User Experience
Freshchat's user experience for customers is good. They've made the right decision to do away with pre-chat forms and instead opt for asking for an email address once a customer has initiated a conversation.
Internal users have a really well laid-out view of their conversations in the Inbox. I really like the right-most information panel showing you details about the user and device as well as optional widgets for clearbit and other Freshworks applications.
Pricing
Freshchat offers a generous free plan with umlimited contacts and 10 team members.
Business running a support operation will probably need to upgrade to the Blossom plan in order to have critial features such as reports, assignemnt rules and office hours.
Features
The color, background and size of the chat widget can be customized. Show Screenshot
In Settings, look for "Business Hours" where you can configure your office hours and a message which website visitors will see they initiate a conversation outside of these hours. This feature requires the 'Blossom' plan or higher. Show Screenshot
The Groups feature lets you organize your team members into groups like Sales, Support or Product Managers. Conversations can then be assigned to groups.
Conversations can be automatically assigned to individual team members or groups based on rules which you can define. This feature requires the Blossom plan or higher.
Saved Replies are known as Canned Responses in Freshchat. You can create personal saved replies for your own use, or choose to create categories of saved replies to share with all other team members or specific teams. Show Screenshot
Users can be blocked by entering their IP address.
The Freshchat chat widget can only be hidden by including some javascript on the pages on which you wish to hide it. Show Screenshot
Chats can be triggered using the Campaigns feature if you upgrade to the Blossom plan (limit is one 1 triggered message) or above (unlimited triggered messages). Show Screenshot
Freshchat supports the tagging of conversations (known as 'Labels' in freshchat) in order to help you better understand your customers' feedback, feature requests, support queries and so on. The Labels feature requires the Blossom plan or higher. Show Screenshot
Reports detailing your team's performance, customer satisfaction as well as a report tracking resolution by tags ('labels') are available in the Blossom plan or higher. Show Screenshot
The Freshchat Bot is designed to automated lead capture and is available in the Garden plan or above.
Freshchat doesn't provide an email inbox but the integration with Freskdesk provides the same functionality.
Freshchat does not provide email support but can be easily integrated with Freshdesk for the same functionality.
Freshchat supports the tracking of an unlimited number of users via the People feature. You can view users by segments (you can also create your own segments). Freshchat also lets you add your own custom attributes for users. Show Screenshot
Freshchat's In-app campaigns let you engage with targeted groups of users and make announcements to specific groups. In-app campaigns are supported from in the Garden plan and higher. Show Screenshot
Freshchat provides a tool to request and export a specific user's data. The same tool allows you to permanently delete a user, supporting their right to be forgotten. At the account level, it is also possible to opt out of third party analytics, not save IPs and not fetch enrichment data for users. Show Screenshot
Multilingual support is provided in the Estate plan.
Freshchat offers iOS and Android apps.
If you have the Blossom plan or higher, you can integrate FAQs directly inside the chat. This is a really neat feature. You can also easily integrate with Freshdesk for more knowledge base functionality. Show Screenshot
Freshchat has an API, see https://developers.freshchat.com/ for more information.
Review by Matt
Matt is a product manager with extensive experience in building and supporting software-as-a-service products. This includes implementing live chat for customer support and customer success teams.
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