What is a Custom App?

Custom Apps (earlier called Freshplugs) are apps that are installed only to your account. Using custom apps, you can integrate with internal tools or implement workflows specific to your account. They are built using the Freshdesk App Development Framework and can be added to your

• Ticket Details Page
• Contact Details Page
• New Ticket
• New Email

For example, if you are running an eCommerce store, you could create a custom app for your order management system, and bring in details about your customer's order, it's location and more when they send you a ticket. Or, if your requirements are more general, you could check out some of the readymade apps in the our Freshdesk Marketplace and enable them in your account easily.

Here are the different ways in which you can use a Custom App: 

1. As an integration with a third party solution

A Custom App is one of the easiest ways for you to build a custom integration in Freshdesk. With a little bit of coding, you can use them to create an integration with any third-party solution your team wants to use. This could be extended to almost all kinds of web-based services that use an open API, and can even be configured to work with any of your internal systems.

For example, you could bring in key information from a CRM and show it inside your Freshdesk ticket detail page so that your agents will have more contextual data to provide personalised support. Here we show how this Pipedrive app brings in information from the PipeDrive CRM, or allows you to add information to Pipedrive directly from within Freshdesk.

2. To bring in additional functionality to the ticket details page:

The ticket details page is used extensively by your team everyday. And sometimes, making minor UI edits can help you do things faster, better and more easily. If you think your life would become easier with some new functionality or if you want to change the way something looks, you could probably do it with little effort.

3. To automate workflows inside your helpdesk

Serverless apps are apps that are run in response to backend events such as ticket create, ticket update, contact create, and contact update. Using custom serverless apps, you can react to specific events inside your helpdesk which enables you to automate certain workflows.

For example, you can use the contact create and contact update event to synchronise customer data across multiple products. Every time a contact is created/updated in Freshdesk, the same contact can be created/updated in your third party solution.

Custom serverless apps can also be used to apply custom logic to alerts and notifications. You can get notified when a ticket or contact with certain characteristics is either created or updated. This notification can be through your desired notification channel.

In addition to the examples mentioned above, there are a lot more possibilities for you to use custom apps to your advantage. If you have something in mind, but aren't sure about how to create the right custom app around it, let us know and we will be happy to help you out.