Freshdesk approvals: The complete guide for support managers

Have you ever had that sinking feeling? A customer needs an urgent refund, but your support agent is stuck, waiting for a manager to sign off. The ticket just sits there, the customer's patience wears thin, and your agent can't move on to the next person in the queue. It's a classic bottleneck that can grind even the most efficient support teams to a halt.

This is exactly the problem Freshdesk approvals are meant to solve. The feature is designed to add some structure to those internal reviews. In this guide, we'll walk you through how Freshdesk's built-in approval feature works, what it does well, where it falls short, and what it actually costs. More importantly, we'll explore a more modern, AI-powered way to automate the very workflows that lead to these approval requests in the first place, helping you get faster resolutions and a happier team.

What are Freshdesk approvals?

Simply put, Freshdesk approvals are a feature that lets support teams build a formal review process for tickets and knowledge base articles. It’s all about adding a layer of oversight for certain actions, making sure key decisions get a second look before they’re finalized.

The use cases are pretty straightforward:

• Ticket approvals: This is for tasks with real business implications, like processing a large refund, making an exception to a company policy, or green-lighting a service request that hits the budget.

• Knowledge base approvals: This helps make sure that any new or updated help articles are checked for accuracy and tone by a subject matter expert before they go live for your customers.

A look into Freshdesk's knowledge base interface, where articles that might require approvals are created and managed.

It’s a handy tool for adding some governance to your process. But it’s important to know that this functionality is only available on the Freshdesk Enterprise plan. That puts it in the premium category, and for a lot of teams, that price tag raises some valid questions about its overall value.

How to set up the native Freshdesk approvals workflow

Before we get into its limitations, it helps to understand how the feature works under the hood. You set up approvals in Freshdesk using their Workflow Automator, which lets you define rules that trigger a request for review.

The Freshdesk ticket dashboard, where agents manage customer requests that may trigger the approvals workflow.

The building blocks of Freshdesk approvals

When you're creating an approval workflow, you’re mainly dealing with a few key pieces:

• Approvers: These are the people or groups who need to give the thumbs-up. It could be a specific manager, a department head, or a dedicated team.

• Approval rules: These are the conditions for getting the ticket approved. You can require a sign-off from just one person in a group, a majority of them, or every single one.

• Workflow triggers: This is what actually starts the process. It's usually based on ticket details like its type, priority, or a custom field you’ve created (for instance, a rule like "Refund Amount > $100").

The standard Freshdesk approvals workflow

The typical flow is logical. A ticket comes in, the system checks if it matches one of your rules, and if it does, the ticket's status flips to "Awaiting Approval." An email goes out to the approver, who can then accept or reject the request. Once they make a call, the ticket status updates, and the agent can finally move forward. If a ticket doesn't trigger any rules, it just continues through your normal process.

The hidden limits of standard Freshdesk approvals

While the built-in workflow adds a much-needed layer of control, it has some real trade-offs, especially for growing teams or those handling complex requests. Here’s where the shine starts to wear off.

High costs and plan restrictions

The biggest hurdle for most teams is the price. The approval workflow feature is locked away in Freshdesk's priciest plan, Enterprise, which runs $79 per agent, per month. For small to mid-sized businesses, that’s a lot to ask for what is essentially a gatekeeping function.

If you're on the Growth or Pro plans, you don't get this feature at all. This forces teams into clunky, manual workarounds, like chasing down approvals in long email chains or messy Slack threads, which kind of defeats the whole point of using a helpdesk.

Inflexible and rigid automation

Freshdesk’s system is built on a foundation of rigid, pre-defined rules. It works okay for simple, one-step approvals, but it quickly hits a wall when you throw more dynamic situations at it.

A common headache you'll see in community forums is trying to build multi-stage or parallel approvals. Imagine a request that needs to go from a manager to the finance team, and then to legal for a final check. Trying to build that kind of sequence in Freshdesk is either incredibly complicated or just flat-out impossible. You end up with a tangled web of rules that are a pain to manage and even harder to scale. The approval itself is just a status change; it can't do anything smart on its own, like pull data from another system to help the approver make a better decision.

Why Freshdesk approvals fix the symptom, not the problem

This is the real issue here. A manual approval process is often just a band-aid for a deeper problem. The need for an approval usually crops up because an agent doesn't have the information or the authority to do something themselves. The Freshdesk workflow puts some structure around that manual step, but it doesn't get rid of it. The bottleneck is still there; it just has a more organized queue. You’re making the wait time feel more official, but you aren't actually making your team faster.

A smarter way than Freshdesk approvals: Automating the root cause with an AI agent

Instead of just managing the approval step, a more modern approach is to use an AI agent to automate the entire task from beginning to end. An AI agent like eesel AI connects directly with Freshdesk to handle these workflows intelligently, moving past simple gatekeeping to deliver a real resolution.

Go beyond Freshdesk approvals with custom AI actions

An AI agent is much more than a fancy approval button. With a fully customizable workflow engine, eesel AI can be set up to take real, meaningful actions.

Let’s go back to that refund request. Instead of just flagging a ticket for a human to look at, an AI agent can be configured to:

1. Check the order value in real-time by looking it up in Shopify.

2. Review the customer’s purchase history in your CRM to see if they're a loyal customer.

3. If the request meets your criteria (e.g., the order is under $100 and it’s their first refund), it can automatically process the refund, notify the customer, and close the ticket.

4. If it doesn't meet the criteria, it can triage the ticket, tag it for a human review, and assign it to a senior agent with all the important information already gathered and summarized.

An example of eesel AI's copilot drafting a reply in Freshdesk regarding a refund policy, showcasing how AI can handle tasks that typically require manual checks and Freshdesk approvals.

That’s the key difference. The AI eliminates the need for any manual review for the majority of requests, freeing up your team to focus on the truly tricky cases that need their expertise.

Unify knowledge to reduce the need for Freshdesk approvals

A big reason approvals are even necessary is that information is often scattered across different places. An agent might not be 100% sure about a policy, so they escalate the ticket just to be safe.

This is another spot where AI can completely change the game. eesel AI can instantly train on all of your company's knowledge, not just a curated help center. It learns from past tickets, internal Google Docs, Confluence pages, and private notes. By bringing all this knowledge together, the AI has the context it needs to solve an issue accurately every time, drastically cutting down on the need for a human to double-check its work.

Simulate and deploy with confidence

Building complex workflows in Freshdesk can feel like a bit of a guessing game. You set up the rules and cross your fingers that they work as you intended. eesel AI offers a much safer path with its simulation mode.

You can test your AI agent on thousands of your past tickets in a safe, sandboxed environment. This shows you exactly how it would have handled requests that previously needed a manual approval. You get a clear forecast of your resolution rate, cost savings, and ROI before you ever turn the AI on for live customers. It’s all about moving from guesswork to data-driven decisions.

Pricing for Freshdesk approvals

To give you the full picture, it's helpful to see exactly where the approvals feature sits in Freshdesk's pricing. As mentioned, it's exclusively for the top-tier plan.

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	Key Feature for Approvals
Free	$0 / up to 10 agents	Not Available
Growth	$15 / agent / month	Not Available
Pro	$49 / agent / month	Not Available
Enterprise	$79 / agent / month	Approval Workflows

Note: Pricing is based on information available at the time of writing. Please check the official Freshdesk pricing page for the most current details.

Stop managing Freshdesk approvals, start automating resolutions

Native Freshdesk approvals give you a basic way to manage internal reviews, but they come at a high cost, are pretty inflexible, and don't really fix the root cause of the delay. They add structure to a slow process instead of getting rid of the process itself.

The future of great customer support isn't about building better gates; it's about using AI to automate resolutions safely and intelligently. By giving an AI agent access to your company's full knowledge and the power to take real action, you can move beyond managing approvals and start automating resolutions. Platforms like eesel AI are the strategic solution for teams that want to scale their support without just scaling their headcount.

Take the next step beyond Freshdesk approvals

Don't let manual approvals slow your team down any longer. See for yourself how an AI agent can turn your most time-consuming workflows into automated resolutions.

Start your free trial with eesel AI and discover which support requests you can automate in just a few minutes.