How to automate multilingual replies in Freshdesk using templates: A 2025 guide

So, your company is growing and reaching customers all over the world. That’s fantastic! But it also brings a tricky new challenge to your support desk: how do you offer quick, helpful answers in multiple languages? Your customers want support in their own language, but trying to manually translate every single reply or manage a mountain of templates in Freshdesk just isn't going to work long-term. It's slow, mistakes happen, and it doesn’t scale well at all.

This guide will walk you through the standard way to set up multilingual reply templates in Freshdesk. We’ll cover the built-in features first, and then we'll look at a much more powerful, truly automated way to handle global customer chats using AI.

What you'll need

Before we jump in, just make sure you have a few things ready:

• A Freshdesk account with either the Pro, Pro + AI Copilot, or Enterprise plan. These plans have the multilingual features you’ll need.

• Admin access to your Freshdesk account.

• A solid list of the languages you need to support.

The standard method for multilingual replies in Freshdesk

Freshdesk has some built-in tools for running a multilingual helpdesk. This method involves a fair bit of manual setup, but it’s the traditional way to manage different languages inside the platform. Here’s a look at how it’s done.

Step 1: Turn on multiple languages in your account

First thing's first, you have to tell Freshdesk which languages you'll be working with.

To do that, just head over to Admin > Account Settings > Manage Languages. Click “Add Language” and pick all the languages your team supports. It's also a good idea to set your main language as the default. This little step unlocks all the localization options you'll need later on.

Step 2: Create multilingual "canned response" templates

Canned Responses are what Freshdesk calls its reply templates. They're there to stop agents from typing out the same answer again and again. You can find them under Admin > Agent Productivity > Canned Responses.

This is where the real grind begins. For every common question, like a password reset request, you have to create a completely separate canned response for each language. That means your list of templates will start to look like this:

• "password_reset_en"

• "password_reset_es"

• "password_reset_de"

• "password_reset_fr"

You can probably see where this is going. This list gets incredibly long, fast. It can become a real headache to keep everything updated and organized. If you support five languages and have just 20 common questions, you're already looking at 100 different templates to juggle.

Step 3: Localize your customer portal and ticket forms

To give your customers a smooth experience, you'll also want to translate things like your portal text, ticket field names, and dropdown menus.

This is another area where things can feel a bit clunky. To translate ticket fields in Freshdesk, you often have to download a YML file for each language, open it in a text editor to make your changes, and then upload it back into the system. It gets the job done, but it’s a manual process that really highlights how much hands-on work is needed to keep a multilingual helpdesk running.

Step 4: Use workflow automation to route tickets by language

Freshdesk’s automation tools can help get tickets to the right agent, but they don't actually automate the reply itself.

You can set up a rule under Admin > Workflows > Automations that kicks in whenever a new ticket comes in. By using a condition like "Ticket properties," you can check the customer's language and automatically assign the ticket to an agent or group that speaks it.

But here’s the catch: this automation is only for routing. The agent still has to open the ticket, dig through that huge list of canned responses to find the right one in the right language, and then hit send. It’s better than doing everything from scratch, but it’s a long way from being truly automated.

This workflow illustrates how Freshdesk's automation can route tickets based on language, a key step when you Freshdesk automate multilingual replies using templates.

Limitations of the standard method

Going through the steps above gives you a basic multilingual setup, but you'll start to see the cracks pretty quickly as your business grows. The native, template-based way of doing things creates a few big problems:

• It’s a maintenance nightmare. Every time a process changes or you update a policy, you have to hunt down and edit multiple templates for every single language. This eats up a ton of time and makes it easy to accidentally send customers outdated information.

• It’s not really automation. Your agents are still spending time on each ticket, searching for and picking the right template. The process isn't doing the work for them; it’s just giving them pre-written blocks of text. It trades the work of typing for the work of searching.

• The replies are static and impersonal. Canned responses can't handle questions with any nuance or pull in live customer data, like an order number or subscription details. They only work for the most straightforward, repetitive questions, which leaves your agents to handle everything else by hand.

• Quality can be all over the place. The quality of your translations depends entirely on who wrote the template. Keeping a consistent brand voice and tone across hundreds of templates and multiple languages is almost impossible unless you have a dedicated localization team.

A better way to automate multilingual replies

Instead of trying to manage a library of static templates, modern AI tools can connect directly to your helpdesk and provide dynamic, context-aware replies in any language, all on their own.

This is where a solution like eesel AI changes the game. It’s an AI platform that plugs into the tools you already use, including Freshdesk, to automate support without making you switch helpdesks or overhaul your current workflows.

How AI solves the challenges of the standard method

• It brings all your knowledge together, so you don't need templates. eesel AI learns from all of your existing company knowledge, your help center articles, past ticket resolutions, and even documents in Google Docs or Confluence. It creates answers from this single source of truth, so when you update a help article, the AI's knowledge is instantly updated, too. No more duplicate templates to worry about.

• It learns from your best agents automatically. The AI studies thousands of your past successful ticket conversations to understand your brand voice, policies, and how you solve problems. It figures out what a great, helpful answer looks like in every language you support, all without you having to do any manual training.

• It gives dynamic, on-the-fly responses. When a customer asks a question in Spanish, French, or Japanese, eesel's AI Agent doesn't hunt for a template. It understands what the customer is asking for and generates a unique, personalized answer in their language right away. It can even take actions like looking up order details from Shopify or escalating the ticket to a human agent if it needs to.

Getting started with AI-driven multilingual support

While the standard Freshdesk setup can take hours or even days of tedious work, getting started with a real AI solution is much, much simpler.

Step 1: Connect Freshdesk to eesel AI in one click

Just head to the eesel AI dashboard and authorize Freshdesk. Your helpdesk will be connected in seconds. No complex API keys or developer time needed.

A screenshot showing how eesel AI integrates with Freshdesk to draft replies, offering a more advanced way to Freshdesk automate multilingual replies using templates.

Step 2: Add your knowledge sources

Next, connect the places where your company knowledge lives. Just paste in your help center URL or connect your Confluence space or Google Docs folders. eesel AI gets to work right away, learning your content so it can answer customer questions accurately.

Step 3: Configure and test your AI agent

Use the simple prompt editor to set up your AI's personality and rules for escalation. You can give it instructions like, "Always be friendly and helpful," or "If a customer asks for a refund, escalate the ticket to the billing team."

Then, run a quick simulation to see how it would have performed on your real-world tickets. Once you feel good about it, you can activate it and start automating replies instantly.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Relying on raw machine translation. Tools that just translate text word-for-word often miss important context and sound unnatural. A much better approach is to use AI that learns from your actual past conversations to get the tone, phrasing, and problem-solving style just right.

• Building overly complex, rule-based workflows. Rigid "if this, then that" automations are brittle. They break as soon as a customer asks a question in a slightly different way. An AI that understands the customer's intent is far more flexible and can handle a much wider variety of questions.

• Forgetting about knowledge gaps. If an answer doesn't exist in your knowledge base, your automation is going to hit a wall. A platform like eesel AI helps by flagging these knowledge gaps for you. It can even draft new help articles based on successful ticket resolutions, helping you improve your self-service resources over time.

Move beyond the standard template method

Setting up multilingual support in Freshdesk is a must for any global business. While the built-in tools give you a place to start, relying on manual templates just isn't a sustainable plan. It creates more work for your team and often leads to slower, less consistent experiences for your customers.

True AI automation gives you a better way forward. By connecting all your company knowledge and learning from your team's expertise, you can provide instant, high-quality, multilingual support that keeps customers happy and frees up your agents to focus on the issues that really need a human touch.

Ready to see how it works?

Take the next step: Try eesel AI on your Freshdesk tickets and see how many conversations you can automate today. Start your free trial or book a demo with our team.