6 ways to automate Freshdesk

Working in customer service means constantly putting out fires without losing your cool—so any tool that makes your life easier is welcome. Freshdesk simplifies your team’s work by automating self-service and giving you one multi-channel hub to manage all your customer support conversations.

But when you need to respond to issues quickly, every second is valuable. You don’t have time to copy information to and from your other tools. The time you spend on things like importing tickets, notifying team members, and backing up important information is time you could’ve spent building relationships with customers.

When you automate Freshdesk, you save time for your most important work. Here are our favorite Zaps—our word for Zapier’s automated workflows—that can keep your customer service processes running smoothly.

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Keep your team in the loop with notifications

It’s important to respond as quickly as possible when a customer reaches out to you. But when your team is spread thin or operating across multiple business tools, you can’t always be glued to your Freshdesk dashboard. 

Instead, why not set up automatic alerts for new activity in Freshdesk? Zapier lets you integrate Freshdesk with lots of team communications tools like Slack, Discord, and email. That way, you can get customer support notifications in the same place you get all your other messages. 

For instance, if your team lives in Slack, Zapier can send a message to your designated channel whenever there’s a new Freshdesk ticket. Or you can set up a Zap that automatically sends an email for each new ticket in Freshdesk. That email could go to a team member for follow-up or to the ticket submitter as a confirmation of receipt (or both).

Pro tip: If you don’t want to spam your inbox or Slack channel, use a filter step to choose what types of tickets trigger a notification. Or you can use a lookup table to send incoming tickets to the right agent via mention or direct message.

Connect Freshdesk to your spreadsheets and databases

While Freshdesk is great for monitoring a busy help desk in the moment, you probably also want an easy way to track your customer support team’s trends over time. 

One way to bridge that gap is to use one of these Zaps to send completed Freshdesk tickets to your spreadsheet or database of choice. That way, your customer support team can enjoy Freshdesk’s benefits while your internal managers still get all the data they need. 

You can also set up a Zap in the other direction to create tickets from new Google Sheets rows. 

This workflow is useful if others in your organization want to submit customer questions but don’t have access to Freshdesk—they can just add new rows to a shared Google Sheet. It’s a simple way to funnel all new requests into your customer service tool without unnecessary back-and-forth.

Add new tickets to your project management tool

It can be helpful to copy Freshdesk tickets to a productivity tool like Trello or Asana so you can track any additional work that needs to be done. Or maybe you use your project management app as your main collaboration space, so getting a notification in ClickUp is more useful than in Slack or email. 

Either way, manually copying and pasting incoming Freshdesk ticket information across tools is not only a huge time waster, but it risks typos bogging down and confusing your process. Instead, use automation to keep your team on track.

To streamline your workflow even more, you can even add a paths or lookup table option to dynamically assign each task to the right person.

Create Freshdesk tickets from forms

Form builders let you collect information and requests from customers wherever they feel most comfortable. Embed a contact form on your website, link out to it on your social media, and even create QR codes for quick feedback in your retail locations. 

But no matter how you collect customer inquiries, you need a reliable way to get that information to your help desk for quick triage. Thankfully, Zapier lets you integrate Freshdesk with many form builders, including Typeform, Google Forms, and Wufoo. Use these Zaps to send new form submissions to your Freshdesk dashboard automatically.

Connect almost any app to Freshdesk with webhooks

What if you want to connect Freshdesk to an app that isn’t listed here or doesn’t (yet) integrate with Zapier? That’s where webhooks come in.

A webhook Zap lets you create Freshdesk tickets with a custom trigger from any API that accepts it. It may sound intimidating—but setting up webhooks takes less technical know-how than you might assume. For an introduction to using webhooks with Zapier, check out this helpful guide.

Create tickets on a recurring schedule

If your team has recurring tasks like maintenance or regular follow-ups, it can be helpful to automate those reminders. These Zaps create a new ticket in Freshdesk on a schedule you set, either monthly or weekly. That way, you can set your regular customer service tasks on autopilot.

Streamline your customer service workflows with Freshdesk automation

Freshdesk’s multi-channel features let you handle a busy help desk with ease. And when you add automation, your customer support processes get even more powerful. 

Save time and reduce human error by connecting Freshdesk to your essential tools. Zapier’s automated workflows save you time and energy—which you can redirect into nurturing and serving your customers better.

This is just the start of what you can do with Freshdesk and Zapier. What will you automate first?

This article was originally published in October 2022. It was most recently updated in October 2024.