FreshChat is a modern messaging software built for sales and customer engagement teams to talk to prospects and customers on the website, mobile app, or social pages. It offers solutions for B2B and B2C businesses, including banking and financial services, insurance, retail and eCommerce, technology, telecom, travel, and hospitality. However, there are FreshChat Alternatives, continue reading to find out more!
What does FreshChat Offer?
It offers in-app messaging through which users can send messages to prospects or customers right from their mobile applications. The live chat feature allows users to engage with customers on their websites. Through its integration with Freshdesk, users can reach out to customers who have already filed a ticket by seeing their name and email address in the chat interface. Additionally, it enables users to add canned responses when answering common questions from customers.
Other features include social media integration, file sharing, webhooks support, message routing rules, etc. Pricing runs on a monthly subscription model with support available via phone and email.
Freshchat Benefits & Pros
1. Web Messaging
Engage with your website visitors in real time. Chat on desktop, tablet, or mobile devices and seamlessly switch between them
2. Native Mobile Messaging
The Mobile Messaging platform Is Built to provide the best experience on native mobile apps on both Android and iOS.
3. Automation & Personalization
Automate engagement with your customers using triggers, bots, and segments, and adapt messages based on prospects' behavior.
4. Analytics & Reporting
Track your performance on different channels and get insights that help you make data-driven decisions.
5. Integrations & APIs
You can Integrate FreshChat with any third-party application through the REST APIs or webhooks or use the pre-built integrations with other leading applications like Zendesk and Salesforce.
6. Automated conversations
Set up automated conversations in just a few clicks. Guides users to the right path or answers with auto messages based on user intent.
7. Customizable web and mobile apps
FreshChat mobile applications are available on both Android and iOS platforms. Users can engage in multiple conversations at a time. Customize the look and feel of your chat window according to your brand.
8. Conversation history
Freshchat allows you to track all previous conversations with each user in your database. It gives you an insight into what they might be looking for when they return to your website, app, or social media channel.
FreshChat Cons
1. Decline In Quality Than Other FreshDesk Products
Freshchat is undoubtedly an innovative solution, but the product lacks quality from a holistic perspective. However, users often complain about minor problems that disrupt the overall experience. The Freshdesk has an excellent reputation for being reliable. Still, FreshChat has ways to go before it stands up to the FreshDesk name. Furthermore, it is still a relatively new product. Hence, UX will improve as more users start with Freshchat for their business.
2. Limitation In FreshDesk Integration
The FreshDesk integration could also be better. The current integration allows you to connect between FreshDesk and FreshChat. Still, it doesn't allow more advanced features like viewing support tickets from within FreshChat. You'll have to keep two separate tabs open, which can be pretty inconvenient when managing multiple conversations at once.
3. Other Minor Bugs
In addition to these limitations, FreshChat has a few bugs here and there regarding small features like saving gifs in private messages and such. Since this is still a relatively new tool, we should expect some minor issues here and there like any other software out there.
FreshChat Alternatives
Here is a list of the top 4 alternatives to FreshChat
- BotPenguin
- Zendesk
- Help Scout
- DelightChat
1. BotPenguin
BotPenguin is a messenger chatbot creating platform for businesses of all sizes. The goal is to help you grow your business using the power of messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. It is a SaaS (Software as a Service) product that allows businesses to create and manage their Messenger bots without any technical knowledge.
Features
- Creating and Managing Bots
- A simple drag and drop builder helps users create their bots without technical knowledge.
- Support for Multiple Platforms
- Connect your bot to multiple platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.
- Easy Integration with Existing Websites/Apps
- Share code snippets with developers to integrate bots with existing websites/apps in just a few minutes.
2. Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer service platform that provides companies with various tools to manage customer relationships. At its core, it's a help desk ticketing system. Still, it also offers call center functionality, a live chat tool, and a knowledge base. It allows companies to provide support via email, phone, web portal, live chat, or mobile app regardless of which tools their customers prefer to use.
Zendesk also offers a suite of products for businesses seeking an integrated set of tools for their customer service software needs. Many of the world's most successful companies (including Airbnb, Slack, and Uber) use Zendesk to provide excellent customer service.
Zendesk Suite includes
- Zendesk Support – A cloud-based customer support solution that allows companies to provide fast and personal support across multiple channels (like email, phone, chat, and social media)
- Zendesk Talk – A cloud-based call center software that gives agents the tools to provide fast and personalized support over the phone
- Zendesk Chat (formerly Zopim) – A live chat software that enables businesses to chat with visitors in real-time on their websites and mobile apps
- Zendesk Guide – A knowledge base software that helps companies self-serve by creating searchable help centers for their customers
Why Go For Zendesk?
1. Easy and Efficient
The company's products are easy to use and implement. They give organizations the flexibility to move quickly, focus on innovation, and scale with their growth.
2. Known Everywhere
Zendesk serves more than 100,000 paying customers in 150 countries and territories. More than 700 employees work across North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America.
3. A thorough Customer Engagement Solution for your brand
The Zendesk Suite is a complete customer engagement solution - it includes live chat, messaging, knowledge base software, and a support ticket system.
3. Help Scout
What is Help Scout?
Help Scout is a customer service software that allows you to deliver fast, personal and delightful support via email and live chat. It's the easiest way to provide the best customer experience without sacrificing your own.
What's unique about Help Scout is that the founders made it with developers in mind. It integrates with your favorite technologies (like Stripe and Slack), has an open API, and can scale as your business grows. If you have a Stripe account, you can even use Help Scout to sync your Stripe customers directly into its database. You can view a customer's purchase history, refunds, or cancellations from one central place.
Why Choose Help Scout?
1. Excellent Customer Support
Help Scout intends to provide the best possible support experience for your customers and prospects. It is a simple, straightforward help desk software with email integration, a shared inbox, and automated workflows. Help Scout doesn't even require a login for your customers to create tickets or have conversations with you.
2. Manage Your Team With Ease And Efficiency
Help Scout will support you no matter what industry you're in or what level of experience your team brings to the table. Whether you're a small business without an IT department or an enterprise company with hundreds of agents, Help Scout provides everything you need to keep your team organized and efficient.
3. Automatic ticketing
Every email to your support address creates a ticket, automatically assigned to the next available agent or the most qualified team member. You can also set up automatic ticket assignments based on language, location, or product type criteria.
4. Email templates
These are automated responses that include personalized text based on information provided by your customer. Templates help you respond faster to customer questions while still providing individualized answers.
5. Contact profiles
Help Scout Automatically generates contact profiles for each person who reaches out with questions. It includes their name, email address, phone number, previous interactions with your company, etc.
Pros Of Help Scout
- Help Scout is a web-based help desk that helps businesses provide better customer service.
- Help Scout users access an easy-to-use, intuitive customer service tool that gives them complete visibility into their customer's interactions.
- It's an invaluable resource for smaller companies looking to provide excellent and efficient customer service.
- When you use Help Scout, your customers get a personalized experience get a clear and quick answer to their questions or concerns.
- You can monitor customer interactions and ensure your team always offers the best solutions possible with rich reporting capabilities.
4. DelightChat
What is DelightChat?
Help Scout is a customer service software that allows you to deliver fast, personal and delightful support via email and live chat. It's the easiest way to provide the best customer experience without sacrificing your own. What's unique about Help Scout is that the founders made it with developers in mind.
It integrates with your favorite technologies (like Stripe and Slack), has an open API, and can scale as your business grows. If you have a Stripe account, you can even use Help Scout to sync your Stripe customers directly into its database. You can view a customer's purchase history, refunds, or cancellations from one central place.
What can you create with DelightChat?
- Lead generation using conversational forms
- Chatbots for customer support on Facebook Messenger
- Customer engagement using personalized messages and information flow
Why Choose DelightChat?
1. WhatsApp as a potential marketing solution:
WhatsApp is the most preferred channel for consumers today for communication with businesses. More than 2 billion people worldwide use WhatsApp today. Whatsapp marketing is a great way to communicate with your customers. It is personal and offers a rich media experience. However, the challenge for businesses is that engaging customers on WhatsApp at scale can be very challenging.
There are no APIs available to companies to reach out to their customers on WhatsApp in bulk. So effective WhatsApp marketing becomes nearly impossible without building a dedicated internal team that can respond manually to every customer query on time.
2. DelightChat as a solution for WhatsApp Marketing:
DelightChat is an excellent option for WhatsApp marketing? It is an intelligent and robust WhatsApp marketing automation platform that helps businesses of all sizes to connect, engage, and convert their customers on WhatsApp.
DelightChat offers a wide range of features for quick response, auto-reply, broadcast messages, analytics, audience segmentation, and more. Their platform also enables you to create targeted campaigns and directly integrate with your existing CRM system or eCommerce platform.
With DelightChat, your business can now automate conversations on WhatsApp using chatbots. DelightChat's chatbot builder allows you to create advanced chat flows using the proprietary Drag & Drop interface. You don't need programming skills to build a WhatsApp chatbot with DelightChat.
The Bottom Line
FreshChat is a fresh, new customer engagement software product by FreshWorks. It is a cloud-based solution that helps businesses acquire, engage, and support customers across different channels. The product caters to businesses of all sizes in all types of industries. You can create a smooth customer experience and pipeline with FreshChat.
However, it has its limitations and benefits. If you don't think that the good outweighs the bad for FreshChat. In that case, pick one of the alternatives mentioned.
After all, you know your customers best and what platform they will enjoy the most.
