Even as winter comes with her mist, snow and rain, and the sweet anticipation of the holiday season, we’ve been working as hard as ever to make the Freshdesk experience better for you. A few weeks back, we gave our knowledge base a makeover and introduced a bunch of new integrations to make your life, and support process, as easy as it can be. Our phone channel continues to become more and more feature rich even as we seek to push the boundaries of customer support in an effort to make the user experience as frictionless as possible.
In the interest of turning that into reality, we have a slew of exciting updates to share with you! Updates and enhancements to Freshdesk that you have been requesting us. Here it goes:
1. Agent Initiated Outbound Email
Where to find it: New > Email (Next to “search” in the top navigation bar)
Who will love it: Customers
Available on: All plans
Your agents can now proactively reach out to your customers using outbound emails. Whether it’s an order update or a maintenance notice, agents can get in touch with customers right from Freshdesk without having to switch out to an email tool. The best part? The outbound emails get automatically converted into tickets as well, so all your inbound and your outbound communication end up in the same place, making it super easy for your agents.
2. Advanced Password Policy
Where to find it: Admin > Security > Password Policy
Who will love it: Administrators
Available on: All plans
When you’re dealing with sensitive customer information, you need to implement proper security measures to make sure your data is as safe as it can be. Some parts of that include setting up custom mail servers to make sure no one else is reading your messages and whitelisting IPs to make sure that access is granted only to the lucky few. Another part? Guarding against the naivety of your users. With the new advanced password policy feature, you can now improve your helpdesk security by framing stringent password policies for agents and customers. This way, you won’t have to worry about being hacked in under a minute and your users won’t set up passwords like ‘123456seven’ or ‘password’.
How to set up strong password policies
3. Dynamic forms
Where to find it: Admin > Ticket fields
Who will love it: Administrators, Supervisors
Available on: Estate, Forest
With great dollops of information come great response times. When an agent picks up a ticket, his ability to solve it at the speed of light depends not just on the complexity of the problem but also the amount of information provided in the ticket. Unfortunately, not every customer will be as detailed as you’d like them to be, so you better do everything you can to make sure you’re getting everything you need to solve the problem in a single shot. That’s why we introduced dynamic forms. You can now create forms that change based on user input. This way, you can show and hide certain sections of the form depending on the type of problem the user is raising a ticket about. And each of these sections can carry fields related to the type selected.
How to set up dynamic ticket forms
4. Merge Contacts
Where to find it: Customers > Contacts
Who will love it: Customers, Agents
Available on: Blossom, Garden, Estate, Forest
A customer, in an effort to get your attention, might reach out to you from multiple channels, through multiple addresses. Their work email, their personal email, through Twitter, through Facebook… and every time they reach out to you, a new contact is created in your helpdesk complicating your support process. You can simplify it and make it more efficient by merging these multiple contact points into one primary contact. This way, not only is it easier for agents to pull up contextual information like recent tickets and company information but customers can also enjoy seamless omnichannel service.
5. Ticket Archive
Where to find it: Back-end update
Who will love it: Agents
Available on: All plans
In order to enhance the performance of your helpdesk and make sure it’s as fast and responsive as it can be Freshdesk will start archiving closed and inactive tickets, automatically. This way, every time you get your helpdesk to pull up ticket count and other ticket properties, old and irrelevant tickets will be not be taken into account, thus making the process quicker and more efficient.
Read more about ticket archiving
6. Ticket Auto-refresh
Where to find it: Ticket detail page
Who will love it: Agents
Available on: Estate, Forest
The sign of a busy mind is a cluttered browser. Or so Albert Einstein said (sort of). It must be true because the busiest people sometimes have the most cluttered browsers. Take support agents – a lot of reps prefer to have all their tickets open as multiple tabs so that they can switch between them with ease, if necessary. The downside? The update you see might not be the latest update on the ticket. The customer could have responded since then. Its properties might have been changed by an automation. Anything could have happened. But with Freshdesk’s new auto-refresh feature, your agents will never have to worry about missing out on updates. They can just dive right in and start solving away.
Read more about ticket auto-refresh
Other updates
- Date field in ticket forms – You can now insert a date field in ticket form to collect information like purchase date from the customer, or to set reminders for agents.
- Arcade points reset – Admins can now reset points and scrap badges agents have won in Arcade when they want them to start afresh.
- Change customer password – Agents can now change the password of customers, so customers can log in without account activation.
- Bulk scenario automation – You can now execute scenarios on multiple tickets, in the ticket list page, at the same time.
- The New ticket page is now cleaner and looks infinitely more attractive.
Original Article by Prashanthini Mande
