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Looking to Sign Up, Should I Be Concerned?

  • 14 September 2017
  • 15 replies
  • 86 views
P
Rank
Badge +6

Hi there,




I'm new to the community and not yet a paying user of Freshservice yet, still evaluating. In general I like the service but find a lot of small bugs and nagging things that either don't make any sense to me or just seem incomplete. With this in mind my biggest concern is looking at the Feature Requests and seeing that the majority of the most popular items are 2 years or older. Some items that are in progress now were originally requested 2 years ago (i.e. auto refresh dashboard, very very useful feature)! It seems like if you want a new feature implemented or something fixed you're out of luck. 




What's the general experience of people that have been using the product for a while? Do issues get fixed and improvements to the core helpdesk get made regularly? or do you just find workarounds and live with it? Did you look at other products but went with Freshservice because it had "x"?




Thanks in advance for any feedback, looking to try and make a decision in the next week or two.




Cheers,


Phill


This topic has been closed for comments

15 replies

R
Rank

Hi Phill,




We've been using Freshservice for 12 months now. We moved over knowing some of the shortcomings, primarily because the system is surprisingly flexible and has a very, very low learning curve (versus other full ITSM platforms like ServiceNow and ConnectWise). We're still very happy with the changeover and would recommend it if you're looking for a full ITSM platform.




That said, the response to feature requests has been very slow historically, especially for what we would consider a straight-forward user experience change (we've raised some privately as well as in the forum). I think they have an internal roadmap/wishlist that takes priority over user requests, especially as recently they seem to be prioritising large feature releases over small UX polishes. They seem to have improved in the last few months, particularly with community engagement.




Would still recommend.




Cheers,


Reuben


K
Rank

I can pipe in here too. My organization (1,500 users, 8 tier 1, 8 tier 2, 3 tier 3 agents) switch to FS a little over a year ago.

The feedback on feature requests is actual hot garbage, plain and simple. They've literally fallen into every bad habit one could possibly fall into. I've had numerous conversations with our account rep regarding the lack of quality feedback on that topic.

That having been said, if you actually have an *issue*, fresh service support is actually quite good. Prompt, smart, creative people. They get stuff done.

Overall I'd recommend it, although, if you end up being a customer, I fully expect you to join us in the forums fighting the good fight until FS communication improves here. :)


P
Rank
Badge +6

Thanks for the feedback. We've decided to proceed as it checked off the most boxes for the couple systems we were evaluating. After a week we're already encountering many different shortfalls running in MSP mode, it's really quite obvious that the MSP mode is a half baked after thought. I agree that support has been quote good in their willingness to assist but unfortunately every request I make is answered with "it doesn't do that" or "we can add that to our roadmap" but asking for that road map resulted in "not available". I suspect we'll endure a year, learn a lot and then move on to another service or go back to our home grown solution. In the meantime I'll do my best to request features, vote up options and pester them as much as I can to improve the product.




Thanks again.


P
Rank
Badge +6

Less than one month in and really regretting this decision. Just tried to go in and clean up the asset category structure and realized that it's all hard coded and can't be edited at all. So many categories we don't use and many odd choices for organizing. Can't delete them, can't move them to different parents, terrible implementation.




The good news is that since we paid a year in advance we've got 11 months to find a replacement system. I just hope exporting our data won't be a nightmare...






P
Rank
Badge +6

Less than one month in and really regretting this decision. Just tried to go in and clean up the asset category structure and realized that it's all hard coded and can't be edited at all. So many categories we don't use and many odd choices for organizing. Can't delete them, can't move them to different parents, terrible implementation.




The good news is that since we paid a year in advance we've got 11 months to find a replacement system. I just hope exporting our data won't be a nightmare...


M
Rank

Hey Phodgkinson, 




Sorry to hear that you regret going with Freshservice. We are already solving the problem you have highlighted here and we'll continue to fix/bring in new capabilities. I hope that you won't have to look for a replacement at all. 🙂 Keep sharing your feedback! 




Thanks!


P
Rank
Badge +6

Hi Mohana,


Encountering issues isn't that big a deal, it happens from time to time. No software can be perfect. The troubling issue I have with Freshservice is that I encounter an issue, come here to see if there is a fix/work around and 9/10 I see that the same issue I'm having has been reported by other users as many as 2 or 3 years ago. So it really gives me zero faith that Freshservice listens to their community or has the ability/capacity to act on requests and implement them. That's the part that makes me regret going with Freshservice.


I'm not even sure it's worth posting my feedback here as it will just sit around for years before it "may" be acted on. Seems rather pointless unfortunately.


M
Rank

I apologize for the delays in responding to the feedback on the forums. I can assure you that every feature request or issue that is reported here and on our support channels are reviewed and prioritized/deferred for development by the product team. As for requests taking 2-3 years, we can only work on some of the  requests and some items take longer to be prioritized (based on impact and asks). 




We'll make sure we restore your faith in the community as a whole by being more responsive on the forums. Please do continue sharing your feedback on the forums as it helps us prioritize the requests when we have other users also respond with similar issues/requests. 




Thanks!


P
Rank
Badge +6

From my experience so far, it's easy to get feedback in the forums, it doesn't result in any action, but the feedback part is easy. Community responsiveness or support aren't the issue, it's actually something Freshservice does very well. It's when I see bugs reported in the forums months or years ago and they still exist in the software today, that's the problem. Now if that's because the community managers aren't reporting what's going on in the Forums to Project Managers/Developers, then yes, you're definitely dropping the ball. 


I think having a publicly published Roadmap would be very beneficial to both sides. It holds you accountable to stay on track and deliver what you say you will. For users we can see if the issues that bug us are actually even on the radar or if we just have to come back to the forums in a year to ask again


M
Rank

A public roadmap is a great suggestion! Am sure this will also allow us to collect more feedback on some items that are in our long term plans. I have proposed this to the team. More on this soon. 




Best,
Sid


K
Rank
I just want to mention that I've heard "A public roadmap is a great suggestion... I have proposed this to the team" for about 2 years now and counting now. 
I'm content with FreshService as a product.  It's well priced and ease of use is top notch.  That being said, at 3 years in, I don't expect any of the feature requests to be completed.  About every 6 months or so I jump back on this forum, make another comment on an ancient feature request with hundreds of likes and replies, get a fairly quick response, something along the lines of - "that will ship out soon!" or "we're working on that now!", then the cycle repeats itself.

 


M
Rank

Hi Kevin, Phil,




Thanks for the recommendations reg the Public Roadmap. We wanted to get everything in place from our side before updating this thread. So, here goes. :)





We have introduced the Public Roadmap section within the Community Forums. You will find all the items that we are working on in the roadmap section. (We are updating all in-progress items now. You'll see more posts in the next few days so do follow the forum so that you receive notifications) We'll follow this up with features and enhancements that are under consideration and we'll also post long term ideas that we are seeking feedback for here.





We also want to be transparent about how we go about prioritizing items on our backlog. Here's how we build the Freshservice roadmap.





Please do check out the changes. Keep your feedback and requests coming!




Best,


Sid




J
Rank

Roads can be long, There doesnt appear to be timescales on when the enhancments might be here, and they do seem a bit vague... However as a new user to Freshserve I find it easy to use, It does have limitations I hope there is some good inovations comming through in the next few months.


R
Rank

In case anybody else sees this thread- the complaints here mirror my experience pretty exactly. 


- FS doesn't test their software - You will find multiple glaring bugs. Some of them *will* prevent you from using their software fully. 

- FS doesn't care about resolving bugs, once identified. You will always get a polite but useless response. Some of those you can see in this thread. They'll make it sound like they are super interested in your feedback and that you just came up with a great idea they had never heard before. And then you look a little closer and the same thing was suggested years ago. They just don't care about the actual usability of the product. What they do care about is making sure they can list as many bulleted features as possible, even if some of them are so broken, they aren't practically usable.


Here are some examples:

- You can't sort the columns of a report. The rows are in random order and there is nothing you can do about it.

- Grouping on reports is broken. Groups appear multiple times with different rows within.

- The Used By field, intended to be where you assign devices to their owners, is automatically updated by the discovery agent to be the last person who signed in to the device. So, if you are planning on using the CMDB to track which assets are assigned to which users, don't. Your assets are going to jump around based on whoever signed in last. Which means that as an admin, when you sign into a device to work on it, it will get assigned to you. You might wonder how something so ridiculous could make it to production. Fresh Service doesn't care about fixing it because it doesn't affect the "feature list" they use to sell licenses.
- Emailed report PDFs don't open on iOS. They work in Windows or MacOS. But not iOS. This has been reported several times, and they just aren't concerned with fixing it. 


Every time you want to implement something, plan on finding a bug or poor implementation that makes you either work around or not implement the feature.


M
Rank

The colloquialism "Execution eats strategy for breakfast." comes to mind when I think about FreshService. The product has so much promise, and checks all the boxes on the surface. Unfortunately, once you start trying to put those "checkboxes" to use, the cracks appear and open up quickly. I want so badly to be able to shamelessly defend this tool against those in my organization that would rather we operate in Salesforce Service Cloud or Jira Service Desk... but the argument gets more difficult each time I encounter a basic "something" that the product should do but doesn't.  


My example du jour is reporting on overdue tickets. I came to the support portal today to ask for help with reporting on overdue tickets. The reporting tool FORCES use of the Date Created variable, which is irrelevant to an overdue ticket. Who cares if it was created 1, 10, 100, or 1000000 days ago?  If it's not resolved/closed, it's not resolved/closed.  So I accept this and set the Created Date variable to before we started with FS, then I have to set criteria for a due date less than a hard coded date. How can I schedule a report to come to my mailbox on a daily or weekly basis if the due date field isn't variable based on when the report runs?  Then I find a thread from 3 years ago where a FreshService rep promises the ability to automate this is just around the corner.... 


After 10 months running with FreshService, the honeymoon is over. We signed a 24-month commitment, and I doubt we'll be using it after that point the way things have gone to date. 


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