What needs improvement with Freshservice?

There are requirements, not only from our side but from different users worldwide. I work with some community groups worldwide, and we have been placing several requests. So, there are a few areas of improvement for this solution, like enhancing reporting for project management, which is also a feature it has, and some others.

Freshservice automation capabilities are improving the way we respond to a few customers. There is a bit of delay when we must respond to the customer.

I would suggest that Freshservice enhance its technical capabilities, particularly when it comes to ICT network discovery. This will make a significant improvement in their software and these features match SolarWinds. It would include discovering infrastructure elements like switches and wireless devices. This would consolidate functionalities and eliminate the need for additional software and streamline the management process, making Freshservice an all-encompassing solution for both technical and contractual aspects.

Day by day, they keep on adding more features which are making the application very slow. We're we're facing some slowness. For example, the analytics part takes a very long time to load. The chat portal is not that great. It would be good if they could enhance the chat portal, and give us some options to customize it.

I am not too happy with the page layout or screen layout since it always looks messy. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the solution.

We are missing the endpoint. If a user asks for an install, we manage the ticket to assign it to someone to resolve it. However, it's hard to interact directly with the users themselves. We'd like something that, for example, could help us manage patches. We'd like the enhancement of some reports. That would be ideal. We had issues defining the difference between companies and departments.

In the next release, I'd like to see more integration with Microsoft to get more data.

Sometimes, the billing process is an absolute nightmare. That's really frustrating. If you have a straightforward contract and don't need to make changes, it is fine, but if you need to make any changes, it'll take months. The other piece is that sometimes, they will push out updates without telling you they're doing updates, or they'll just have it as a notification. If you don't go and actively check, you just won't even know it is pushed out. You have to stay on top of it. You can't pick the version you're on. Everybody is on the same version, which is great and makes being an admin and working on the platform a much more consistent experience. For the most part, it is all pretty much the same. As compared to the Freshdesk knowledge base, it needs work. You can't save knowledge-based templates, which is a little bit ridiculous. For example, you can't have article templates in there. These are IT people. They're not thinking about formatting. We've got to do that for them. Some of the ways that tasks are reported on and shown can be better. You can't see tasks in your regular ticket list view. You can't see a combo view of tasks and tickets. It is a little bit difficult to get a solid overview of your list of things to do. You can only see them in separate views, instead of one single view. There should be the ability to add screenshots into a service request without having to download and attach them because that can be really frustrating for users. You can do that in the incident version, but you can't put a screenshot in a service request, which is frustrating. The users certainly don't want to take a screenshot, save it to their computer, and then attach it just to submit the ticket. They could just print the screen. I would like to see further integrated analytics, which is something that's on their radar. I would also like them to bring back some of the different metrics that they got rid of. I know that's on their radar too, and they're working on it. The unified bot builder is also on their radar. There is so much stuff that I know is already getting ready for deployment in the next year. The vendor-provided training material has some room for improvement. We disabled the incidents in our portals, and the customizability of all that has also been awesome, but beyond that, it would be good if I could see how a service request goes from end to end instead of being a whole lot of things. Their support could also be better. We have had some long-drawn-out and unnecessary experiences because of their support.

Their analytics need improvement. Some of their integration could be better as well. Maybe this might be new in some of their newer versions. However, the chat should be an inherent part and shouldn't be a separate module. The way they run their service portal, it would be nice if you didn't require users to log in. If they could go to a login agnostic model and be able to, using AI, auto triage and recognize if somebody submitted a ticket before, they should be able to do that in an automated fashion. They shouldn't force users to log in anymore.

There are some limitations in reporting. For example, I would like to have a report of conversations or replies. I have discussed the improvements with them, and they are working on them. They will update it for my request in the next release. I'm waiting for that. There is a limitation in the profile field, which is required for our business. For example, if I need to add another manager for financial approval, there is no look-up field under profile.

This product is very good for small and mid-level markets. However, I'm not sure about the enterprise level. I'm not sure about expanding to a 100,000 to 200,000 user base or more. We'd like to see a CMDB, a Configuration Management Database, in the future.

The analytics could be better. We would like better visualization of items and KPIs, et cetera. The licensing could be better.

We did an evaluation of the project functionality. That was a fairly new area they were launching. It was fairly underwhelming, but they were gradually building out this area. That was one area where I felt they still have a long way to go. We did a review of our project management tool internally within the company, and it was one of the choices, but it didn't match up anywhere close to any of the other tools we were considering. It wasn't a good match. On the reporting side, when we were doing reporting, one thing that was a bit of a limitation was when you had a data list containing a list of changes that have occurred for the whole time and you had to fit the list onto a page. If the list went over the page, it would just truncate it at the page. You wouldn't get all your data. So, it didn't work. That was one big stand-out for me. What we tended to do was convert things into a more readable format, and then we had more targeted exception reporting, but it would be nice to have a full list of things that could be automatically generated and that can flow over pages. In terms of additional features, their strategy is quite good in that they incrementally change things. They must be using some sort of agile methodology. They tend to be doing these little releases along the way, and then they say, "Oh, we've got this new feature." I would definitely encourage them in that area. It is working for them. So, on the project side, being able to easily add risks and issues and more complex dependencies were probably the key areas in the project space where I saw that they let themselves down, but it was just a burgeoning area that they were launching into. It was just part of their initial offering. The plans for the future were still fine.

Freshservice could improve the integration with Microsoft Outlook. In a future release, they can improve by integrating the asset management model directly with the Microsft Azure Active Directory of the organization.

What I have seen in Freshservice is there's no room for customization. Which works as an advantage in some cases and it works as a disadvantage in others. If you are someone that starts managing your IT services, it is a great solution, because there's no way to go out away from the direction of the system. You have to follow the process as it was intended for the designers of a solution because there's no room for customization or configuration. They should add some versions of the solution that has a wider possibility of customization, that would be great. Freshservice as it is right now is great for specific segments of the market, but if we think of bigger segments, it's complicated, because usually they have a lot of things that have to be customized and with Freshservice it's not that simple. Freshservice has limitations in the discovery part of the solution. In order to automate the process of bringing information from your infrastructure to the database of the solution. It has a lot of limitations. For example, it is not as easy to work with Linux servers or Linux computers, as it is to work with a Windows computer. We'd like to see more compatibility with Linux infrastructure in future versions.

I'm not sure if it's on the roadmap, but Freshservice is missing something for the moment. You can't implement a complicated delivery workflow. We don't have the same problems with incident and change workflows. It's only for delivery workflow. They have a mechanism for modifying your incident or change workflow. There's a visual interface for that, so there's no reason not to have the same function for request management. I don't understand.

The ability to customize the user interface is a bit lacking, and the reporting is a bit lacking because they're very stringent upon what you can pull reporting-wise within Freshservice. They have a lot of built-in reports that are very nice, but when it comes to customizing these, they just provide you with certain data. When you try to build your own report wizard, you aren't able to go and select some of the data that is shown in some of the reports that come with Freshservice. This is something that we have brought up with our account representative, and we have suggested these as feature updates in the future. We're still waiting on them to go and implement something like that. Their support could be improved. In the user interface of their website, it can be a little bit difficult to navigate to get support.

While we're just starting with project management, I foresee some limitations with it two or three years down the line. The functionality we will likely need just isn't there right now. It's still very, very basic in terms of the offering. For example, measuring progress can be tricky. If you finish the sub-tasks and not the main task, it doesn't calculate the project's progress correctly. It would be nice if there were some standard KPIs around, for example, performance or support. It would help with budgeting. The product should look at BCM or ServiceNow and see if there are features that would make nice additions. It would help them stay competitive.

They can improve the search. While searching the inventory, when I cancel a selected category, the search box disappears, and I have to reload the page. It is a small glitch. Currently, we can have only one plan per subscription. All users have to be on the same plan. We can't have two users for plan A and five users for plan B. It might be good if there was an option to have different plans within one subscription so that you can assign each agent to the corresponding plan.