Freshchat Review, Pricing & Features

What is Freshchat?

Freshchat is a live chat software with features geared toward customer engagement. It's a product offered by Freshworks, a company with products for businesses of all sizes.

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Table of Contents

• What is Freshchat?
• Freshchat Review Summary
• Freshchat Pricing & Cost
• Freshchat Features
  • Live Chat
  • Chat & Email Campaigns
  • Reports
  • FAQs
  • Integrations
• Freshchat Customer Support
• Freshchat vs. Competitors
• Is Freshchat Right For You?

Freshchat Review Summary

Freshchat is a live chat solution offered by Freshworks, a software company with a wide variety of products for businesses. Freshworks was founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy. It is currently headquartered in San Mateo, California, and the company has 40,000 customers across all products.

Freshchat’s main feature is live chat, though it also includes chat and email campaigns, chatbot add-ons, and integrations with other Freshwork products like Freshdesk, Freshsales, and Freshmarketer.

Freshchat offers five plans for customers to choose from. There is a free option, which allows for 100 agents and unlimited contacts. Freshchat is comparable in price to Live Agent and Pure Chat but offers more flexible pricing options.

Overall, Freshchat is a solid software that includes fundamental live chat and marketing analytics tools. Given the high price of the chat bot, this is not the ideal solution for small businesses that are interested in that feature. If you are interested in a more budget-friendly chatbot option, it would be advantageous to choose a solution like Tidio. However, if you have a small team of agents and do not necessarily require a chatbot, Freshchat is a reliable option.

Freshchat Pricing & Cost

Freshchat pricing ranges from $19 to $99 per agent per month. Discounts are available to customers who opt to pay annually rather than month-to-month.

There are two Omnichannel options for customers who wish to integrate Freshchat with Freshdesk and Freshcaller. There are also add-ons that customers can use to supplement their plans. The add-ons are:

Freshchat Key Features

This review will provide an overview of Freshchat’s major features. To give you a sense of overall look and usability, we’ll also provide images of the software.

To learn more about how we research and rate software tools, read about SoftwarePundit’s review methodology.

Live Chat

Live chat is a customer service tool that allows customer service representatives to talk with website visitors. On your website, visitors will see a small window, or widget, where they will converse with agents. Freshchat’s live chat feature is quick, reliable, and intuitive. It also offers more than 30 languages.

Team Inbox

The Freshchat Team Inbox is where agents chat with visitors and where all chats are accessed. All chats are listed in the left column and can be filtered by new, assigned, resolved, and bot conversations. Below is an image of the chat interface:

While using the Team Inbox, Agents will get information about visitors such as location, date of first chat, and number of pages they have visited. Along with typing messages in the chat box, agents will be able to:

Chat Widget

When visitors are on your website, they will see a chat window that looks like this:

The widget can be customized to your preference — you will be able to change the brand, color, and background to properly tailor the visitor’s experience. Freshchat does not, however, have eye-catchers, which are attention-grabbing widget additions found in other live chat tools.

Additional Live Chat Features

Freshchat offers important live chat features designed for agents to respond to visitors efficiently. Below is a table of those features.

Chat & Email Campaigns

Campaigns are strategic communications sent with the intent of engaging visitors and helping them purchase the ideal products and services. Freshchat offers campaigns via email and chat to help you automatically connect with visitors through multiple channels. These tools are effective for lead generation, though Freshchat does not offer as many pre-built email templates as competitors like Tidio.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the practice of grouping your customers based on data like geographic location, language, and onsite behavior. This will allow you to send targeted, relevant campaigns to specific groups. Freshchat allows you to create segments using multiple data points and logic statements — for example, you can choose to create a segment for customers who are using a desktop, who speak English, and who have had one session on your site:

Freshchat’s chat and email campaigns can use these segments as target audiences.

Chat Campaigns

You can use Freshchat to send automated and targeted chats to customers on the website. The benefit of these messages is that Freshchat automatically greets and interacts with visitors while agents may be offline or with other visitors.

Chat campaigns are created by drafting the message you intend to send, choosing when the message will be sent, and identifying the target audience. Below is an image of the chat campaign setup view:

Email Campaigns

Freshchat also allows its customers to send email campaigns. This includes bulk emails (e.g. newsletters, general promotions), as well as triggered emails (e.g. abandoned cart emails, appointment reminders). Below are the four email options you can choose from with Freshchat:

Email campaigns are fully customizable and Freshchat customers can choose which email address to route responses to.

Reports

Reports allow you to see how your team is performing in terms of customer support and can reveal which areas need improvement. Freshchat’s reporting section gives an overview of team performance, customer satisfaction, and conversation success. We found Freshchat’s in-house reports to be more powerful when compared with similarly priced tools, which often need to integrate with external applications to produce thorough reports.

Dashboard

The Freshchat Dashboard provides a broad overview of the most important reports. Overall, the dashboard has a clean layout that allows customers to quickly view and access important information from the day’s chats.

More detailed reports are found within the Reports Tab, which provides a number of categories with more detailed metrics.

Reports Tab

Within the Reports Tab, you will be able to access graphs and statistics concerning your company’s live chat performance. The Reports Tab includes metrics on five categories:

Below is an image of the Conversation Overview report. The data are presented in graphs, which will allow your team to see productivity and volume trends over time:

FAQs

FAQs act as a knowledge base where visitors to your website can find answers to their questions. Having such a knowledge base is helpful for both visitors and for chat agents, because chat agents can send pre-written FAQ articles rather than having to explain a lengthy subject to each visitor. Freshchat’s FAQ section is both easy to use and effective.

Sending FAQs

To send FAQs to visitors, you’ll create FAQ categories based on visitor needs, as seen below:

You can have an unlimited number of these categories. When using the live chat functionality, it is easy to attach an FAQ page for visitors to read through and solve issues.

Integrations

Freshchat has built integrations with other software including help desk tools, chat apps, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Freshchat has integrations with most of the major software systems, but does not have as many integrations as alternatives. For example, Freshchat lacks an integration with Zapier, which many other live chat tools have. However, Freshchat does integrate directly with other Freshworks products, which tend to function better than integrations with third-party tools.

Examples of some key integrations are:

Freshchat Customer Support

Freshchat’s customer support is very responsive over live chat and via email. We found that agents were available to speak almost immediately after sending a chat during the week.

Freshchat Alternatives & Competitors

The top Freshchat competitors include LiveChat and Intercom. To read an in-depth comparison between Intercom and Freshchat, check out our Freshchat vs. Intercom article. Additional live chat alternatives are listed below.

Is Freshchat Right For You?

Freshchat is a live chat solution offered by Freshworks. Its main features, including email marketing and live chat, are geared toward customer engagement.

Freshchat’s free plan offers 100 seats, making it a solid choice for small companies searching for a live chat solution. However, the high cost of its chatbot feature may be cost prohibitive for small businesses. If you’re searching for chatbot functionality at a lower cost, check out Crisp or Tidio.

If you are interested in trying Freshchat, sign up for a 21-day free trial.