to layout a custom agent experience for each team works really well from an administration standpoint.

Checks a lot of ITSM boxes.

Usability for the most part, like I mentioned, a lot of small missed opportunities but overall it is great.

The main thing I dislike about their tool is the tradeoff of flexibility within their app ecosystem. Many of their orchestration tools fall short of full customization because of this. For example, if I want to send a custom Web Request to something, I would have to build that outside of their orchestration tool. This is a bit difficult to do since it basically means I have to authenticate to two separate integrations to use the same feature. Given that their workflow is sort of like Okta Workflows, I was hoping it allowed for more of the custom actions stuff like Okta Workflows does. Additionally, I was not a huge fan of their Slack integration when we had it. It was not very customizable and I felt like other enterprise service platforms had a better look and design to them. Although the AI functionality works very well, I feel like adoption at our company has been slow for using Slack Chat bots in general. It was also very buggy too and business rules did not affect the Slack Bot as well which made the customization options for this limited. Certain features would stop working and we had to uninstall it several times to fix it. They should really work on improving the UI of that tool and maybe improve some of the features to be customized to the organization instead of fully relying on machine learning to provide you options. One last problem I have with the tool also relates to the customization of how the AI works. As of today, the Freddy AI features are kind of out of the box and you really can't do anything about it other than shutting it on or off. Given this, I don't think the feature is useful at all. It needs more workflow and customization like every other part of Freshservice to become useful.

Lack of flexibility of most of the modules. Seeming overlap between different modules like incident/problem/change management without enough flexibility. Reporting of agent time spent in the platform is not very good. It is hard to determine if the reporting is producing accurate results.

The development isn't all there. There are simply too many to list. I found myself a super admin of this product and found myself helping others in the forums, and Im surprised by all the small misses that would really further the development of this product. Product releases always cause new bugs that affect us negatively. When I find bugs, FS support reports that it is due to a random issue and sometimes provides an inaccurate response, but it sounds like they dont typically understand our issue. My issues typically eventually get in the hands of a developer, the support team needs to be more technical.