Requester works for multiple companies

I would like to volunteer for a beta! 

Any idea on timeline as to when this will be released outside of the beta testers?

Hi @Janani, I've seen that this feature is already available (in beta mode), but only for "estate" plan and superior plans. Is there any reason why this basic feature is only available at high plans? I mean, this feature was highly requested, and it's fundamental to any company giving support to their customers. But the fact that it is only available for higher plans makes us wonder if we should use an alternative to Freshdesk.

Our company is very small, we have three support agents, and we were considering to scale to "Blossom" plan, in order to have our custom domain. Also, we definitely need to associate one contact with multiple companies. But we are not in the position to escalate to "estate" plan, just to use this feature.

Is there any particular reason for wich this feature is available only at high plans?

Lisandro, I totally agree. We are also a small business and this feature is pretty much a core requirement for us. We now have quite a few contractors that support multiple of our end users and it can get really difficult to track and filter tickets based on what company they were supporting at the time. Our decision to go to Freshdesk in the first place was pretty much down to the promise that this feature will be rolled out. I would also think this should be a core feature of any help desk system. We are currently on Blossom with 7 agents and although it is somewhat essential to our business to have this feature we simply cannot justify paying more that double what we are now just for this feature. Hopefully Freshdesk can work something out for us smaller fish.

I also agree with the previous comments. We were told by our demo rep that this feature would be added soon, which was a big reason we decided to side with Freshdesk. They never mentioned that it would be added exclusively to a tier that is far beyond our needs. I believe that such a simple and essential feature such as this should be available to everyone.

@Travis

We will be coming our beta for a minimum of one month as we will be making iterative changes based on customer’s feedback. We will announce in our “What’s new” section when we roll out the feature to all of our estate and forest customers.

@Lisandro Kallen and Nathan

Thank you for voicing your concerns. I agree that this has been a highly requested feature. We added this along with our estate plan as most SMBs are directly in touch with their customers. The need for a contractor or reseller to act as a middleman increases as the company size grows and when this happens the helpdesk would also need sufficient agents to handle the higher volume of tickets that start coming in. Features to handle such scenarios are in our estate plan which is why we decided to support the contractor/reseller use cases in higher plans. I understand that your business might not conform entirely to the case I have described above, however, our motive with the beta was to get a version that a vast majority can use, to start with.

I am waiting for this feature for more than three years now. (see second comment in this thread). I asked to become a beta tester more than a month ago. Any update?

@Remi, we are enabling the feature only for our estate and forest customers and we found that you are on our sprout plan. In case this info is incorrect, please let us know and we'll look into it immediately.

We are in estate plan: telepage.freshdesk.com or support.telepage.nl #701933

I used to work for a different company. Now I work for Telepage (support.telepage.nl of freshdesk.telepage.com. We are in Estate.

Remi, we've enabled the feature for your account. Here is the solution article explaining how the feature works.

Let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Hi Janani,

I have had a ticket open to enable this for my account for 2 weeks, can you please action as it doesn't appear that it should take very long to do.

BR

Dan

Hi there all! Considering there is plenty of you listening to this thread, I would like to ask you: have you found a Freshdesk alternative that provides this feature as a core feature?

We are looking for a Freshdesk alternative to solve this issue. Actually, we don't want to leave Freshdesk: the tool is awesome, very intuitive, the support is great, and the prices are pretty decent. However, we have run into a dead end here: he definitely need this feature, and we cannot pay estate plan, because is far away from what we need. We are a very small company, we have only two support agents (me and my partner, both owners of the company).

I don't agree with @Janani, saying that "the need for a contractor or reseller to act as a middleman increases as the company size grows and when this happens the helpdesk would also need sufficient agents to handle the higher volume of tickets that start coming in. Features to handle such scenarios are in our estate plan which is why we decided to support the contractor/reseller use cases in higher plans."

We actually need this feature, but is has nothing to do with resellers or contractors.

Our customers are online people that buys our CMS to create their own website. Inside their website, they can add users and give them permissions to work inside the website. So, in this case, our contact is the email of the customer that pays for the service; the company in this case, for us, is the website: it has a name, a domain, and ideally we would add some custom fields to know some more stuff about that website (for example, wich is the plan payed for that website).

But consider that one of our customers (that is, a contact) uses the same email to create another website. For us, that is another company: another website can have an entirely different plan, with a different cost for the service. So the big problem here is: each time a contact send us an email to support, which company is she/he reffering to? We can only know this with the feature of adding a contact to multiple companies.

But notice that this case has nothing to do with resellers. Those are our customers, and not resellers of our service.

Does anyone have to deal with a similar situation? Have you found an alternative to Freshdesk to solve this situation?

Thanks in advance!

Yes the situation you quote is very similar to mine. But I have  a mix of actual clients and a few freelancers each of who work for or with multiple companies and have the need to use me for support..

But I am on my own - 1 users - with about 7 or 8 of these types of users to accommodate covering up to about 15 or 20 companies - and just cannot warrant the extra price for this, when I stated down this route with Freshdesk, was going to be a feature - It has taken a very long tome to "not become one" for a lot of us.

The product other than this is very very good, I love and it has helped me a lot  but it is not a busy support desk, 2 or 3 tickets a day, maybe none the next so can not warrant the extra cost under any circumstances. Maybe not the normal type of user but I am sure there are 100's out thee like me.

Not sure what else is out there that will be as good as FreshDesk and offer this important feature at a price we can afford but I guess I now have to start looking.

Would be very interested in what others find works.
David

Just to add that we are in a similar situation - we only have 3 agents on our support portal, and only 1 actually uses it on a daily basis. Our company size is less than 5.

We provide support for users of different websites. The website in this instance is the company. But then we have the issue, where a user is signed up to several different websites, and therefore needs to be under multiple companies.

It's a big issue I can't find a workaround for.

Lisandro, I totally agree

@Lisandro David and Simone, I understand that this feature is out of reach for some of you and I appreciate you guys explaining your respective use cases. We would like to work with you to figure out alternative solutions or workarounds that can be implemented for your specific scenarios. We’ll be writing to you today to see what works best for you.

@janani, What is the work around ?

I am using this feature for a few day's now as Beta. It works like a charm! Super!

How might I try this feature in Beta?

Me too please

Nathan and Pierre - if you have purchased portal customisation separately, a custom drop down field could be used to associate ticket to a company. 

Darren, we've enabled the feature for your account. 

Alessio, unfortunately, this feature is available only from the estate plan.

Janani,

Can you please disable this? We use SSO and I just read the solution article detailing that the functionality will not work with Custom SSO.

Thanks,

Darren

Note: Currently, one contact-multiple company will not work perfectly in accounts that either have

Custom SSO enabled, or
A CRM integration enabled