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Freshdesk Admin Guide

Multi-Channel Support
Convert your support emails into Freshdesk tickets
When you create a Freshdesk account, you're provided with an email address that looks like this:
[email protected]. You can share this with your customers, and ask them to send
their questions to this address. Any email sent to this address becomes a ticket in Freshdesk. The
customer who sent in the question becomes the requester of the ticket.

If you already have an email like [email protected], you can continue to share that email
address with your customers for reaching out to you. But, you'll have to forward emails coming into
that address to Freshdesk so that they get captured as tickets in your account. We'll walk you through
how you can do this.

A quick guide on setting up your own support email in Freshdesk:

● Login as an Administrator to your support portal, and go to the Admin page. From here, click on Email
in the support channels section.

● Freshdesk would have created a default support email and listed it in the 'Global Support Emails'
section, as you can see below. This email is nothing but the one that you were shown when you
signed up: [email protected].

● Click on the Edit button next to your default support email.

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● Now, provide a Name for this address (something along the lines of 'Your-company Support'). The
name you provide here will be the 'From' name that your customers will see when you respond to their
emails from Freshdesk.

● Now, enter your actual support email address (i.e., [email protected]) - to which your
customers write to.
● Your support email address will also be the 'reply-to' address for all the emails you send from your
support portal.
● As you enter the support email, the forward your emails to textbox is modified. This email is invisible to
your customers. Copy this email address.
● You could assign all tickets that come from your support email to any one group of agents, by
choosing the groups listed under Assign to Group. This will be helpful when you setup ​multiple
mailboxes in your helpdesk. Alternatively, you can make use of ​Dispatch'r rules to auto-route tickets to
specific groups as well.
● Hit Save.

Verifying your email address before you start forwarding:

● The next step is to verify that [email protected] is indeed your email. You would have
received an email from Freshdesk to [email protected] with a verification link.
● Click on the verification link in the email to confirm your email address. You can also copy-paste the
link into your browser. Once you successfully verify this address, you need to setup forwarding so
Freshdesk can start capturing emails sent to this address as tickets

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 Here’s​ how you can do it if you are using Gmail.

Getting feedback from your website (via the Feedback Widget)

Freshdesk lets you collect feedback and support requests directly from your website, portal or any third
party web page. This lets your customers submit a ticket to your helpdesk without having to look
around for your self-service portal or remember your support email.

To set up your feedback widget, you need to configure it in Freshdesk and put up the code snippet on
your website. To make it available across several pages, you can set up a pop-up widget that will
appear as a small tab on the side of your screen and will open up a form when clicked. You could also
set up an embeddable widget, which will put a form directly on one of your pages (for example, the
Contact Us page).
Either way, the widget will automatically display the ticket form with all the ticket fields you have
configured inside Freshdesk. ​Follow these instructions if you want the widget to appear on a
Wordpress site.

You can choose to allow users to attach screenshots, take screenshots or search through your
knowledge base through the feedback widget. You can also ​pre-populate the ticket form with requester
information​.

A quick guide to customising and adding a feedback widget:

● Log into your support portal as an administrator.

● Click on Admin > Support Channels > Feedback Widget.
● You can place the ticket form inside your web page as a pop-up widget (accessible through a button
available across all pages in your website) or as an embedded widget (the ticket form will be placed on
the page), or both.

Pop-up Widget Button Customization

You can customize the widget button in the case of a pop-up widget. The button could display text or
an image.

● If you choose to have text in the button, you can specify the display text under Label and pick a color
for the button that suits your website from the Background option.
● If you choose to have an image in the button, you need to specify the URL of the image under Image
URL.

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● You can also choose the position of the widget button. The drop-down lets you choose where on the
page the button should appear. The offset box lets you choose how far away from the corner the
button should appear.
● Every customization you make here will be reflected in the prototype widget button. You can make
changes accordingly.

Form Customization

You can customize the ticket form in both pop-up and embedded widgets. If you choose pop-up
widget, the ticket form opens when you click the button.

● Give a title for your ticket form under Form Heading.

● Form submit message will be shown to the ticket requester after they submit a ticket through the form.
You could include a message telling your requesters when they can expect a solution to their problem.
● You can specify the height of the ticket form in pixels based on the number of ticket fields you have in
the form.
● Under Form Options, you can add more capabilities to your ticket form like:
● Letting users take a screenshot of the screen which is open (not available in embedded widget)
● Letting users attach files to their ticket
● Allowing them to search your knowledge base directly from the ticket form
● Using the widget in SSL encrypted pages. In this case, enable the Use Https toggle before copying the
code
● Preventing spam by enabling CAPTCHA in the form
● Making the form visible on mobile phones

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 Widget code

The widget code would have changed to reflect the customization update. You can copy it and paste it
in the page where you want the widget to appear.

● In case of a pop-up widget, paste the code within <title> and </title> tags of the page. If you are putting
it on your website, make sure that you paste the code on every page.
● You can use the Mobile view toggle to enable the widget on your mobile-optimized page.
● If you are using the embedded widget, paste the embedded widget code at the exact place in the page
where you want the form to show up.
● If you are using the widget in SSL encrypted pages, enable the Use HTTPS toggle and then copy the
code.
If you make any customization changes after you put the codes in place, make sure that you copy
paste the new code again.

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 Social Support - Facebook
You can add one Facebook brand page to your Freshdesk account if you're on the Sprout plan and
unlimited Facebook pages from Blossom onwards, and manage these social conversations right from
your helpdesk. You can even take your support conversations under the radar, by talking to your
customers on Facebook Messenger right from within Freshdesk.

How to add your Facebook page to Freshdesk

● Login to your support portal as an Administrator.

● Go to Admin > Support Channels > Facebook.
● Click Add Page.
● It is important to note that you'll need to be an Admin of the Facebook page you are looking to
integrate.

● After you login to your Facebook account, you will have to authorize Freshdesk (Sometimes when
page settings change, you may have to reauthorize the Facebook page - ​learn more​).
● You will then be redirected to Freshdesk and you can see the list of all the pages that are associated
with your Facebook account.

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● Use the checkbox to choose all the pages you want to integrate into Freshdesk (please note that you
cannot add the pages that are already integrated with another Freshdesk account).
● Click Associate once you're done.

Your Facebook page is now integrated into Freshdesk. By default, all visitor posts and visitor
comments on company posts containing specific keywords (see below) are automatically converted
into tickets. You can modify these setting in the Facebook Settings page.

Facebook page settings

Clicking on the Edit button next to each integrated page takes you to the Facebook Settings page for
that particular page. Here, you can modify the settings to choose which posts or messages get
converted into tickets. You can even associate a page with a specific product if you ​support multiple
products​.

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 There are three ways in which Facebook posts or comments can get converted into tickets:

1. Do not convert

● You can choose not to pull in any of your Facebook posts or comments into Freshdesk, if you would
like your support agents to focus only on visitors who engage directly via Facebook Messenger.

2. Convert only relevant posts

● This is the default option for automatic ticket conversion for Facebook. Most users looking for your
support on Facebook are likely to post their queries on your page directly or comment on one of your
company posts. You can choose to import all visitor posts as tickets automatically. To cancel out the
noise in your visitor comments and ensure you are pulling in all relevant support queries, you can look
for certain keywords and convert comments containing those keywords into individual tickets. We’ve
set up a default list of keywords that you can tweak to suit your industry or business. You can also
assign these tickets to a specific agent group, such as your social media team.
● Once a post or comment is pulled in as a ticket, you can handle them in the same way that you handle
email queries. For visitor posts, your replies will get added as comments to the general thread. For
visitor comments, your replies will appear as replies to the specific comment on Facebook.

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 3. Convert everything

● With this option, all visitor posts on your wall, as well as company posts on which any visitor has
commented on, will be converted to tickets. Once a post becomes a ticket, all the comments in that
post get appended to the ticket automatically. You can manually split each comment as a separate
ticket. ​You can know more about splitting comments here​.
● Again, you can assign these tickets to a specific agent group. Your replies from the helpdesk to these
tickets will get added as comments to the general thread on Facebook.

Converting messages to tickets

Any private chats that your visitors initiate on your Facebook page are pulled in automatically as
tickets into your helpdesk. You can reply to these tickets directly from Freshdesk and they will reach
the sender as messages. This will be the same as having a private conversation on Facebook
Messenger with your customers.

You can ensure that multiple messages from a customer regarding a single issue are threaded
together in one ticket by setting a ticket threading interval. For example, if you set the interval to 12
hours (using the drop down), the messages sent to you by the same user within 12 hours will generate
a single ticket. A good practice is to identify the standard resolution time for your industry and set the
interval accordingly. You can also assign these tickets to a specific agent group.

Facebook page tab

If you are on the Estate or Forest plan, you can use the Facebook page tab to take your self-service
portal right into Facebook - ​learn how​.

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 Click Update when you are done modifying the page settings.

You have now completed setting up Facebook for Freshdesk and can reply to all your Facebook posts
and messages right from within your helpdesk. For more information on replying to Facebook
messages from your helpdesk, ​click here​.

Social Support - Twitter

When customers are talking about your products and services on social media, it is important for you
to proactively support them right there. Taking your support social can transform your helpdesk from a
reactive firefighting role into a proactive one.

You can add a single Twitter account to your Freshdesk account if you're on the Sprout plan and
unlimited Twitter accounts from Blossom onwards. After you add your Twitter account, you can see all
tweets to your account in your Social tab. You can also convert the tweets into Freshdesk tickets
automatically and they can be seen in your Tickets tab along with tickets from other channels​.

Quick guide to adding your Twitter account

● Login to your support portal as an Admin.

● Go to Admin > Twitter > Add Twitter account.
● You will be redirected to Twitter, where you'll need to login to your account and authorize the
Freshdesk app.

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● You will be redirected again to the Edit account page in Freshdesk.
● You can control which of your agent groups can see the @mentions of this account in your Social tab.
● All your Direct Messages will be converted to tickets automatically and you can choose to convert
@mentions with certain keywords to tickets. If you ​support multiple products​, you can link these tickets
to a particular product using the dropdown.

Ticket rules
You can create rules to convert @mentions of this account containing certain keywords to tickets
automatically. You can add multiple rules, and the tweets will be converted to tickets based on the first
matching rule.

● In the first rule, enter the keyword that an @mention has to contain to be converted to a ticket. The
tickets would be created only based on the keywords specified as part of the rules.
● You can add multiple keywords in one rule by clicking enter. ​Learn how you can use the keyword box
for best results.

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● You can assign these tickets to a particular group of agents using the drop down.
● Click on the Add new ticket rules to add more rules.
● You can assign tickets to different groups in each rule. For example, you can assign tickets containing
'not fit' to the returns group and 'discount' to the sales group in your support using two rules.
● The order of rules is important as the first condition that the tweet satisfies will be executed.
● If you want to convert all your @mentions to tickets automatically, enter your Twitter account handle as
the keyword.

Please note that if you have Dispatch'r rules set up that affect the tickets created by these ticket rules,
the Dispatch'r rule will be executed. For example, say your ticket rules state that all tweets with
'payment' should be converted to tickets and assigned to the finance group. And you have a Dispatch'r
rule that assigns every ticket generated through Twitter to the social group. Now every time a ticket
mentioning 'payment' comes in, it will be assigned to the social group. So you may have to revamp the
Dispatch'r rule you've set up for Twitter tickets.

Direct Messages ticket settings

All your Direct Messages (DMs) are converted to tickets in your helpdesk automatically. They will not
appear in the streams under the Social tab.

● Threading interval is the time limit up to when a DM conversation between your account and another
account will be considered as a single ticket. Use the drop down to pick a time limit.
● The Assign to group drop down assigns all the DM tickets to a particular agent group.
● Once you save the settings, you will be able to see your tweets from the past few days under the
Social tab. If your ticket rules apply to these older tweets, they will be converted to tickets and any
follow up on that tweet by you will be added as notes in the ticket.

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All your @mentions can be seen in the Social tab. You can reply to them, convert them to tickets and
more. ​Learn more about all the options​ available in the Social
tab.

If you want to monitor general tweets about your business or competitors that do not @mention your
account, you can create a custom social stream - more on that ​here​.

Customer Portal

Every person who raises a support ticket in your helpdesk through any channel automatically becomes
a contact. You can make your customers create an account in your support portal and have them login
before they create a ticket or look at your Knowledge Base and Forums. Alternatively, they can also
use single-sign-on through Google, Facebook or Twitter to login.

In general, the email address will be the primary field for the contacts. If the customer logs in through
Twitter or Facebook, the primary field will be the Twitter handle and/or the Facebook user name
(populates the Full Name field in the contact information) respectively.

Creating an account in your support portal

A new user can create an account by clicking Sign up in the upper-right corner of the helpdesk:

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The Signup form will collect the user's name and email address. You can also ​set up captcha to
prevent spam.

Registered users can click on Login in the upper-right corner of the customer portal. (New users can
too, and then use the SSO options to login for the first time.)

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 If you would like to restrict your customers from signing up and/or logging into the customer portal, you
can modify the settings as required under Admin > Portals > Settings. A quick guide on how you can
customize this access can be found ​here​.

Note: ​You can enable the User Activation email for new users to make your account secure from
spammers. Once a user signs up, an email notification containing the activation URL is sent to them
on their registered email address; they can click on it and create a password for their Freshdesk
account. This can be managed under Admin > Email Notifications > Requester Notification. The User
Activation email will also be sent out when the contact raises a ticket for the first time in your helpdesk
via any channel.

Creating tickets from Portal:

Now that the customer has signed into their account on your support portal, they would be able to view
your KBase, Forums and also raise support tickets. By default, anybody visiting your support portal
can submit support requests and view your knowledge base and forums without logging in. You can
also force them to login before they can use your portal (​Learn how​).

Quick guide to creating support tickets on the customer portal

● After your customers login (based on your Portal settings), they can click on the New support ticket
button as indicated:

● They will be taken to your ​ticket form where they can fill out information like their 'Email Address',
'Subject' and a 'Description' of the issue they are facing, along with the additional information such as
'Name', 'Phone Number' or the 'Type' of the issue. They can also attach files to their tickets.

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● If you have your Knowledge Base set up, Freshdesk will suggest the solution articles based on what
they type in the subject box. This will help your customers get a solution without reaching your support
and will also help deflect tickets on your account.
● Once they hit the 'Submit' button, their ticket will be created in your helpdesk with the 'Source' field
value set to Portal.
● The ticket requester will be taken to the public ticket page where they can check the status of the
ticket, add replies and notes to it when needed

Quick guide to checking tickets' progress

At any point, the requesters would be able to login and check the status of the tickets they have raised
by clicking on the Check ticket status link, as shown below:

A ticket can have various statuses. The requester can filter out tickets based on the 'Status' by using
the drop down above the list of tickets:

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All Tickets view

Choosing All Tickets will show every ticket raised by the requester in the helpdesk, no matter what the
status of the tickets is.

Open or Pending tickets

For an agent, every ticket that comes in will be in the Open status by default. The agent can change
the status of the ticket to Pending when they are awaiting a response from the requester or if they're
waiting for more information from a third party. The ​SLA timers do not run when a ticket status is
Pending. For a requester, all open or pending tickets have a status of Being processed (modifiable).

Resolved or Closed

The ticket is marked as Resolved when the agent provides the solution for the customer's
question/issue. The ticket is marked as Closed when the customer confirms resolution of the ticket.

The customer will be able to reply to the ticket at any point of time to reopen it in case of further
questions.

Bringing in your support team

Full time Vs Occasional Agents

Agents in Freshdesk can be 'Full-time' or 'Occasional'. Full-time agents are those in your core support
team who will login to your help desk every day. Occasional agents are those who would only need to
login a few times every month, such as the CEO or your field staff. That way, people from other
departments in your business like sales and marketing can login and take care of specific customer
queries from time to time, without you having to purchase an additional agent seat for a whole month.

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You can add an unlimited number of Occasional Agents in your help desk no matter how many
full-time agents you paid for when you picked a plan.

Each occasional agent will use up a Day Pass for every day that they log into your support portal. For
example, if you have one day pass and an agent logs into the help desk at 8 in the morning, the day
pass will be valid until the end of the day (00.00 hrs). The EOD will be calculated based on the time
zone of the occasional agent if you are in the Garden plan or above. If you are in the Sprout or
Blossom plan, the EOD will be based on the time zone of your helpdesk.

Please note that the time remaining in 24 hours will not be carried over to the next day. And an
occasional agent will not be allowed to login when there are no day passes available.

In other ways like ​adding agents or the scope of the agent, an occasional agent will work the same
way as a full-time agent.

Usage History lets you keep a tab on occasional agents who use your purchased day passes by
tracking the date, agent name, and email address. An admin can access it from Admin Tab > Account
Settings > Day Passes. You can pull up usage history for the last 90 days and it also has a filter to
narrow down your usage based on agent names as well.

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 Adding new support agents

You can add ​full-time and occasional agents to your helpdesk and assign them scopes and roles. You
can restrict which parts of your helpdesk each of your agents can see and what actions they can
perform.

A quick guide to adding agents to Freshdesk​​:

● Login to your support portal as an Administrator

● Click on the Admin tab on the left panel > General Settings > Agents
● The list of agents in your helpdesk is shown
● The number of agents seats still available in your helpdesk is shown on the top right corner. You can
add more seats by visiting Admin > Account Settings > Plans & Billing
● To add a new agent, click the New Agent button in the top fold

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● You can choose whether your new agent should be a full-time or an occasional agent using the radio
button
● You will get 3 free day passes (as a whole, for an account) for occasional agent access. An occasional
agent will use up a day pass every day he/she logs in. So with 3 passes, 3 occasional agents can
each log in once or one agent can log in for 3 days. To add more day passes, click on 'Day Passes'
under the Admin tab

● Now let's try adding a full-time agent (the procedure is the same for occasional agents)
● Specify the email address of the agent under Email (required field)
● Once you enter the email address, the system will check if this is an existing user on your account. If
so, you will be notified of the same. If the email address is new, you will get the option to enter further
details - Full name, Work number, Mobile number and Title.
● You can add a profile picture for your agent, or it can be added later on by the agent after logging in

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● If you want all your agents to use a standard signature, you can use the Signature box to fashion it.
You can add pictures, links, and format the text completely, and you can copy the signature and paste
in signature box of other agents too

Roles and scope

● The scope of an agent is what the agent will be able to see in the helpdesk. By default, the scope is
Global (the agents can see everything in the helpdesk). You can also choose whether they should only
be able to see tickets assigned to them (Restricted access) or see all tickets assigned to the Agent
Group that they belong to (Group access)
● Every agent must have a role. A role defines what the agent can or cannot do within the helpdesk. For
example, an 'Account Administrator' has complete control over the helpdesk, including payments while
an 'Agent' can only perform actions on tickets such as replying and resolving. ​Learn more about roles
and how they ​differ from scope

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 Associating groups to agents

● You can add agents to one or more groups when you are adding them to the helpdesk
● Click on the Associate Groups button to see the list of groups available and choose the groups to
associate with your new agent

Language and time-zone options

● If you're on the Garden plan or above, you can set specific ​languages for agents. The agents will see
the support portal in the language chosen.

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● Additionally, on the Estate and Forest plans, you can set specific time zones (that take effect on their
SLA policies​) for each agent on your helpdesk.
● Levels will come in handy if you're on the Blossom plan or above and have the Arcade enabled. The
level of an agent in ​Freshdesk Arcade is based on the points collected by the agent based on different
metrics like fast responses and customer satisfaction ratings. You can start up your agent at different
levels. ​Learn more​ about levels in Arcade.
● Click Save after you've entered all the necessary information.

● The agent receives an ​activation email​ through which the agent can log in and set the password.
● Back on the agents page, you can click on the Edit button next to each agent and make changes to
their information.
● You can also delete agents by clicking on the Delete button. When an agent gets deleted, they will
become a contact in your helpdesk.
● Once an agent has been deleted, tickets assigned to that particular agent will be unassigned.

'Existing Freshworks user' error

Sometimes when you try adding an agent you might receive an error message saying that the user
already exists. This could be due to one of two reasons:

● The email address is already associated with an agent.

● The email address is associated with an existing or deleted 'Contact' in your helpdesk.

In this case, you can just convert a contact into an agent by going to the Customers tab in Freshdesk,
clicking on the contact name and choosing Convert to an Agent in the resulting screen.

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'Converting to agent will delete all the secondary emails of this contact' message

When you use the 'Convert to an Agent' option for a contact, you would be prompted with a pop-up
message: 'Converting to agent will delete all the secondary emails of this contact.

An agent can have only one email address associated with their agent profile. This message is to let
you know that in case the contact has more than one e-mail address associated, the primary e-mail
address will be taken as the agent's email address and the remaining email addresses (secondary
email addresses) would be deleted.

Organizing Agents into Groups

You can organize your agents into different groups to help them focus on certain types of issues, and
get to know the solutions and customers better. Each group can have different kinds of canned
responses and other automations specific to them. You can set the visibility of agents as "restricted" so
they can see only the tickets assigned to their group. This will reduce the clutter and let them work
efficiently.

For example, if you are managing support in an e-commerce store, you can create a group named
"Returns and Exchanges" and assign tickets containing the words "return" or "different size" to them,
using Dispatch'r.

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 A quick guide to creating a new Group:

● Login to your support portal as an administrator.

● Go to the Admin > General Settings > Groups.
● The default groups available are listed; you can click on the Edit button next to each group and add
agents.
● Or you can create a new group by clicking on the New Group button on the top fold.
● Give a name to your group under Group Name.
● Enter a description for the group under Description.
● In the Agents text box, enter the names of the agents whom you want in this group.
● If you want tickets to be automatically assigned to your group and then to the agents within the group,
you will have to create dispatch'r rules:
○ 1. To assign the tickets containing certain keywords to this new group you created (​Learn
how​)
○ 2. To assign the tickets to particular agents within the group automatically (​Learn how​).
■ Please note that automatic ticket assignment to agents within a group can be done
only in the Estate and Forest plans.
● After a ticket has been assigned to a group and it has not been assigned to anybody within the group
for a particular amount of time, you can set up an escalation email to be sent out to particular agents.
This will make sure that no ticket falls through the crack. You can select the time limit and the agent to
whom the escalation email should be sent to from the drop-down. You can also edit the content on the
email notification (​Learn how​).

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● If you're on the Garden, Estate or the Forest plan, you will be able to set different business hours for
each group, which will be helpful if your team works in shifts. ​Learn more about multiple business
hours.
● Once you are done, click Save.

Now all your agents are organized into groups and you can see their performances in the ​helpdesk
reports​.

Bringing in your Customer Base

The ‘Customers’ tab and what it can do

The 'Customers' tab in your helpdesk allows you to manage the details of contacts and companies that
you keep in touch with. It gives you complete control over the data related to your clients. You can:

1. Create New Contacts or New Companies

2. Import CSV files to add and/or update contacts' details in bulk

3. Export contacts as a CSV file
4. Edit, delete and/or otherwise manage contacts
5. Perform quick search actions using the 'Search' bar on the contact and company list page to access
the required contact/company

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 You will have numerous people interacting with your helpdesk over a period of time. To keep track of
them, you can create them as contacts in your customer list. You can also create a new company and
map the required contacts under this company.

Contacts:

Freshdesk automatically creates an entry for every new user who sends in an email, tweet or submits
a ticket to your helpdesk. If you receive a ticket from an existing contact, Freshdesk will associate that
ticket with the corresponding user contact and display the details in the ticket page. You can also view
all the previous tickets from a client/user by visiting their individual contacts page.

Companies:

The 'Companies' feature allows you to group together users/contacts from the same organisation. This
allows you to easily keep track of all correspondences with members from the same company, in one
place. Based on the registered domain name, Freshdesk will automatically associate all incoming
tickets from users with the relevant domain, to the appropriate company and the entire list can be
viewed in that company's page.

Importing and Exporting Customer data

Importing Data

You can import contact and company information from a CSV into your Freshdesk account. Importing
customer data allows you to make bulk updates and additions to your database with ease.

You can also import all the custom fields you have in both contacts and companies.

Before you import data, make sure that the CSV file follows these guidelines:

● The first line of the CSV file is the column header which contains the fields names like Name, Email,
Title, etc.
● The CSV file must contain Name and Email address or Name and Phone number, without which the
contacts will not be imported.
● The email address and URL should be in the correct format. (Example - [email protected] and
http://freshdesk.com/​ or ​https://freshdesk.com/​)
● Please note that the email address is the unique identifier. This allows you to have multiple contacts
with the same name as long the email address provided is different. Also please note that if the CSV
file contains an email address of an existing contact in Freshdesk, the import will overwrite the existing
contact.

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● If you have more than one email address associated with a contact, please use the format given in the
screenshot below to make sure data import is completed properly. You can add upto 9 secondary
emails for one contact apart from the 1 primary email, allowing a contact to have 10 emails associated
with it.

● In order for the phone channel in Freshdesk to recognize your phone numbers, you should have the
country code clearly specified. For example, 4088481234 or 408-848-1234 should be written as
+14088481234 in your CSV file before you import into Freshdesk.
● If you have more than one company associated with a contact, kindly use the format given in the
screenshot below to make sure data import is completed properly. Customers can now send yes || no
|| yes for each company to see all tickets from the company. (This feature is available only if you have
enabled one contact multiple companies feature.)
● Value of a dropdown field should only be the choices available for that particular field in the helpdesk.
● The existing details of contacts and companies will be overwritten/updated after an import.
● A checkbox field only accepts yes or no. Any other value encountered during the import will be
considered as no.
● If you have a tag field with multiple tags, every tag should be separated by a comma.
● Please ensure that your CSV file is in UTF-8 format and the first row has the header information
(example: name, email, phone etc.)

Note: The first company in the company column in the CSV will be made the primary company for that
contact.

To import customer data into your helpdesk:

● Go to the Contacts > Import button. To import Companies, use the same button in the Companies
page (accessible via the hamburger icon in the upper-left corner of the page).

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● Click on Upload a File. Navigate to where the CSV file is located on your computer and select it.
● If you have custom fields in your CSV file, ensure that those fields are first added to Freshdesk before
you import. Go to Admin > General Settings > Customer Fields to add custom fields.

● After you map the information, click on the Import button and wait for Freshdesk to finish importing the
data. It will not take more than a few moments.
● If you want to import company information of the customer, you will have to add a company column in
your CSV. If the company name in the CSV does not exist in your helpdesk, a new company will be
created.
● If you are trying to import contacts in bulk, you can refer to ​this article for the various timezones and
languages that you can use in your CSV for the configuration.
● Once you are done, you will receive an email about the status of the import. The import of fields which
does not follow the guidelines listed above will fail. The failed rows will be attached to the status email
as a CSV file and it will contain the reason for the failure.

Exporting Data

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 You can export your customer data as a CSV file at any time. To start exporting:

● Go to the Contacts tab in your helpdesk.

● Click on Export.
● Select the fields you wish to export. (Custom fields that you've created will also be seen.)
● Click on the Export button.
● A file containing all the data that you selected will be sent to your helpdesk's associated email address.

You can export company information by clicking on the Companies option from the left corner of the
Contact page (using the hamburger icon) and then follow the same procedure. Exported data will be
sent to you through email.

Note: Exporting based on the tags added for each contact is currently not an option. It can be filtered
through the UI but, upon exporting, the entire contact list will be exported and not just the contacts
associated with the chosen tag.

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 Generating a sample file: In order to make sure all the fields (default and custom) are available in your
CSV import file, you can trigger a sample Contacts/Companies export, edit the file and then use this
file for your import.

Setting up your account

Setting up a vanity URL and pointing the CNAME

Although you use Freshdesk for support, you may want your customers and support agents to access
your support portal in your own vanity URL like support.yourcompany.com. In that case, you can point
your support URL at support.yourcompany.com to the Freshdesk domain your signed up with, like
yourcompany.freshdesk.com. Just make sure you have created a ​CNAME record in your DNS zone
file to point your vanity URL to your Freshdesk domain.

Quick guide to setting up Freshdesk on your own URL

Step 1: Creating a CNAME record in your DNS Zone File

● Login to your Domain Control Panel

● Go to the section which says DNS or Name Servers
● Create a new CNAME record with name/host/alias as your custom support URL pointing to value
yourcompany.freshdesk.com
● TTL: Enter a Time To Live between 30 minutes to 1 hour, or leave this field in its default settings
● You may need to fill in these details:
● Alias Name: Enter the subdomain name for your alias. For example, if you want to use a vanity support
URL like support.mycompany.com, enter 'support' as your alias name
● Point to Host Name: Type @ to directly map the alias to your Freshdesk domain
● Save changes to your DNS records

Step 2: Verify your domain with TXT record

● Login to your Domain Control Panel

● Go to the section which says DNS or Name Servers
● Create a TXT record in your DNS and point fdkey.<custom-support-url> to the verification code
generated in Freshdesk. For example: If your custom support URL is support.mycompany.com and the
verification code is 2b59746c1aad1db40722a183fb558346, the TXT record should be set as follows:
fdkey.support.mycompany.com pointing to 2b59746c1aad1db40722a183fb558346
● You will find your unique verification code next to your Portal URL under Admin > Helpdesk > Edit
Portal
● Save changes to your DNS records

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 Note: These instructions may vary a bit based on your domain registrar. If you are unable to find a way
to add the DNS record, get help from your webmaster or your server administrator.

Step 3: Setting up your Helpdesk URL in Freshdesk

● After creating the CNAME record, login to your Freshdesk portal as an administrator
● Go to Admin > Helpdesk > Edit Portal (​Learn more​ about Rebranding your Freshdesk Account)
● Under Portal URL type your vanity support URL (support.mycompany.com)
● Click Save to save the new settings and to start using your own support URL

Once done, you can verify your changes by entering your support URL in ​this page and looking up
your CNAME records.

Please refer to ​this​ article on how you can configure a custom SSL certificate for your support portal.

Supporting Multiple Products with Freshdesk

Freshdesk lets you support multiple products from a single helpdesk without having to pay for any
extra licenses.

Using a single helpdesk for an entire organization works all right, but wouldn't your customers love to
have a dedicated support portal for each of your products? Freshdesk allows you to have separate
portals for each of your products, without creating and paying for more accounts. You can give them
different URLs, and also hide irrelevant forums and solutions by restricting them to specific categories.

The agent interface will remain the same for both products. Unless segregated by automation rules,
agents can see tickets from all products in their ticket view.

With each of your products, you can have:

● Unlimited product-specific incoming support mailboxes (like [email protected],

[email protected])
● Unlimited product-specific outgoing support mailboxes
● A separate branded customer support portal for each product
● Separate knowledge base articles for each product
● Distinct community forums for each product

Quick guide to setting up multi-product support

Setting up a Product

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● Go to Admin > General Settings > Multiple Products.
● Click New Product, and enter the Product Name and Description.
● To configure unique support emails for each product and assign them to specific groups, fill in the
details under Product Support Email.
● Remember to configure the ​forwarding rule in the corresponding mailbox to convert the emails into
tickets.
● Save your settings.

Setting up a Portal

● Go to Admin > General Settings > Multiple Products.

● Click on Enable Portal.
● Enter the Portal URL and configure the Portal settings.
● You can also associate the required Solution and Forum categories you wish to display on that specific
portal under Portal Categories.

Note: Portals can be set up and configured from the Portals page too (Admin > Support Channels >
Portals).

Customising your ticket form

The ticket form includes a bunch of fields like Requester, Subject and Description, by default.
However, you can customize the ticket form to include different fields specific to the type of your

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business or your support process. You can collect customer information that is unique to your
business by creating custom fields for these details.

What are the different types of ticket fields?

Freshdesk has different kinds of ticket fields that let you capture various types and levels of
information. For example, you could use single line text fields to collect one line information like the
name of the company, and you could add drop down fields to give your customers a list of options to
choose from.

Custom field type Example use-cases

Single line text Customer name, company name.

Multiline text Additional descriptions, addresses,

notes.
Checkbox Subscriptions, Agreements.

Number Order ID, Phone number, etc.

Dropdown Quantity, Size, etc.

Date Purchase date, complaint date etc.

Decimal Percentage values.

Dependent Fields Country - State - City

One of the most important field types you can use in Freshdesk is the Dependent field, which lets you
create a three-level hierarchy that is dependent on the user's choice in the previous level. You can
learn more about it in ​our solution article here​.

You can also create dynamic sections for your custom dropdown fields so that different sets of fields
can appear based on the option a user chooses within the dropdown. You can know ​more about
dynamic sections here​.

Managing field properties

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In addition to adding new fields and rearranging them, you can also drill down and define the
properties of each and every field in your ticket form. This can be used to control what your agents and
your customers see in the ticket form and to manage your workflows better in your helpdesk.

Here are a bunch of things you can do with your fields.

Behavior What it means

For Agents
Field label Displays name of the field shown to your agents
Required when submitting the The agent should fill the field before submitting the form
form
Required when closing the The agent should fill the field before closing the ticket
ticket*
For Customers
Field label Display name of the field shown to your customers
Displayed to customer The customer will be able to see the field but won't be allowed to edit

Customer can edit The customer will be able to see this field and edit the value
Required when submitting the The customer should fill the field before submitting the form
form

Field properties work the same way for all your ticket fields and can be easily customized in such a
way that your agents get to keep track of information, and customers get to see only what's necessary

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 to them. The lock symbol displayed next to ticket fields indicate that these fields are only visible to the
agents and are not visible to the customers.

*When an agent attempts to close tickets without filling in the required fields, they will be prompted to
update these fields. ​Here is how agents can update fields and close tickets in bulk.

Creating dynamic forms

You can make your ticket form dynamic so that the fields change based on the user input. In
Freshdesk, you can add dynamic sections under the default field Type as well as any custom
dropdown fields that you create. ​Learn how to create custom dropdown fields here. Different sets of
fields can appear based on the option a user chooses within the dropdown. For example, in an
e-commerce scenario, the user can see 'Enter order ID' field when he chooses 'Return' as the type
field value and 'Select new size' field when he chooses 'Replacement'.

Using dynamic sections in your ticket form will improve the structure and help your agents filter tickets
easily and resolve them faster.

Quick guide to creating dynamic forms:

● Log into your account as an administrator.

● Go to the Admin > General Settings > Ticket Fields.
● You can associate dynamic sections with any 2 dropdown fields in your ticket form. ​This can be either
the Type field and 1 custom dropdown field, or any 2 custom dropdown fields.
● A dropdown can have multiple sections and each section can have multiple different fields.

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● Click on the Add Section button (the plus icon next to the dropdown field). ​In the following
pop-up, give the section a title and associate it with a value in the dropdown. When the end user
chooses a particular dropdown value, the associated section will be displayed to them.

● You can customise the fields in each of the Sections by using a variety of form fields. Here is a list of
drag-and-drop form fields and their typical use-cases.

Custom field type Example use-cases

Single line text Customer name, company name.

Multi Line text Additional descriptions, notes.

Checkbox Subscriptions, Agreements.

Number Order ID, Phone number, etc.

Dropdown Quantity, Size, etc.

Date Purchase date, complaint date etc.

Decimal Percentage values

Dependent Fields Country, State and City

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● The fields created under each section will appear as custom fields in the ticket view filters. They can
also be used to create automation rules.
● You can drag and drop any of the form fields under each Section. You can also rearrange the order of
the fields within a section.

● You can delete a section by clicking on the trash can icon next to its name. Please note that you won't
be able to delete a section unless you delete the fields under each section.
● You cannot create a new field with an existing field name. If you want to create a field that has already
been created under a section, you have to copy/move it to your new section.
● You can move or copy fields from one section to another by dragging and dropping them in the target
section.
○ Moving a field from the source section to the target section will remove the occurrence of that
field in the source section and will move it to the target section.
○ Copying a field from the source section into the target section will retain the occurrence of that
field in the source and will merely add a copy of it into the target section. Copying will not
create a new instance of the field. You can copy a field when you want to use the same field in
multiple sections.

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● Once you have customized the form, click Save. Now your agents and customers will see the new
dynamic form when they create a ticket.

The dynamic ticket form - Agent view

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The dynamic ticket form - End-user view

Note: The dynamic ticket fields feature is available only for Estate and Forest plans. If you set up
dynamic forms and then downgrade to a lower plan, the form structure will be removed but all the
fields will remain (i.e) the dynamic fields will be moved out of the sections. No data will be lost in the
process.

Controlling agent access with Roles

Roles allow you to create special privileges and profiles that specify what an agent can see and do
within your Freshdesk support portal. These roles help you categorize your team into different
sections, and assign them different capabilities so that they can do what they need to on their
helpdesks without getting in each other's way. They're especially useful for larger teams, where there
are different groups of employees trying to handle different areas.

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 By default, Freshdesk lets you choose between 4 roles for your team members:

● Agents: Can view, respond to and assign tickets, as well as modify ticket properties.
● Supervisors: Can view and respond to tickets, generate reports and can also enable automatic ticket
assignment of the member groups under the Admin tab.
● Admins: Can access everything and edit configurations under the Admin tab, but cannot view or
modify billing information.
● Account Admins: Have complete access to everything, including billing and account management.

Note: The Restricted agent role in above image above is a custom role that you can create from the
Estate onwards - ​learn more.

Each time you add a new agent to your helpdesk, you'll have to specify their role. Once you apply a
role to an agent, the agent will no longer be able to view or access options or updates outside their
role. For example, if an agent has the role of Agent, they won't be able to see the Admin tab.

If you assign multiple roles to an agent, the highest privileges allowed across these roles will apply.
For example, if you have one role that gives a user access to your Community Forums and another
that allows them to Reply to Tickets, a user with both roles will be able to access your community
forums ​and​ reply to tickets.

How to assign a role to an agent

● Go to Admin > Roles.

● The number of agents belonging to each role will be displayed; just click on a role to add more agents
to it.

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 Alternatively, you can assign roles when adding/editing an agent:

○ Login to your helpdesk portal as an Admin.

○ Go to Admin > Agent to add a new agent (or hover over an existing agent in your list and click Edit.)
○ Scroll down to the Roles and Scope section, and click Associate roles.
○ Check all roles that you want to assign to this agent.
○ Click Save to save this agent’s roles.

When adding a role to a particular agent, remember to also set the scope of tickets that the agent can
view. You can learn more about ​Roles and Ticket Scope here​.

Working with Ticket Templates

Ticket templates let you fill up your new ticket form or the new email form with one click. As an
administrator, you can create templates where you pre-fill information like subject, description and
ticket properties. These templates can be used by your agents and yourself to quickly create tickets
and send emails.

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 For example, when your agent is on a call with customers back to back, they don't have to fill up all the
details and type out the description of the ticket/email after every call. They can quickly apply a
template, create a ticket/email and move on to the next call.

Creating a ticket template

● Log into your account as an Administrator.

● Click on the Admin icon from the left panel.
● Under Helpdesk Productivity, click on the Ticket Templates icon.

● Click on the New Template button to create a new template.

● Give an understandable name for your template as it will be used by agents in a hurry.
● After giving a description to your template, you can choose if this template can be seen by all agents
or only by agents in particular groups. This is to make sure that the template doesn't clutter the view of
those agents who will find no use of it.
● The 'Ticket/Email form' section has all the default and custom fields that are visible to the agents
except the requester and source fields. You can create a template by filling in as many fields as you
want.

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○ In addition to the default ticket fields, you can pre-fill tags and attach documents in templates.
○ Note: Please refrain from adding signatures to the email/ticket using the ticket templates. You can
create your own signature under profile settings section and that would automatically get populated in
the ticket form when you're trying to create a ticket/an outbound email.
○ Once you fill in all the details you need, click on the Save button.

Using canned responses in ticket template description

You can also use canned responses you have already created within the template. This way, the
responses you created for agent replies to tickets can also be used in new tickets and emails.

To insert a canned response, click on the star icon on the top right of the description box.

Applying templates in new ticket and new email forms

When a template is applied to a new ticket/email, all the field values will be overwritten by the template
field values. For example, if your agent sets priority as 'High' and then applies the template in which
the priority is set as 'Low', then the resulting ticket form will have priority set as 'Low'. So if there are
some fields that your agents need to fill out manually, it needs to be done after the template is applied.

Your agents can insert ticket templates in their new ticket form by clicking on the New Ticket button
and choosing a template from the list of available templates on the right.

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Similarly, to apply a template to an outbound email, go to New > Email and click on the required
template from the list of available templates on the right. It is advisable to clearly differentiate the
templates while naming them because unlike ticket descriptions, email subjects need to have
salutations and signatures.

After the template is applied, agents can edit the field they want or just create the ticket/email after
filling the requester field.

Automating your workflow

Ticket Assignment using Dispatch’r Automation

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 The Dispatch'r rules run on every incoming ticket and perform actions based on previously-specified
conditions. The Dispatch'r lets you automate actions such as:

● Assigning tickets to the right agents

● Setting status, priority, and type
● Sending email notifications to agents and requesters
● Deleting tickets or marking them as spam

These actions can be performed on a ticket either on the basis of ticket properties, or which
company/contact created the ticket. Here are the three kind of fields
and what they mean:

Name Where to find it Visibility

Ticket fields are the properties Admin > General Settings > Ticket Fields Agents and customers
of a ticket such as ticket (customers can see and edit
status, priority, subject, fields allowed by helpdesk in
description, etc. the ticket form)
Contact fields are the Admin > General Settings > Customer Agents and customers
properties of the requester of Fields > Contacts (customers can see and edit
the ticket, such as requester fields allowed by helpdesk in
email, timezone etc. profile settings)
Company fields are the Admin > General Settings > Customer Agents
properties of the company of Fields > Companies
the ticket requester, such as
company name, domain etc.

By default, the ticket fields will be selected. Under Select condition, all default and custom fields
related to the chosen field will be populated.

A quick guide for creating a Dispatch’r rule

○ Log into the helpdesk portal.

○ Go to Admin on the left panel > Helpdesk Productivity > Dispatch'r.
○ Click on New Rule.
○ Enter an appropriate name and description for the rule you'd like to create.
○ Create Conditions which act as a trigger for this particular rule.
■ Choose the type of field using the buttons (ticket, contacts or company).
■ Select the field you want from the dropdown list.
■ Specify whether all conditions need to be matched to trigger the rule, or just one.
○ Under Actions, choose the action which should be taken on the ticket once the rule is triggered.

■ If you'd like to send a notification email, you can use ​placeholders​ to help frame the​ content.

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 ■ Add multiple conditions/actions by clicking on the + button, and delete rules using the - button.
■ Rearrange conditions/actions by hovering over the menu button next to the -.

● Once you've finished setting up all the conditions and actions, click Save.

As an example, here's a rule that filters tickets sent by unhappy customers with high revenue, sets
their status to Urgent, and assigns them to a particular agent - let's call him David:

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You can also use the options in the dropdown list to set up a combination of AND and OR conditions in
the rules. This can be very useful while setting up rules for complex workflows - for example, here's a
rule that sends a notification to an assigned agent when the ticket priority is Urgent/High, the ticket
type is a Query/Problem, and the source is Email:

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 The Skip new ticket email notifications option under Actions will come in handy when the ​'New ticket
created' email notification​ is not required, based on specific conditions.

For example, in case you receive multiple tickets that are ads or brochures from no-reply email
addresses, you'll want to close them and mark as spam automatically, while also making sure that
your agents aren't spammed with the notification email indicating that a new ticket has been created.
In this case, you can use the configuration shown below:

Multiple Dispatch'r rules

● You can create multiple Dispatch'r rules to assign different kinds of tickets to different teams.
● All the rules created will be visible under Admin > Dispatch'r, where they can be activated, deactivated,
edited or deleted.
● The order of the rules is very important because, on any ticket, only the first matching rule will be
executed.
● When more than one rule is activated, a reorder button appears - you can use it to drag and drop the
rules in the order you'd like.

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 Note: The Dispatch'r rule will not be executed on deleted tickets and those that are ​marked as spam​,
upon ticket creation.

Automatic ticket assignment to agents within a group

Tickets can be assigned either manually or automatically to agents or groups. However, when a ​ticket
gets assigned to a group through the Dispatch’r, it does not mean that the ticket is assigned to one of
the agents in the group. It just means that a notification is sent out to ​all t​ he agents in the group.
Automatic ticket assignment helps you to automate this process of assigning tickets to the online
agents in your group.

Automatic ticket assignment can be achieved by the following methods:

● Round-robin ticket assignment

When tickets are assigned to a group for the first time or reassigned from another group, they are
assigned in a circular fashion to the agents who are online in that group. For example, if you run an
e-commerce business, your support tickets are most likely to be transactional in nature; involving
questions on recent orders, refunds, FAQs, etc. Naturally, you‘d want these tickets to be quickly
resolved by any of the agents available in the helpdesk. Round-robin makes sure tickets are equitably
distributed among the online agents so they always have tickets to work on. (​Learn more about it
here.)

● Load balanced ticket assignment

Not ​all of your agents will log into the helpdesk at the same time. If just one agent is logged in, all
incoming tickets will get assigned to this one agent. This leads to the agent working on

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 previously-assigned tickets as well as simultaneously managing the rush of incoming tickets. For
example, if you run an IT services business or a product company, this situation will be more
pronounced since tickets such as product bugs take longer times to resolve. Load balanced ticket
assignment makes sure your online agents are assigned tickets based on a threshold value of tickets
you set. (​Learn more​ about it here.)

● Skill based ticket assignment

If you have specific agents in a group who are more skilled at handling certain kinds of tickets, you will
want to route those tickets directly to these agents. For example, if you have a global customer base,
you might have agents specialized in handling tickets from a specific language, say Spanish. Within
each group, you would want to assign tickets that have Spanish as the requester language to the
Spanish-speaking agents in a uniform manner. Skill based ticket assignment will enable you to easily
match tickets to the right agents by assigning skills to your agents and creating rules that will map
these skills to tickets. When a ticket skill and an agent skill match, the ticket will be automatically
assigned to the agent. ​Learn more​ about it here.)

Changing agent availability status

Incoming tickets are now automatically getting assigned to the agents, so your job as a supervisor just
became easier. However, there could be several instances when an agent might want to avoid getting
more tickets, such as when he/she is working on a high priority ticket or is on the phone with a
customer.
Agents can change their availability if you’ve given them the privilege - You, as an Admin or
Supervisor, have the ability to let your agents choose whether they want to be assigned tickets through
the automatic ticket assignment.

Quick guide to giving agents the privilege to change their availability:

● Login to your support portal as an Administrator.

● Go to Admin > Groups.
● Select the group for which you want to give the agents the privilege of changing their availability.
● Turn on the toggle for Automatic ticket assignment and click the check the box to Allow agents to
change their availability for automatic ticket assignment.
● Click Save.

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 Time based automations using the Supervisor rule
The Supervisor in Freshdesk allows you to bring your workflows into your helpdesk and define specific
actions based on time- and event-based triggers.

For example, say a customer's submitted a ticket but the agent's been unable to solve the problem
because the information is inadequate. It's been a couple of days and the user still hasn't replied.
Traditionally, your agent would have to remember the ticket, go back and send out another reminder
email.

However, with the Supervisor, you could set up a simple rule to send out automatic reminder emails if
the customer hasn't gotten back with the information in, say, 24 hours.

The Supervisor runs once every hour and processes all recent tickets - tickets updated in the past 30
days. Supervisor rules are processed sequentially, but a rule may cause certain actions that trigger
subsequent rules.

A quick guide for creating a Supervisor rule

● Login to the helpdesk as an administrator.

● Go to Admin > Helpdesk Productivity > Supervisor.
● Click New Rule.
● Enter an appropriate name and description for the rule.
● Define the conditions which act as a trigger for this particular rule:
○ Choose the condition elements from the dropdown list and define the condition filters
○ You can add additional conditions by clicking Add new condition
○ Specify whether all conditions need to be matched, or just any one, in order to trigger the rule

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 ○ You can also perform OR operations on dropdown ticket fields (default and custom)
○ You can delete a condition by clicking on the corresponding - icon
○ Add the first task you would like to perform by selecting an Action from the dropdown list.
○ For example, to set ticket priority as High, select Set Priority as in the first dropdown list and
choose High.
○ Add more actions by clicking Add new action.
○ You can delete any action by clicking - icon.
○ Click Save once you're done.

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 The list of supervisor rules created will be listed on the Supervisor page. Edit or delete existing entries
by hovering over the option and choosing Edit or Delete/Deactivate.

If you want to create a supervisor rule that is very similar to an existing one, you can use the Clone
feature to essentially make a clone of that particular rule.

Notes:

● The conditional elements are not case-sensitive. So if you're setting a rule that acts on tickets whose
subject contains 'Refund', the rule will get activated regardless of whether you use 'Refund' or 'refund'.
● You cannot specify more than one keyword in a condition i.e if you're setting up a rule that acts on
tickets whose subject contains 'refund' or 'payment', you have to specify only one keyword per
condition (i.e a condition for 'refund' and one for 'payment') and select the Match Any condition radio
button.
● If you're setting up a rule which acts on tickets whose subject contains 'refund', tickets with the words
'refunded' in their subject will also match the rule. Similarly, a rule which is supposed to act on tickets
whose subject contains 'want a refund' will also act on tickets whose subject has 'want a refund now'.
However, tickets whose subject contain 'refund' will not be acted on by this second rule.
● The Supervisor rule runs based on Calendar hours and gets executed appropriately.

Event Based Automations using the Observer Rule

The Observer lets you automate actions on your helpdesk when specified events occur in a ticket in
real time. You can use it to modify statuses, change priorities and even send out notification alerts as
soon as certain conditions are met. For example, you could get the Observer to reopen resolved
tickets automatically as soon as a customer replies, or to send an email to the Head of Support the

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minute a customer submits an unsatisfied rating; thus ensuring that your agents don't have to waste
time waiting for certain events to occur and that you can stay on top of things as they happen.

Unlike the Dispatch'r (which acts on newly-created tickets) and the Supervisor (which runs once every
hour and checks all tickets in the helpdesk against its rules), the Observer is a trigger-based
automation that constantly watches all activities in your helpdesk and matches them against the
conditions you've specified. Also, the Dispatch'r comes into play at the time of ​creating ​a new ticket
whereas the Observer comes into play when you need any actions to be taken on existing tickets
based on a trigger.

Anatomy of the Observer

a) What triggers this rule? Any ticket-related event in the helpdesk that is caused by a user causes the
Observer to spring into action.

b) Who causes the event? You can choose to mention whether the rule should only be executed if an
agent causes the event, if a requester does, or either.

Note: The requester can include any contact in the CC and BCC field of the ticket.

c) What other conditions should the ticket match? You can specify the properties that a ticket has to
possess for the rule to be applied to it. Actions can be performed on a ticket if it matches certain ticket
properties, or based on which company/contact created the ticket. Here are the three kind of fields and
what they mean:

Icon Name Where to Visibility

find it
Ticket fields are the Admin > Agents and
properties of a General Customers.
ticket, such as Settings >
ticket status, Ticket Fields Customers can see
priority, subject, and edit fields
description, etc. allowed by the
helpdesk in the ticket
form.
Contact fields are Admin > Agents and
the properties of General Customers.
the requester of the Settings >
ticket, such as Customer Customers can see
requester email, Fields > and edit fields
timezone, etc. Contacts allowed by the

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 helpdesk in profile
settings.
Company fields are Admin > Agents.
the properties of General
the requester's Settings >
company, such as Customer
company name, Fields >
domain, etc. Companies

d) What actions should this rule perform? Specify which actions should be executed if all the
conditions are met - anything from changing the ticket's priority to deleting it.

All the rules you create will be listed in the Observer page. You can edit an existing rule or
delete/deactivate it by hovering over the option and choosing Edit or Delete/Deactivate. You can also
use Clone to create a copy of an existing rule and tweak it as per your requirements. Please note that
Observer rules are processed sequentially, and so the changes performed by one rule might affect
how subsequent rules get executed.

A quick guide to creating an Observer rule

● Login to the helpdesk as an Administrator.

● Go to Admin > Helpdesk Productivity > Observer.
● Click on New Rule.
● Enter an appropriate name and description for the rule.

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● Select a trigger from the dropdown list and choose its filters. For example, if the trigger is that a ticket’s
priority has been changed from low to high, you choose the Priority is changed trigger from the
dropdown list and then specify that the change is from Low to High.
○ You can add additional triggers by clicking Add New Event.
○ You can delete a trigger by clicking the - icon.
○ Choose whether the event has to be performed by a requester or an agent, or either.
○ You can reorder your triggers by hovering over the menu button next to the - option

○ Choose which conditions should be met for the rule to be triggered.

○ Specify whether all of the conditions have to be present for the action to be performed, or if
just one is sufficient.
○ You can delete a condition by clicking on the - icon.

Here's a sample first responder rule that only acts on unassigned tickets from IT companies in Arizona
and Berlin; these tickets are assigned to the responder and the supervisor is added as a watcher to
the tickets:

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● Select an action from the dropdown, and choose its filters.
● For example, if you want to set the status to Closed, select Set Status As from the first dropdown and
then select Closed.
● Click Save once you’re done.

You can ​even use the Observer to trigger a webhooks call​ as soon as a specified event occurs.

Notes:

● The conditional elements are not case-sensitive. So, if you're going to create a rule that automatically
sends an email to the CEO the minute the priority of a bug report is changed, then the rule will work for
tickets which have the word 'bug' or 'Bug' in their subject/description.
● If you're setting up a rule which acts on tickets whose subject/description contains 'refund', tickets with
the words 'refunded' in their subject/description will also match the rule. Similarly, a rule which is
supposed to act on tickets whose subject/description contains 'want refund' will also act on tickets
whose subject/description has 'want refund now'. However, tickets whose subject/description contain
'refund' will not be acted on by this rule.

Creating common reply templates with Canned Responses

Every support agent knows that even the most extensive Knowledge Base can't stop some common
questions from cropping up again and again - questions that force agents to keep repeating
themselves while more serious queries pile up. With Canned Responses, your agents can create a
predefined set of reply templates that they can send out with a single click. The next time a customer
writes in asking how they can reset their password, your agents can quickly use a canned response to
solve their problem and move on to other tickets.

You can even ensure that each response is customized with the requester's name, agent's signature
and ticket details ​using dynamic content placeholders​.

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 Quick Guide for creating a Canned Response

● Under the Admin tab on the left panel, go to Helpdesk Productivity > Canned Responses.
● Click on New Canned Response.
● Make sure to choose an appropriate Response Title that you (and your agents) can understand.
● Type your formatted response template in the rich text editor.
● Click Insert Placeholder to automatically include dynamic content such as Ticket ID, Subject or
Requester Name in the reply.
● Set the visibility and access permissions for this response.
○ If you select Myself under Available for, the response will be stored in the Personal folder and
only you can use it.
○ If you set visibility to All agents, every agent can view it by clicking on Insert Canned
Response in the reply box.
○ You can also make the response visible to a particular group only - for example, a canned
response for 'Refund' can be made visible just to your 'Returns and Refunds' team, as other
teams will have no use for it. This option also allows you to select multiple groups.

● Choose the folder you'd like to place this new canned response into; you can always move it later, if
you'd like.
● Click Save to save your canned response.

If you'd like to edit a previously-saved response, just click on its name.

The list of canned responses you've created will be available under Admin > Helpdesk Productivity >
Canned Responses. You can also create a canned response as you're typing a reply to a customer by
clicking on Canned Response above the reply and selecting the Add New Canned Response option.

Now your agents can ​use the canned response you created in a ticket by clicking on Insert Canned
Response.

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Organizing your Canned Responses into Folders

Organize your canned responses into folders for easier categorization. Click on +Create Folder to
create a folder, and Move to order and move your canned responses between folders as you like.

Agents can create personal canned responses visible only to them. ​Learn how​.

Deleting a Canned Response

To delete existing canned responses, go to Admin > Canned Response > Folder name (if applicable)
and select the canned responses you'd like to remove using the checkboxes. Once you've made your
selection, click on Delete.

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 Note: It is currently not possible to perform bulk actions (bulk edit, bulk update or export) for Canned
Responses.

Execute specific actions based on the scenario using Scenario Automations

Agents often need to perform a series of actions or tasks before they can push a ticket to the next level
- tasks that are not unique to that ticket. For example, with tickets concerning refunds, you'd have to
tag the ticket as Refund, assign the ticket to the Refunds group, and set the status of the ticket to
Processing Refund. Scenario Automations in Freshdesk let you perform a number of tasks with a
single click, right from within a ticket. So every time there's a ticket about a refund, all you have to do is
execute that scenario and the ticket is tagged, assigned and has its status changed without you lifting
a finger.

A quick guide to creating a scenario automation

● Login to the helpdesk portal.

● Go to Admin > Helpdesk Productivity > Scenario Automation.
● Click New Scenario.
● Enter an appropriate name and description for the scenario you are about to cre​ate.

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● Add the first task you'd like to perform by selecting an Action from the dropdown list.
○ For example, to set ticket priority to High, select Set Priority in the first dropdown and then
select High.
● Add more actions by clicking on Add another action.
○ You can delete any action by clicking on the - icon.
● Once you're done, click Save​.

The list of created scenario automations is displayed on the Scenario Automations page. You can edit
or remove an existing entry by hovering over the option and choosing Edit or Delete. You can also
replicate a scenario automation by clicking on the Clone button next to the scenario you wish to
duplicate. For more on how your agents can execute and verify scenarios, click ​here​.

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 Using Canned Forms to increase Agent Productivity

Requests often come in with limited information and you might end up asking a set of repetitive
questions to your customers. While replying, the customer would have to copy and paste the set of
questions before they begin to answer them. Using Canned forms, you can now process these
requests efficiently and with ease. These readily accessible form templates are customizable and help
in resolving major service requests faster.

A quick guide to set up Canned forms:

● Login to your helpdesk as an ​Admin​​.

● Go to ​Canned forms​​ under ​Helpdesk Productivity​​.
● Click on ‘​Create New​​’.

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● Give your canned form a suitable name and hit ‘​Next​​’. You can edit the title later by clicking on the
‘​Edit​​’ button against the form name.
● Set up a ​Welcome message​​ for your form in the center panel.
● Drag and drop the required fields from the ‘​Form Fields​​’ panel on the left, into the center panel.
○ You can add ​four types of fields: Single line text field, Multiline text field, Dropdown field and
Checkbox field.

● Configure the values for these fields under the ‘​Edit fields​​’ panel on the right.
● You can also reorder the fields by dragging and dropping them however necessary within the center
panel. The fields in the form will appear in this order for your customers.
● Set up a '​Thank you message​​' to display when your customers submit their responses.
● Use the ‘​Preview​​’ button to preview the form before saving it:

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● Once you’re done, click on ‘​Save form​​’.
The saved form will now be available for usage, as part of the reply editor, on the ticket details page.

A quick guide to using Canned forms:

● Click on the desired ticket from the ticket list view.

● Hit the ‘​Reply​​’ button to start composing your reply (you can also use canned forms in ​Notes​​).

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● Click on the form icon from the toolbar of the editor. This will open a slider from the right, displaying the
saved canned forms.
● You will have an option to preview the form on this page, before adding it to the reply.
● Click on the '​Insert​​' button to insert the desired Canned form into your response.
● You’ll notice that the form is added ​as a link​​ for your customers to click on and fill.
● Hit ‘​Send​​’ once you’re done.

Your customers will receive the link to the form you just sent. Clicking on the link will take them to the
form page where they can fill the necessary details.

The answers submitted on the form will come into the corresponding ticket as a note. These values are
not stored as ticket fields and will only be available as part of the ticket conversation. The ​default
Observer rule will automatically reopen the ticket and send the Ticket Assigned agent a notification
when the customer submits the form.

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 SLA Policy

Understanding SLA Policies

When customers submit a support request, they'd also like to know when they can expect a response
(and a resolution) from you. A service level agreement (SLA) policy lets you set standards of
performance for your support team. You can set SLA policies for the time within which agents should
respond to and resolve tickets based on their priorities, and set up automatic escalation rules to notify
specific agents about SLA violations.

You can use SLA policies in Freshdesk to determine the Due By time for each ticket. You can have a
default SLA policy for all customers, or have multiple SLA policies for different customer tiers (such as
those who have subscribed to your Premium Support package).

In Freshdesk, SLA policies are driven by ticket priorities - you can define your service levels for Urgent,
High, Moderate and Low priority tickets. You can then use various automations to determine or
manually dictate the priority levels of each ticket.

A quick guide to creating an SLA policy:

○ Login to your support portal.

○ Go to Admin > General Settings > SLA Policies.
○ Click on New SLA Policy.

● Optionally, you can click on Edit next to the Default Policy and provide a brief description.

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● Complete the time-priority matrix
○ Define your various priority levels manually, or automate it using the ​Dispatch'r.
○ You must choose whether the SLA timer should be calculated based on Business or Calendar
hours.

● If you'd like to enable escalations when service levels are violated, make sure that the
Escalation Email button is toggled on.
● Click Save to finish setting up your SLA Policy.

Notes:
From the Blossom Plan onwards, you can ​set reminders ​to notify agents before an SLA is violated and
even ​escalate the ticket automatically​ when a violation does occur.

If you're on Estate or Forest, you can also create ​multiple SLA policies in Freshdesk for different
customer tiers, products, agent groups, and so on. For example, you could have an 'Express Support'
SLA policy for high-value clients.

Escalation of tickets in case of an SLA violation

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 When the allotted response/resolution time for a ticket has elapsed, it is recommended that you
escalate the ticket to another agent for immediate action. This can be set up in the SLA policies you
create.

Steps to set up escalation for an SLA policy

First, create an SLA policy using ​these steps​. If you already have an SLA policy in place, you can set
up an escalation protocol using the following steps:

● Login to your support portal.

● Go to Admin > General Settings > SLA policies.
● Click Edit for the SLA that you wish to add escalation procedures to.
● For each priority level, choose the ticket response time, resolution time and select whether the SLA
should operate as per business or calendar hours.

● In the field What happens when the SLA is violated?, define the escalation rule and name the agent to
whom the escalation email should be sent.
● You can set up a single escalation rule when a ticket is not responded to on time, and a maximum of 4
levels of escalation when a ticket is not resolved on time.

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● Once you're done, click Save.

You have now set escalation rules for your SLA policy successfully. You can use the same steps to
create and edit rules for ​multiple SLA policies​.

What are Business Hours and Calendar Hours

It doesn’t make sense for your helpdesk to take weekends into account in your SLA policies - if they
did, Monday morning SLA reports wouldn't make for pleasant viewing. Freshdesk offers two different
ways in which you can calculate your SLAs - Calendar hours, which includes your working hours as
well as holidays, and Business hours, which are your official working hours only.

Understanding Business Hours

Business Hours refer to the working hours of your company. When chosen, anything outside your
working hours, including calls, will not be timed by Freshdesk. You can specify working hours for each

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day, allowing you to meet SLAs for multiple time zones within the same week, if necessary. Business
hours are more suitable for tickets of low and medium priority.

You can set your timings via Admin > General Settings > Business hours. To create a new business
hour setting, click on New Business Hours; or click Edit to modify previously-created business hours.

Understanding Calendar Hours

Calendar hours are regular full-day round-the-clock hours. If you're promising your customers 24/7
support, you need to use calendar hours as the basis of your SLA policies. Calendar Hours are more
suited to high-priority and urgent priority tickets, which require immediate attention from your team
even if it's a weekend or a holiday.

For example, if a ticket is due in six hours on a Friday evening, you'll have no problem waiting till
Monday morning to resolve it if your SLA is per business hours. However, if it's in calendar hours,
you'll want to resolve it immediately to ensure a spotless SLA report.

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 Configuring Multiple Business Hours in Freshdesk

When you have parts of your support team working across different regions, times or time zones,
managing the working hours of each group becomes a hassle. Since each center wakes up at a
different time, it makes sense to align their SLA timers with their business hours.

Multiple business hours in Freshdesk allows you to create different sets of working hours and holidays,
which can then be assigned to specific groups.

How does having multiple business hours help?

When your whole team operates out of the same office and they clock in and clock out at the same
time everyday, just having one set of official business hours sounds fine. But when your team works
out of multiple centers, or follows different work hours, it is easier for you to lay down a separate set of
business hours for each team. By dedicating separate business hours, SLAs can be executed properly
based on time or place of origin and your team won't be incorrectly penalized.

When would setting up another set of business hours be necessary?

○ Centers at NYC and LON: If you have a geographically distributed team working across multiple time
zones, setting up different business hours for each center makes sense.
○ Different teams to manage different climes: If you've split your Global Support Teams by the regions
from which customers raise support issues, you might want each set of agents to work on the same
hours as the customers they help.
○ Day Workers and Night Owls: If you have special teams that rotate your 24x7 support center by
jumping in at different shifts, you might want to set definite working hours for each group.

How to create multiple Business Hours?

● Login to your support portal.

● Go to Admin > General Settings > Business Hours.
● Click New business hours.
● You can create new business hours based on either location or a specific team.
● Be sure to specify the appropriate Time Zone setting for your Business Hour.
● You can also import holidays according to whichever country the team is working from.

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 Once you've created the business hours that you want, here's how to assign them to groups:

● Login to your support portal.

● Go to Admin > General Settings > Groups.
● Select the appropriate group based on location and team.
● Under the list of Business Hours, select the corresponding one.
● Click Save and your all incoming tickets assigned to that group will have SLAs executed based on the
Business Hours that you just defined.

Here, the Billing team has been assigned Sydney's business hours.

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 Customer Satisfaction Ratings
Customer satisfaction rating (CSAT rating) remains one of the best ways to gauge how your customers
feel about your service and support. It refers to the percentage of customers that picked a positive
answer to the survey question sent at the conclusion of an agent-customer interaction.

The Customer Satisfaction Survey is a built-in functionality of Freshdesk that can be used to directly
measure helpdesk efficiency and customer satisfaction with every support ticket. You can use the
customer satisfaction report to analyze your agents’ relative performance; which can, in turn, help you
assess your service, and provide better guidelines to train support people in the future based on past
results.

Using Freshdesk, not only can you send a survey question to your customers, but also choose the
point scales (2, 3, 5 or 7) and ask additional questions. A single account may create up to 10
satisfaction surveys; however, only one survey can be active at any given point.

If you are on the Blossom plan, there are a few limitations on how you can use the Satisfaction Survey
feature. They are:

● You can only use 3-point scales. If you would like to use the 2-, 5- or 7-point scales, you will need to
upgrade to a higher plan.
● You cannot add any additional questions to your survey.
● By default, the option to '​Collect Additional Feedback' i​ s selected. You cannot uncheck this field.

A quick guide to setting up your surveys

● Login to your Freshdesk account as an Admin.

● Go to Admin > Customer Satisfaction > New Survey.

● Give your survey a name and enter your primary question (the question that customers will see in the
email, below the agent signature).

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● Choose a point scale of your choice. While the default point scale is 3, you could also choose a 2-, 5-
or 7-point scale as well.
○ Here are some examples of the different point scales:
○ 2-point scale (Yes, No)
○ 3-point scale (Agree, Undecided, Disagree)
○ 5-point scale (Poor, Bad, Neutral, Good, Very Good)
○ 7-point scale (Very Poor to Exceptional)
● You can choose between the default text or edit the point choices yourself by clicking on them.

Once a customer takes the survey, the point scale will be locked down and the survey settings cannot
be edited. You can, however, rephrase the questions and edit the answer options. Please make sure
that the questions and answers are in-context as the responses collected before the edits were done
will be shown under the new survey questions in the report.

Designing your 'Thank You' page

Once the customer clicks on the primary question to give you their feedback, they will be taken to the
Thank You​ page, which can have any combination of the following:

● A 'thank you' message

● A text box where customers can leave more comments (enable this by checking the Collect additional
feedback option)
● Additional survey questions

Adding Additional Survey Questions

● To add survey questions on the Thank You page, click on the Add survey questions link.

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● Choose a point scale and add up to 10 questions for your additional survey. Please note that all the
additional questions must have the same point scale and point choices.

Controlling when the survey is sent

As an administrator, you will have the option to choose when the survey goes out to the customer.
Surveys can go out:

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a. When the ticket is closed
b. When the ticket is resolved
c. When the agent sends out replies to a ticket
d. When the agent chooses to send it out

If you choose to send the survey when the ticket is closed or resolved, you'll need to enable the
corresponding email notification under either Admin > Email Notifications > Requester Notifications >
Agent closes the ticket OR Agent solves the ticket. The survey will be sent along with the appropriate
notification.

When you choose to let your agents send surveys as they see fit, they will have to select the checkbox
below the reply editor to send their survey.

Note: Please note that the survey will not be sent when the ticket is created by an agent.

Saving and enabling a survey

● Once you're done setting up the primary survey question, designing your thank you page and selecting
how and when the survey should be sent out, click Save.
● You will be redirected to the Satisfaction survey dashboard.
● Saving the survey does not mean that it's live - click the ON/OFF slider to the left of the saved survey
to enable it.

Satisfaction Survey Report view

The Overview and the Responses tab of the Satisfaction Survey group the responses into 3 buckets -
positive, neutral and negative. For instance, if you have set up a 7-point scale survey, the responses
get split as 3-1-3; for a 5-point scale, it'll be 2-1-2 and so on. You can see the Overview and
Responses at a glance and also for every question in the survey.

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You can also see the survey report for a particular Group or Agent by clicking on the corresponding
tabs.

The Responses tab shows a list of the individual responses sent in by customers who responded to
the survey.

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 Change Management

Tracking helpdesk changes using Audit Log

Communicating changes made in your helpdesk can be very easy when your team is small with a
single Admin managing it. You can email the changes made, or even verbally convey it to your team.
Some of these changes could also be related to financial and/or security policies within your company.
As and when your team grows, keeping track of all those changes is going to be tedious. Your
helpdesk can have multiple Admins who will have access to setting up or modifying existing workflows
to improve helpdesk productivity.

Changes made to a specific module in a helpdesk should be easily trackable so every Admin is aware
of the changes made by the other. Audit Log in Freshdesk helps Admins oversee these changes made
in the account. This feature focuses on

● What the change was

● Who made this change and
● When it was made

These logs will now assist Admins or Super Admins to go back to an older working setup if the latest
changes, made by another Admin, doesn’t work too well.

Note: Reversing the changes automically is not possible. Admins will have to manually reset/change
the setting as per requirement.

Audit Log will assist you in viewing changes made to three specific modules:

● Account Subscription
● Agent

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● Automation (Dispatch’r, Supervisor, and Observer)

The type of changes logged for each module, in detail, are below:

Modules Changes Type of change

Account Billing cycle Changes in monthly/quarterly/half yearly/annual billing
Subscription (this is only applicable in case of credit card payment)
under Admin > Plans & Billing
Plan Changes made to account plan
Currency Changes in payment currency (example: INR/USD/EUR)
Card details Changes in the associated card number and expiry date
Number of agents Changes to the number of agent seats under Admin >
Plans & Billing
Agent Agent and Admin Creation and Deletion
(under Admin >
Agents)
Email address Changes made to the email address of the agent
Type Occasional / Full-time
Roles and Scope Changes made to the Role and/or Scope of the agent

Round Robin Automatic ticket assignment toggle - ON/OFF

Availability
Automations Dispatch’r Rule Creation, Deletion, Modification, Reordering, and
(under Admin > Activation/Deactivation
Dispatch’r)

Supervisor Rule Creation, Deletion, Modification, Reordering, and

(under Admin > Activation/Deactivation
Supervisor)

Observer Rule Creation, Deletion, Modification, Reordering, and

(under Admin > Activation/Deactivation
Observer)

A quick guide to using Audit Log:

● Log in to your Freshdesk account as an Administrator

● Go to the Admin tab and click on ‘Audit Log’ under Account Settings

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● The list of changes performed on the helpdesk, across the mentioned modules, by the Admins will be
displayed

● The ‘Performed by’ column will give you the name of the Admin who performed the action, the time
and date when the action was performed, along with their IP address
○ Clicking their name will take you to their agent profile
● The ‘Event’ column will give you details on the type of action performed — Created, Updated, or
Deleted
● The ‘What changed’ column will give you details of the change along with a link to that module
● If an update was made to an existing automation rule, you will have an option to ‘View Changes’

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● Clicking ‘View changes’ will open out the slider, displaying in detail the original setup along with what
was changed, in two distinct grids

Click the ‘Filter’ option to narrow down the changes made:

● during a specific time period

● by a specific Admin
● to any one specific module in the helpdesk

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By default, the latest change made across these modules on the helpdesk will be displayed first in the
list.

Sandbox

As a helpdesk administrator, you would want to test out a configuration or feature before enabling it on
your Freshdesk account. For example, when you add a new workflow, you need to make sure it
doesn't affect your customers or agents before you’ve had a chance to test and fine-tune it completely.

With the Sandbox feature you can avoid making irreversible changes on your Freshdesk account. The
sandbox is a replica of your Freshdesk account. Over here, all configurations from your account get
copied to the sandbox. However, customer data like tickets do not get copied.

What gets copied into your Sandbox account?

The Sandbox is designed to copy all settings that can impact the workflow of your helpdesk. Here is a
comprehensive list of configurations that will be copied into your Sandbox account.

Admin accounts
Agent accounts
Helpdesk settings
Email settings (except for the support email)
Ticket Fields
Customer Fields
Groups and corresponding settings (business rules, ticket assignment, escalation rules,..)
Roles (with permissions)
SLA & Business Hours
Products (names only)
Tags
Dispatch’r, Observer and Supervisor rules
Scenario Automations
Canned Responses
Templates
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Email Notifications

Note: All the above mentioned configuration changes are copied back. However new agents created in
your sandbox, or changes to agent profiles, are not copied back into your Freshdesk account.

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What does not get copied into your Sandbox account?

Tickets data, customer and contacts

Ticket list views
Support email(s)
Social handle(s)
Portals - logo, favicon, customization
Gamification
Forums
Apps and integrations
SSO and SSL settings
Knowledge Base

The features and configurations above can be tested independently on your sandbox account, but any
changes made will not be copied back to your Freshdesk account.

Confidential tickets, customer or contact data will not be copied. However, sample data that can be
used for testing is pre-populated into your sandbox account, on creation.

An email is sent to all administrators once the Sandbox is ready. Admins and agents can login to the
Sandbox account with their Freshdesk credentials.

Note: We recommend keeping the sandbox active only during testing phases. You can always rebuild
your sandbox from the Sandbox page.

How do I setup my Sandbox account?

Navigate to the Admin tab on the left panel. The Sandbox icon will appear under the Helpdesk
Productivity section.

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Build your Sandbox to start testing out features and configurations on sample data​.

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Once you hit the ‘Build Sandbox’ button, a replica of your existing configurations will be created. This
can take a while based on your helpdesk configuration. An email is sent to all administrators once your
sandbox is available.

Hit the Go to Sandbox button to start testing out configurations and features on your Sandbox account,
before you implement them on your Freshdesk account. A banner on top of the screen will indicate
whether you are in your sandbox account or your Freshdesk account.

How do I review and sync the changes from my Sandbox account to my Freshdesk account?

Once you have tested the configurations in your Sandbox, you can sync these changes with your
Freshdesk account. Navigate to Admin > Helpdesk Productivity > Sandbox on your Freshdesk account
and click on ‘Review changes and sync’​.

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The Sandbox will fetch all the changes that you’ve made, and depending on the number of changes,
this may take a while.

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Conflicts​​: When a configuration is edited on both the Sandbox and your Freshdesk accounts, it can
lead to conflicts. For example, it is possible that an admin changed the name of a ticket field from
‘Issue Type’ to ‘Bug type’ in the Sandbox account.

At the same time, a different admin changed the name to ‘Type of Issue’. When this change has to be
synced, Freshdesk would not know which name to pick - ‘Bug type’ or ‘Type of Issue’ - this is a conflict.

The account administrator would have to decide which change to persist with. All such arising conflicts
need to be resolved before the sync. To avoid situations like these, Freshdesk recommends that only
one admin work on changes to workflows, and all changes are communicated to all admins upfront.

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Once you’ve reviewed all the configurations, and resolved any conflicts, click on ‘Sync now’ to move
these changes to your Freshdesk account.

Once the sync is complete, all administrators get a confirmation email with all the changes that have
been synced between your Freshdesk and Sandbox accounts.

Once the sync is complete, your Sandbox account is automatically deactivated. To test new workflows,
setup a new Sandbox.

How do I deactivate my Sandbox without syncing any changes?

As an admin, you may want to try new features even when you have no changes to sync or want to
test a different set of configurations. For example, you’d like to try how Skill-based agent assignment
works and you don’t want to copy it to your Freshdesk account.

You can deactivate the Sandbox by navigating to Admin > Helpdesk Productivity > Sandbox on your
Freshdesk account.

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Here are some best practices we recommend:

Inform all your admins that you’re building a sandbox and how long you think it’ll be active. Freshdesk
will email all admins when the sandbox is ready, but it’s a good idea to let them know upfront.

Communicate why you’re building a sandbox - what changes you’d be making, what settings you
would be changing. This ensures you get feedback from all admins about changes they might want.

Make sure you, or other admins, are not making changes to your Freshdesk account configurations
when a sandbox is live. This avoids any conflicts between your two accounts.

Make sure other admins have finished making any all changes before you sync your changes to your
Freshdesk account, so that all admins’ changes are copied.

Carefully review all changes before syncing them back to your Freshdesk account.

Keep your sandbox account live for short periods of time - this prevents differences from adding up
between your two accounts. A single cycle of testing the features or workflows involves building the
Sandbox, making changes, testing the features or workflows, and syncing the changes back to your
Freshdesk account.

Plan your sync from sandbox to Freshdesk account during off peak hours. Depending on the volume
of your changes, syncing can take some time, and you’d want to be alert that changes you make do
not impact a lot of your users.

For any questions or feedback, please reach out to [email protected].

Gamification

Gamifying the support process puts the fun back into customer support. It can also help align your
support team with your business goals by offering rewards and badges for agents who meet
predefined targets. With Freshdesk Arcade enabled, every ticket resolved, satisfaction rating earned
and other support-related activities directly translate into points for each of your agents.

How do the points work?

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The trick to providing great customer support is to offer fast responses to customer queries and solving
problems in one go while making sure that the customer is happy with the solution. Agents are
awarded points for solving tickets within an hour, bonus points if the ticket is closed after only a single
agent interaction and even more bonus points if the customer is happy (determined by the Satisfaction
Survey). Agents can also be penalized for solving tickets past their SLA and for having unhappy
customers.

The number of points to be awarded to agents can be set by the Admin under Admin > Helpdesk
Productivity > Arcade > Arcade Settings. You can also set milestone points for the agents to reach the
next level​.

Agents are also awarded badges and trophies based on the quests they complete and their position
on the leaderboard.

Levels
With every agent in your team starting to earn points, it's only fair that they are ranked at different
levels based on their score. The more points they earn by resolving tickets and performing other
helpdesk activities, the higher they climb up the ladder. The Admin gets to choose how many points an
agent needs to score in order to reach a particular level. (​An Admin can also start agents off at levels
higher than Beginner​.)

Quests
Align your support with your business by setting up quests for your agents. Quests drive your agents
to perform activities that benefit your brand. ​Here's​ how you can set them up.

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 Reset
You can reset the points in the Arcade Settings to the default 100 points at any point of time. For
instance, you might want your agents to start the leaderboard afresh when you are restructuring your
team. In that case, click the Reset option found on the top right of the screen. A confirmation dialogue
box will appear. Once you confirm Reset, the points your agents earned previously will be moved back
to the default points. Click ​here​ to know how you can reset points in Arcade.

How to enable and set up Arcade?

● Go to Admin > Helpdesk Productivity > Arcade.

● Use the Enabled/Disabled toggle to enable the Arcade.
● You can also enable the Arcade by clicking on the Enable Freshdesk Arcade button at the bottom.

● Choose how many points you want to award your agents for which tasks, and the number of points
they have to score to reach particular ​levels​.
● When you're done, click Save.

Note: The Freshdesk Arcade is activated on all trial accounts by default. These arcade points are the
metrics that are used to curate the ​awards​.

Advanced Ticketing

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 Linked Tickets
Linked Tickets helps businesses keep track of contextual tickets in their helpdesk and ensure that
updates are delivered in a consistent and efficient manner.

For example, let's say your product is facing some unexpected downtime. A lot of your customers will
be reaching out to you and reporting the issue. These tickets will be taken up by multiple agents, each
of whom have to check in with the right teams, keep track of the progress and report back to the
customer when there’s a solution. Different customers will get updates at different intervals, based on
the persistence of the customer and the workload of the agent; which could also lead to inconsistency
in the various answers.

With linked tickets, you can group similar tickets together and link them to a master ticket called the
tracker. The person assigned to the master ticket can leave comments on the tracker. All of the related
tickets will receive this as a broadcast message so the agents can respond instantaneously with the
update. The internal broadcast message will be visible only to agents of the helpdesk.

Quick guide to set up linked tickets:

○ Login to your Freshdesk portal as an Administrator

○ Go to Admin > Advanced Ticketing

● Enable the toggle for Linked Tickets

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● Linked tickets will now be enabled in your account and you can begin to manage your tickets more
efficiently.

Once you're done with ​installing the feature​, when agents notice a trend in the tickets coming into the
system, they can look for an existing Tracker and link the ticket to it or create a new Tracker.

How to create a new Tracker?

● Go to Tickets, and click on the ticket you’d like to link to a Tracker.

● Select the Linked Tickets icon from the right panel on the Ticket Details page.

● Click on Create a Tracker.

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○ A new tracker form will slide into view. You can enter the details for the Tracker and click on Create.
○ The ticket will be linked to the Tracker; it will have the ‘Related’ tag when you view it in the Tickets tab.

Alternatively, you can create a Tracker from the Tickets tab by selecting all the tickets you wish to link
to a tracker and clicking on Link. A similar prompt asking you to choose a Tracker or create a new one
will appea​r.

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 Note: An existing ticket cannot be converted into a Tracker ticket. The reason behind this is because a
tracker is intended for internal tracking processes. Converting an existing ticket into a tracker will not
help as the ticket and the conversations would be visible to the requesters.

Once the Tracker ticket has been created, you can link the existing tickets to it for better coherence.
The tickets can be associated with the Tracker from the Tickets List View page or the Ticket Details
page.

How to link a ticket to a Tracker from the Ticket Details page

● Click on the ticket and select the Link to a Tracker option on the right panel of the ticket details page.
● A list of recently created Trackers will slide into view. You can scroll through the list to find the
respective tracker or search for it with Subject, Ticket ID or Contact. You can link the ticket to the
tracker by clicking on the link icon. (Note: If you don't find a suitable Tracker, you can always create a
new Tracker.)
● Once linked, the Tracker’s details will be displayed in the linked ticket widget on the related ticket.
● To unlink the ticket from the Tracker, click on the Unlink button.

Note: A ticket can be linked to only one Tracker and Trackers can accommodate a maximum of 300
tickets. Once a ticket is linked, it cannot be merged with another ticket. Likewise, merged tickets
cannot be linked to a Tracker.

With all the related tickets linked to the Tracker, the team working on it can notify the agents on the
progress by using an internal broadcast message. Once the message is broadcasted on the Tracker
ticket, it would be relayed on all the related tickets automatically. This broadcast message would be
visible only to agents on the account.

How to broadcast a message

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● When the Tracker is assigned to an agent, they’ll be able to view a list of all the related tickets that are
linked to it in the widget to their right.
● You can click on the link displaying the number of tickets associated with the tracker to get the details.
Tickets can be unlinked from a Tracker by clicking on the Unlink button that pops up when you hover
over the ticket.
● To broadcast an internal message to agents who are assigned to related tickets, click on Broadcast.

Note: Only agents who have access to the Tracker ticket will be able to send a broadcast message.

● Enter the message and click Broadcast. The message will be sent to all the related tickets that are
linked with the Tracker.

Broadcast message (Tracker view):

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Broadcast message (Related Ticket view):

The broadcast message will be added to any new tickets linked to the Tracker. At any point of time,
any related ticket will only have the last broadcasted message. That is, if a new message is
broadcasted, it will replace the existing message with the new one. The agents can include the
message in their replies on the related tickets using the Insert this message into reply option

Note: When a message is broadcasted from the Tracker ticket, a hardcoded email notification will be
sent to the assigned agent and the ​watcher(s)​ added on the related tickets.

Parent Child Ticketing

Parent Child ticketing helps businesses resolve issues faster by allowing agents to divide a ticket into
smaller sub-tickets, that can be worked on in parallel by different agents.

Let's say your business takes on a new client. A lot of due diligence happens before your teams begin
working on the briefing of the client: market research, background checks, legal overviews and so on.
These are tasks that most of your team will work on in parallel.

Now, most teams make do by creating a ticket request and forwarding it to different teams and
following up with them. However, with parent-child ticketing, an agent can create sub-tickets with

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 multiple tasks for different teams to complete - they can divide the parent ticket of due diligence into
child tickets - background check, market research etc. and assign it to the individual teams.

This way, not only is there increased accountability and visibility for agents but the overall resolution
time can be reduced, ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction.

Quick guide to set up Parent Child Ticketing:

● Login to your Freshdesk portal as an Administrator

● Go to Admin > Advanced Ticketing

● Enable the toggle for Parent-Child Ticketing

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 Parent Child Ticketing will now be enabled in your account.
When an agent decides to divide an existing ticket into Child tickets to work on in parallel, there are
two ways to go about it: they can create it on-the-go and cascade details from the original Parent ticket
to the Child or they can use a predefined template to automatically cascade specific details to the
Child tickets.

Quick guide to create Child tickets on-the-go:

● Go to the Ticket Details page of the Parent ticket for which Child tickets are to be created.
● Click on the Parent child panel on the right side of the page.
● Choose Create a child ticket from the options displayed.

● All the properties from the Parent ticket will be cascaded into the Child ticket unless you choose to edit
out some information.

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● Select the Create another checkbox to continue adding Child tickets or just click Create when
you're done.

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 Note: You can add up to 10 child tickets for each Parent ticket. A Parent ticket can only be Closed
when all of its associated Child tickets are Closed.

Shared Ownership
Different tickets get resolved differently. Sometimes, resolution of a ticket may be dependent on more
than one agent or team. Maybe someone from Finance has to step in, or someone from Legal, or a
third-party vendor - whatever the situation is, the ticket usually winds up being assigned in turn to the
various teams involved. This type of workflow results in a lack of visibility for the agent, which means
that they could be out of the loop when the customer asks them for an update.

Shared Ownership prevents such a situation from coming to pass by ensuring that a ticket is shared
between the primary agent, i.e. the customer-facing agent, and an ‘internal agent’. This way, the
primary agent can stay in the loop even as internal teams work on resolving the issue.

A quick guide to enable shared ownership:

○ Log in to your Freshdesk portal as an Administrator

○ Go to Admin > Advanced Ticketing

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● Enable the toggle for Shared Ownership

Shared Ownership will now be enabled in your account

For shared ownership to work, you need to make sure that your ​internal groups are mapped to the
respective custom ticket statuses created. As an admin, you can create custom ticket statuses and
map each of it to a set of groups. When a ticket status is changed, only the respective groups that
have been mapped to that status will have the option to be assigned to an internal group for that ticket.

Note: ​You cannot map internal groups to the default statuses, Open, Pending, Resolved and Closed.

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 Enabling Shared Ownership
To enable Shared Ownership, you need to map internal groups to corresponding ticket statuses based
on your workflow.

How to map internal groups to a ticket status

○ Login to your support portal as an Admin.

○ Go to Admin > Ticket fields > Status to view the list of all your ticket statuses.
○ Excluding the four default status values - Open, Pending, Resolved and Closed - you can map each of
the custom statuses created to a set of groups by entering them under Mapped Internal Groups.

● To add a custom status, click Add Item and enter the details for the status there.
● Make sure to include Customer Responded as one of your custom statuses. Map all internal groups to
this status. By doing so, you make sure that even when the customer responds, the ticket still stays in
your agent’s ticket view.

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● Please note that you also need to make sure that all of your agents, both primary and internal, add
Customer Responded as a status in their ticket views for the ticket to be visible to everyone.
● When you’re done mapping all the statuses to their respective internal groups, click on Done.

How to enable Shared Ownership?

For a new ticket:

○ Click on the + icon next to your profile picture and then select the New Ticket option.
○ Fill out the ticket form.
○ While selecting a status, make sure to pick one to which the internal groups are mapped.
○ The Assign to field corresponds to the primary group and primary agent of the ticket.
○ Depending on the status, you can assign an internal group and agent from the list mapped to the
status. The Assign to (internal) field corresponds to the 'Internal group' and 'Internal agent' of the ticket.

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● Click on Submit.

For an existing ticket:

● Go to the ticket details page of the ticket for which you’d like to set up Shared Ownership.

○ Under Ticket properties, choose a custom status that is mapped to the internal group to whom you’d
like to assign the ticket.
○ Under the Assign to (internal) field, select the respective internal group and internal agent from the
dropdown list.
○ Click on Update.
Click ​here​ to find out more about circumventing Observer rules that remove shared ownership.

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 Self Service

Setting up your Knowledge Base

Solution Articles or knowledge base posts promote self-help in your support portal. They should ideally
cover all aspects of your product or service - in the example of an ecommerce store, their knowledge
base articles would probably include payment instructions, shipping information and product return
policies.

For better clarity, the Freshdesk knowledge base is categorized into a three-level hierarchy -
Categories that hold a group of related content, Folders under each category, and the specific Solution
Articles inside each folder.

At the top level, Categories broadly classify your solutions page into several sections. For example,
you could place Shipping, Payments and delivery-related information under the Order Fulfillment
category. Another interesting application of this organizational system is when you're providing support
across multiple brands or products (more about ​multi-product support​ here).

Related solution articles are organized into Folders. Folders make it convenient for users to read
similar articles and other possible solutions to their problem. For example, you would club solutions
related to tracking codes and postal services under the Shipping folder.

The number in brackets next to each folder indicate the number of solution articles within that specific
folder.

Here's how to go about setting up your Knowledge Base:

Creating a Category

● Go to Solutions > New Category.

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○ Enter an appropriate name and description for the category you are about to create
○ Hit Save for saving the category

You can also choose to edit a category by clicking on the category you have created and then clicking
Edit.

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 Creating a Folder

● Go to Solutions > New Folder under the category in which you wish to create a folder.

○ Enter an appropriate name and description for the folder you are about to create.
○ Choose the visibility for this folder:
■ You can choose to make the folder visible to all, only to logged in users or agents alone
depending on your requirements
■ You can go further and make it only visible to specific companies by entering their names.
○ Save.

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 Creating an Article

● Go to Solutions > the folder in which you'd like to create the article > New Article.

○ Name the article.

○ You can write the article and format the content in the rich text editor or using the HTML editor.
○ Note: The following tags will not be supported in the HTML editor: <script>, <style>;
form-related tags like <form>, <input>, <select> and event attributes like onclick, onmouseover
○ Attach a file if required by clicking on Attach.

○ Mention the keywords under tags for the article to show up when a customer searches for a particular
keyword.
○ Choose the folder from the available dropdown menu under which you wish to list this solution article.
○ Specify if the article is a Permanent solution or just a temporary Workaround under Article Type.
■ Permanent solution articles are the best-practices and help guides that show your customers
how to work through your products and services. For example, you would want your regular
payment options to be added as a Permanent solution.
■ Workarounds are stop-gap fixes for customers to jump over the problem, till you find a
permanent solution to it. For example, if your payment gateway just broke down, you can give
your customers an alternate solution to pay you through Paypal, till the issue gets fixed for
good.

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 Note: Once you have chosen the Article Type, keep in mind that it will not appear in the customer view
as this is only to help agents.

● Freshdesk also lets you customize their meta information. That way, you could optimize your
knowledge base for search engines and make sure that they rank better on Google. More information
on optimizing your solution articles for search engines is available ​here​.

Once you fill this up, click on Save if you still need to work on it. This will save the article as a draft and
will be available in your drafts folder. Click on Publish if you wish to publish the solution article.

You can learn about deleting a category, folder, and/or article, ​here​.

Building your community with Forums

With Freshdesk, you can set up a community to provide your customers with a platform to interact with
each other. This will be useful both from a customer support as well as a branding standpoint. For
example, customers can ask questions and get quick answers from other users in the community who
might have asked the same question earlier or help with a workaround that they found useful.

Here is an image of how Freshdesk categorizes its forums:

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Once you have set up your Freshdesk account, you can create new topics from the Forums tab. You
can also ​customize your community to drive different kinds of discussions. For example, you can invite
users to share ideas, suggest features and drive your products or services through Idea forums.

You can make sure that the important topics are always on top by making them Sticky, or close the
discussion on a stale topic by locking it. These options can be found under Edit Topic inside a forum
topic:

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Sometimes, customers might reach out on forums with bugs that they are facing to get help from other
customers. To bring topics like these right into your helpdesk and get your team working on the issue,
your agents can use the Convert Topic to Ticket option to create a new ticket with a link to the
corresponding forum topic.

To make sure your agents are on top of important customer conversations on a forum, they can
monitor a topic by clicking on the follow button. This ensures they are notified by email each time there
is a new update to the thread.

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Categorize your forums based on ​type - Announcements, Questions, Ideas or Problems, with specific
functionalities based on your requirements.

You can also have your forums displayed publicly and make them available for everybody, instead of
just your existing users. If you want to run the community only for logged-in users, you can make the
community exclusive by managing access levels from Admin > Portals > Settings

Set the visibility rights for each of your forums by clicking on the corresponding Edit Forum button:

The Visible to option can be set to one of the four visibility types:

All​​ - This makes it publicly visible to anyone who accesses your self-service portal.
Logged In Users - This makes it visible only to those who have signed up and logged in with their
credentials.
Agents - This makes it private, so only agents on your helpdesk can view them. This is useful for
internal knowledge sharing.
Select Companies - This makes it visible only to certain companies that you select from your
contacts. This will let you run a private community for a specific group of users if necessary. For
example, you could mix and match different types of forums and take feature requests from your users
publicly, and setup a private forum for your premium customers to let them know about upcoming beta
releases.

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 Reporting and Analytics

Reporting in freshdesk lets you Identify problems in your helpdesk and keep tabs on all the metrics
that matter to you. Measure and improve efficiency easily, pay attention to the most vital cogs of your
helpdesk.

The Helpdesk In-depth report

The Helpdesk In-depth report gives you an overview of your helpdesk and all the important metrics
associated with creating and resolving tickets. This includes the number of tickets, created, resolved or
reopened as well as the helpdesk average response time, resolution time and SLA metrics. Each
metric can be further analyzed based on various ticket properties like source, type, priority, status, and
the number of responses.

Learn more about the Helpdesk In-depth report

These are the metrics covered in the Helpdesk In-depth report:

1. Ticket metrics - Created tickets, Resolved tickets, Reopened tickets, Unresolved tickets

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2. Time metrics - Average first response time, Average response time, Average resolution time, Average
first assign time
3. SLA metrics - First response SLA, Resolution SLA, First contact resolution (FCR)

Ticket volume trends

Ticket volume trends show which hour/day/week/month/year receives the most number of tickets and
when they are resolved. You will also be able to see the number of unresolved tickets in the selected
time period. These reports help you understand the ticket flow in your helpdesk and it helps you
allocate resources accordingly.

Learn more about ticket received, resolved, unresolved trends

Agent Performance report

The Agent Performance report gives you a summary of the agents' performances in the selected time
period. You can sort your agents based on various metrics like their SLA compliance or the number of
private notes they add and find out the best and worst performing agents.

Learn more about Agent Performance report

Group Performance report

The Group Performance report gives you a summary of the group performance in the selected time
period. You can sort your agent groups based on various metrics like their SLA compliance or the
number of private notes they add and find out the best and worst performing groups.

Learn more about Group Performance report

The reporting feature is based on the plan you are on. To learn about the availability of reports based
on each plan, check ​here.

Team Dashboards

The default dashboard in Freshdesk offers an overall view of the entire helpdesk’s performance and
KPIs. These widgets are fixed with options to filter by Group and Product. With customisable Team
Dashboards, teams/groups within an organisation can get a clear picture of just their team’s
performance, at a glance. This will help Supervisors of specific teams to monitor their teams’

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performances, quickly manage the ticket flow, and measure their teams’ productivity.

As an Admin/Supervisor, customise your dashboard to show just the required metrics for your teams.
This customised dashboard gives the agents of that team visibility into tickets that require immediate
attention, helps them to quickly jump in and assist the team to improve team’s overall metrics, and
even help motivate themselves to make it to the top of the leaderboard.

A quick guide to creating a new Team Dashboard:

Login to your Freshdesk account as an Admin/Supervisor. In the Dashboard tab, click on the
hamburger symbol on the top left corner and then click on + New team dashboard. An account can
have a maximum of 5 custom dashboards. Give your custom dashboard a suitable name and set the
visibility of the dashboard to either 'All agents' or 'Agents in group'. Click on 'Done'. You can edit the
name and/or visibility later by clicking on the edit icon right next to the name of the dashboard.
You are now ready to configure the widgets on your dashboard from the Widget Library.

Widget Library What it displays

Live Widgets Score card Shows the count of tickets in your Ticket views (default and
custom views applicable to groups)
Bar Chart Shows you the graph for the count of tickets in your Ticket
views. This representation will help you deep dive into
problematic areas
Team performance Customer Shows how happy your customers are
and trends Satisfaction
Leaderboard Shows the champion agent across the various parameters of
your Arcade settings
Ticket trends Shows your team’s ticket load over time
Time trends Shows your team’s time metrics

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 SLA trends Shows your team’s SLA compliance over time

Widget Library:

The widget library offers various widgets that can be added to your dashboard to help you monitor
your team’s performance trends, and your live workload to help you take necessary actions faster. The
live widgets from the widget library pulls out data from your ticket views to help you monitor and
categorise data using scorecards and bar charts, real-time.

The ‘Ticket Trends’, ‘Time Trends’, and ‘SLA trends’ widgets refresh automatically and can be
configured for various time ranges from ‘today’ to ‘this month’. These widgets include the ability to
highlight counts that deviate from expectations and the ‘Help me decide’ feature to recommend optimal
highlight counts based on past trends.

Simply click on a widget to add it to your dashboard and customise it as per your preference. You can
choose to remove the widget if desired by using the ‘Remove widget’ option.

Score card:

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This score card displays the ticket count based on the ticket view you choose. Only global views and
group views available to the Admin/Supervisor are shown. This card doesn’t require a refresh and
shows values close to real-time with a maximum of 30 second delay. Click on the widget to add it to
your dashboard.

Note:​​ Private custom views that are visible just to the Admin/Supervisor will not be available as part of
the ‘Ticket view’ list for this widget.

Configuring the widget:

● Give the widget a suitable name.

● Choose which ticket view the widget should pull values from
○ The ‘Show filters’ will give you a quick view of the filters set for that view
● Widget highlights:​​ Choose the thresholds for the selected metric. The widget will alert you
using color codes if the thresholds are breached. If you are not sure of the values to specify,
click on the ‘Help me decide’ button and we’ll help you decide the values based on your past
trends for the particular metric.
● Clicking on the ‘Save and back’ arrow will save this widget and take you back to the widget
library.

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 Once this is set up, clicking on the score card from the dashboard will take you to the
corresponding ticket list view.

Bar Chart:
The Bar chart displays the split of tickets based on the ticket view and categorisation of your
choice.This card doesn’t require a refresh and shows values close to real-time with a
maximum of 30 second delay. Click on the widget to add it to your dashboard.

Configuring the widget:

● Give the widget a suitable name

● Choose which ticket view the widget should pull values from

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 ○ The ‘Show filters’ will give you a quick view of the filters set for that view
● Categorise the graph to display information based on the dropdown fields available in
your account
● You can choose to have the graph represent values in either percentage or count
● Clicking on the ‘Save and back’ arrow will save this widget and take you to the widget
library.

Once this is set up, clicking on any of the values on the bar chart from the dashboard will take you to
the corresponding ticket list view. You will notice a ‘View all’ option if the chart has more than 6 values.
Clicking on this ‘View all’ will open out the chart with all the values in a slider.

Customer Satisfaction:
The Customer Satisfaction widget displays the count of survey responses and the percentage of the
type of surveys received. Click on the widget to add it to your dashboard.

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Configuring the widget:
● Give the widget a suitable name
● Choose which ‘Group’ you would like to view the CSAT ratings for
● You can setup ‘Time period’ for the widget to dynamically show ratings for the specified date
range

Once this is set up, clicking on the 'View details’ option within the widget from the dashboard will take
you to the Customer Satisfaction report with the corresponding filters applied.

Leaderboard:
Based on your gamification settings under Admin > Arcade, the leaderboard widget would display the
leaders in each segment.
There are ​four badge​​s in Freshdesk, each based on different metrics:

Most Valuable Player:​​ Agent with the most overall points for the current month.
Customer 'Wow' Champion: Agent with the maximum Customer Satisfaction points for the current
month.
Sharpshooter: Agent with the highest First Call Resolution (tickets resolved with only one interaction
between agent and customer) for the current month.
Speed Racer: Agent with the maximum points for Quick Resolution (ticket was solved in under an
hour) for the current month.

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This metric can be filtered by groups and timeline.

Configuring the widget:

● Give the widget a suitable name

● Choose which ‘Group’ you would like to view the leaderboard for

Once this is set up, clicking on the ‘View all’ option within the widget from the dashboard will take you
to the leaderboard list page with the corresponding filters applied.

Ticket Trends:
Based on the performance of your team and the ticket inflow, this metric displays your team’s ticket
load over time.

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Configuring the widget:

● Give the widget a suitable name

● Choose the metric for which you wish to view the ticket trends for. The available metrics are:
○ Tickets received
○ Tickets resolved
○ Tickets reopened
● Choose which ‘Group’ you would like to view the ticket trends for.
● If you are using multiple products, choose which ‘Product’ you would like to view the ticket
trends for.
● Choose the timeline for which you would like to view the ticket trends for.
● Widget highlights: Choose the thresholds for the selected metric. The widget will alert you
using color codes if the thresholds are breached. If you are not sure of the values to specify,
click on the ‘Help me decide’ button and we’ll help you decide the values based on your past
trends for the particular metric.

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Once this is set up, clicking on the count in the widget from the dashboard will take you to the
corresponding ticket list view.

Time Trends:
Based on the time trends of your team, this widget displays time based metrics.

Configuring the widget:

● Give the widget a suitable name

● Choose the metric for which you wish to view the time trends for. The available metrics are:
○ Average resolution time
○ Average first response time
○ Average response time

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 ○ Average first assign time
● Choose which ‘Group’ you would like to view the time trends for.
● If you are using multiple products, choose which ‘Product’ you would like to view the time
trends for.
● Choose the timeline for which you would like to view the time trends for.
● Widget highlights: Choose the thresholds for the selected metric. The widget will alert you
using color codes if the thresholds are breached. If you are not sure of the values to specify,
click on the ‘Help me decide’ button and we’ll help you decide the values based on your past
trends for the particular metric.

Once this is set up, clicking on the widget from the dashboard will take you to the corresponding metric
in the Helpdesk In-depth report.

SLA Trends:

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Based on the SLA trends of your team, this metric displays SLA based metrics over time.

Configuring the widget:

● Give the widget a suitable name

● Choose the metric for which you wish to view the SLA trends for. The available metrics are:
○ First contact resolution
○ Response SLA
○ Resolution SLA
● Choose which ‘Group’ you would like to view the SLA trends for.
● If you are using multiple products, choose which ‘Product’ you would like to view the SLA
trends for.
● Choose the timeline for which you would like to view the SLA trends for.
● Widget highlights: Choose the thresholds for the selected metric. The widget will alert you
using color codes if the thresholds are breached. If you are not sure of the values to specify,
click on the ‘Help me decide’ button and we’ll help you decide the values based on your past
trends for the particular metric.

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Once this is set up, clicking on the widget from the dashboard will take you to the corresponding metric
in the Helpdesk In-depth report.

Managing the custom Team Dashboard:

● Drag and drop widgets to reorder the display as desired.

● Once you configure and 'Save' a new custom dashboard, you will be able to edit the widgets
and also clone the dashboard if required using the 'Edit' and 'Clone' buttons on the top right
corner of the dashboard page.
● In case you want to delete a custom dashboard, click on the 'Edit' button and then hit the
'Delete' icon against the name of the dashboard to remove it from the helpdesk. Note that this
is a permanent delete and cannot be undone.

Go one step further and broadcast team specific announcements using the ‘Announcements’ feature
for every team dashboard that you create.

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A quick guide to setting up an announcement:

● Click on the ‘Announcements’ button on the top right corner of the dashboards page

● Type your message, limited to 150 characters, in the text box

● Hit the ‘Post’ button

● The broadcasted message will now show up as an announcement, with your name, time and
date of publishing, for that particular team dashboard
○ The visibility settings of the team dashboard will be applied to the announcement as
well

● Clicking on the announcement will take you to the ‘Announcement History’ on the slider where
the announcements from the last 30 days will be listed

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 ● By clicking on any of these announcements, you’ll be able to see the ‘Viewed By’ panel listing
out the names of agents who viewed the announcement from the dashboard
● You can click on the ‘Stop’ button to remove the broadcast from the team dashboard

Once you post an announcement, the agents will be notified via the in-app notification, inside
Freshdesk. Clicking the announcement on the notification section will mark it as ‘read’.

Note: It’s not possible to edit an announcement. You can stop an existing announcement and post a
new one instead.

Security

IP whitelisting to restrict access to your portal

You can restrict support agents and customers who can login your support portal to certain IP
addresses. Once you enable Whitelist IP address in your portal, only the users from the IP addresses
you specify can login to your support portal.

Quick guide to whitelist IP addresses in your portal

● Login to your support portal as an administrator.

● Go to the Admin tab.
● Click on the Security icon.
● Use the toggle to enable the Whitelist IP Address.
● In the IP ranges section, you can enter all the IP address ranges that can login your portal in
the n.n.n.n format.
● Click on the Add new button to add multiple IP address ranges.

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● You can also add a single IP address in the start IP box (the end IP box will automatically be
populated with the same IP when you save it)

● Please note that your own IP address will be auto-populated as the first IP range. You will not
be allowed to save your settings if your current IP address is removed from the list.

Whom do the restrictions apply to?

● You can either restrict access to the agents or to agents and customers.
● You can choose 'applies to agents' when you just want to make sure that the agents logging
into your helpdesk are from IP addresses known to you. In that case your customer support login

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screen will be visible to everyone and based on their login credentials and the IP address from which
they are logging in, they will be granted access.
● When you choose 'applies to agents and customers', you have complete control over who can
login your helpdesk. The login screen will not be visible to anyone whose IP address is not whitelisted
by you.
● Click on Save button to restrict access to the IP addresses you have listed.

If you're facing trouble setting this up, you can refer to whatismyipaddress.com that has all basic
information about IP addresses. Or you can use your network administrator's help to whitelist IP
addresses.

Restricting Helpdesk access to specific domains

When you are using Freshdesk internally or with a known set of clients, you'd want to restrict access to
the helpdesk to certain domains. This way, only the whitelisted domains will be allowed to log in (or
sign up) and create tickets inside your helpdesk.

This can be done using Helpdesk Restriction:

● Log into your helpdesk as an administrator

● Go to Admin > Helpdesk
● Scroll down to see the 'Helpdesk Restriction' section
● By default, users from any domain can log in, signup or create tickets
● When you chose 'Users from whitelisted domains', you can enter all the domains that can
create tickets and signup/log in. You can whitelist a maximum of 40 domains.

When you set up restriction based on domain:

● The domains of companies and contacts that already exist in your helpdesk will be whitelisted
automatically
● The domains created by an admin will be whitelisted automatically

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● Twitter SSO will be disabled
● Tickets sent by domains that are not whitelisted will be dropped
● If an un-whitelisted domain is added as a CC, it will be dropped

However, tickets created by an agent on behalf of a customer whose domain is not whitelisted (or
tickets created through chat or phone channel) will not be dropped. And the contact of the ticket
requester will be whitelisted.

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