I see more and more of these types of articles these days. When you read the headline “Freshdesk provides a platform for SMBs with vocal customers” you think you are going to get some real feature detail.
http://www.zdnet.com/in/freshdesk-provides-a-platform-for-smbs-with-vocal-customers-7000017528/
Now I don’t have a problem with Freshdesk, Zendesk, Desk.com, etc. This post is not an attack on our competition. What I take issue with is authors who make statements like “Until just a few years ago, service support was pretty reactive. Customers would typically come in with issues through e-mail or phone directly to the company. The support infrastructure was always one-to-one.” It is just not true. iSupport has given customers tools to enable one to one, one to many and many to many support for years. I know a few other products that do the same.
“Today, customers expect moire [sic] from the companies they do business with. They want to talk to other customers, share ideas, and suggest feedback to the organizations. Often, they end up taking their frustrations outward to social media.” Really? Today customers expect more? They never have in the past?
Then the author turns around in the next paragraph and says “Freshdesk tools help to gather customer queries coming through e-mail and phone, and enable service support teams to address these.” Wait wasn’t that what you just said was the old way of doing things? Isn’t this article suppose to tell us how their product is different?
“The Indian startup’s target audience includes small and large businesses looking for a software to handle their support needs.” Is small and large a target?
“They are also touted to enable businesses to be proactive aand [sic] provide their customers the platform to engage. Some features the startup says it offers include:” and the author goes on to describe four features: Arcade, Automation, Themes and Roles. These are great features! We have had three out of four of them for years. Not a single one of these features does anything to provide proactive support.
Not a mention is made in the article of social media monitoring tools. That type of feature is certainly more proactive than waiting for a phone call to come into the help desk. The article makes mention twice of the community platform offered by the company but never describes what that is.
What the article does a good job of explaining is how this company came to be because they thought that they could provide a less expensive product than their competition.
Again, I have no beef with any of the companies mentioned in the article.In fact I think the product being talked about here is much better then the author makes it sound. I’ll still put our product up against anyone. Guess what, I think iSupport is better! Go figure, I root for my own team.
It is so frustrating to see articles that seem to be written by PR firms passed off as providing some type of hard information to the consumer. Freshdesk, Zendesk and Desk.com congratulations on your development efforts you, and many others, have re-energized the support market in the last couple years. You have taken many ideas and concepts that iSupport invented a step further and make us continue to produce a better product. I can’t wait to see how this plays out over the next 21 years.
With respect to our competitors and customers,
