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The Freshdesk blog
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Sophia
Yippie, we just got awarded the ‘Best Web Tool – 2012′
March 26th, 2012 
Best Web Tool
There are only a handful of things that can give you that high. Like a customer telling us how much he loves Freshdesk. Or a good review that comes as a pat-on-the-back. Or an award that celebrates all the hours we put in, and the thought behind it.
It really feels awesome to receive the ’Best Web Tool 2012′ award from WebhostingSearch.com. This award stands testimony to the value addition that a product(us!) offers to its customers. Check out the whole citation here.
Sairam
Announcing Freshdesk integration with JIRA
March 21st, 2012 
Freshdesk Help desk integrates with JIRA Project Tracker
Freshdesk is delighted to announce our latest integration with project tracking tool JIRA. Used for issue tracking and project management by over 14,500 organizations in 122 countries, JIRA will enable your development team to take care of project and bug tracking, while the support team can ace all your customer communications.
With the new JIRA integration, when a customer reports an issue in Support, the Support agent can convert a ticket into a JIRA issue or link the ticket to an existing issue (if the issue is already open). When the issue is resolved or closed in JIRA, the agent can view the same in Freshdesk and update the customer with the fix.
Easy to set up and use, the integration will help your organization serve customers better by improving response time and minimizing information lapses. Customer support and issue resolution will get faster and awesomely efficient.
The integration is available with both the on-premise and on-demand versions of JIRA including the new JIRA 5.
Try Freshdesk’s JIRA integration today. You can sign up for the 30 day free trial here.
For instructions on how to integrate JIRA with Freshdesk, read our Solutions Page article here.
Sreelesh
GetApp ‘gets’ the new Freshdesk…
March 20th, 2012 
Every product team loves a good review. And so did we. Yesterday GetApp reviewed us on their blog, which we especially loved, because it captured all that’s new in Freshdesk pretty well.
The review of ‘Freshdesk 2.0’ covers: Email Commands, Email to Knowledge Base, Time Tracking & Enhanced Reporting. The review also talks about our free helpdesk for the single-man support team allowing small businesses to use all features at absolutely no cost (and that includes free support as well!).
Our Day Pass feature, in which customers can add occasional/temp agents starting at just $1 per day also gets a special mention.
GetApp calls the business case for Freshdesk ‘compelling’. Read the whole review here. If you’ve not yet experienced Freshdesk, do sign up for Freshdesk’s 30-day free trial and in the words of the GetApp reviewer, make life easy for your support agents!
Freshdesk scores 9/10 in GetApp's review
Sairam
It’s time to ‘Harvest’ something ‘Fresh’ – Announcing Integration with online invoicing service Harvest
March 20th, 2012 
Customer Billing gets easy with Freshdesk Ticketing & Harvest Invoicing
The new Time Tracking feature in Freshdesk lets agents log and track the time they spend working on a ticket. In fact, you can even generate time sheets for each customer. But how do you bill them for the time you spent doing your good work?
We’re excited to announce our latest integration, with time tracking and online invoicing service Harvest.
So what’s so exciting about that?
Harvest lives up to something we deeply value here at Freshdesk – a simple and easy interface.
If you love your customers and invoicing them through Harvest, you will be loving this integration already! You can automatically push time entries from Freshdesk into Harvest. You can then consolidate all the time spent across projects and then proceed to invoicing your clients through Harvest. Pretty cool, eh?
Check out our solutions page for a step by step instructions on how to integrate Harvest with your Freshdesk account.
Sairam
Double your ‘Fresh’ quotient with Freshdesk AND FreshBooks – Announcing FreshBooks Integration
March 15th, 2012 
Freshdesk Helpdesk integrates with FreshBooks Invoicing Software
Some time back, we announced our new Time Tracking feature that lets you track how much time your agents spend on a ticket and even generate logs and time sheets for each customer.
Of course, if you’ve gone as far as pulling out time sheets, you would probably like to invoice your customers for the time you have spent on them as well. If you are using the leading invoicing service, Freshbooks, here’s one more reason to smile: a Freshdesk integration that lets you directly invoice your customers through Freshbooks.
There’s probably not much else to say about Freshbooks except that when it comes to online invoicing, it’s somewhere on the upper limit of awesome.
To all our customers who had been asking for this particular integration on our forums and feature requests, here goes!
With the integration, you can now track time from within Freshdesk and use FreshBooks for all your invoicing needs.
For the detailed account on how to integrate FreshBooks with your Freshdesk account, you should check our solutions page article on it.
Sairam
Introducing Time Tracking in Freshdesk..
March 14th, 2012 
Generate Time Sheets with Freshdesk's Time Tracking utility
A few weeks ago, we introduced Time-Tracking in Freshdesk. This has been one of the popular feature requests from our users, especially from the consultant and web design/graphic design community. Now when your clients send you support tickets for work that needs to be performed, you can track time spent on completing these tasks from right within Freshdesk.
With the cool Start/Stop timers, you can stop counting time on your fingers and let Freshdesk track time while you focus on work. When it’s time to invoice the client, use the neat Time Sheet report in Freshdesk to generate a detailed time spent report for each client and send it to them with your invoice.
You can find specific details on how to use the new Time Tracking feature on our solutions page article. The Time Tracking feature is available to all customers on the Blossom and Garden plans.
Go ahead – try our new time tracking feature and let us know what you think about it.
(Image Courtesy – http://throttle-media.net/)
Sairam
Add Occasional agents starting at just $1 per day – Introducing the Day Pass
March 13th, 2012 
Freshdesk Day Pass for Temp Support Agents
Following feature requests from our customers for an easy and affordable way of adding occasional agents, we went to the drawing board. We wanted to give our customers the ability to scale up and down without complicating things, at a price that would rid them of the need to worry about the cost.
Introducing the Day Pass, a convenient way to add additional people to your support team without paying for a whole month. Freshdesk’s new feature enables you to add occasional agents at just $1 per day for the Sprout plan and at $2 per day for the Blossom and Garden plans.
So how does exactly does the Day Pass work? Here are a few FAQs.
1. How do I add Occasional support agents?
Go on to your ‘Admin’, click on ‘Agents‘ under ‘Everything Else‘, and you can see the page that shows all the agents. Click on ‘New Agent‘ and you can see the setting at the bottom of the page that lets you add the agent as either full time or occasional.
Adding Occasional Support Agents into Freshdesk
2. How do I buy Day Passes?
To buy more Day Passes or to access your Day Pass settings, go to your ‘Admin’ page in Freshdesk and click on ‘Day Pass Settings’ under ‘Everything else’. You get 3 Day Passes free of charge and you can add Day Passes in packs of 5, 15 or 25 up to 50.
How do I buy Day Passes?
3. Is there a limit to how many occasional agents I can add?
No. You can add any number of occasional agents and you only need to pay for them when agents login. Day Passes never expire and you can auto recharge like your Skype balance. You may use them tomorrow or two years from now, your choice.
4. How do Day Passes get charged?
Once an occasional agent logs in, a Day Pass gets activated and remains active until midnight local time of the same day. Day Passes are charged one day at a time. Please note that the Day Pass will get deactivated at midnight local time and if an agent logs in the next day, another Day Pass will be activated, costing only $1 or $2 for the entire day, not per hour.
5. What are some scenarios these will be useful?
A Product Manager might want access to the support portal in order to follow a particular chain. He would only be looking at the support portal for a few hours or a couple of days at the most. A Day Pass would be perfect for him.
The Customer Support Admin would want to add some extra agents for a few days during Christmas shopping season. But he would have to pay either for the whole month or on a hours basis, both of which wouldn’t be cost effective. He would love the Day Pass, through which he can add extra agents when he wanted and also pay on a day per day basis, making more sense for him.
Continue reading “Add Occasional agents starting at just $1 per day – Introducing the Day Pass” »
Vikram
Simon Says “Update Ticket Right From Mailbox”… with Email Commands
March 7th, 2012 It’s the weekend and you are all propped up with your favorite novel and a steaming Latte at Starbucks. The Gods despise your moment of relaxation and you receive a support notification on your shiny new iPhone. For added effect, imagine this is your super-high value customer with a question that only your colleague Bob can resolve. You know that you can put in your answers in a reply to this email and have Freshdesk send it to the customer. But how do you get the ticket bumped up to “high” priority, and have it assigned to Bob, without getting out of that comfy Starbucks couch? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could avoid even logging into your portal, and have the ticket prioritized, re-assigned and even send the customer a note that everything is under control, with just one reply right from your mailbox? Well, with Email commands, now you can!
Announcing Freshdesk’s Email Commands
With Email Commands in Freshdesk, you can pretty much “talk” to your helpdesk and spell out exactly what you want it to do with a ticket, right from your email client.
To make it even more fun, you can play a game of “Simon Says” with Freshdesk. Now with a reply like this:
You can make sure that your helpdesk automatically makes the ticket priority high, assigns the ticket to Bob and just sends the customer the rest of the email. The “commands” part gets stripped off by Freshdesk, so your customer doesn’t see what’s brewing inside your kitchen. You get to do all this magic with a simple email from your iPhone. And get back to your novel before your Latte gets cold.Have some fun. Play around with @SimonSays and let us know what you think.
For a more detailed explanation head over to our solutions page.
Do you know that Freshdesk is completely free for a one man helpdesk? And that we have special pricing for startups and charities?
Sign up for the 30 Day Free Trial here.
Sreelesh