assignment rules freshchat

Freshchat Review 2024: Features, Pricing, Pros and Cons

By Joren Wouters • Updated on Mar 8, 2024

Freshchat is a chatbot and live chat platform to engage with visitors on multiple channels, such as your website, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. But should you use Freshchat as your customer support tool?

In this Freshchat Review, we will cover all its features, the pros and cons, and the pricing plans of Freshchat.

Let’s dive in!

Our Verdict

Freshchat is perfect for small businesses to enterprises looking for a customer support tool, enabled with AI chatbots and live chat.

Freshchat is easy to use, has many features and allows you to connect with 400+ applications. With the built-in live chat and auto-assignment rules, you can hand over a conversation to an agent whenever you need. By using Freddy AI, you can automatically reply to questions and support your live chat agents with summarizing conversations and responding to questions.

Freshchat has a free plan and multiple paid plans (starting at $19/month). This makes the platform suitable for small businesses who just started, up to large enterprises with a big customer support team.

Table of Contents

Using the Freshchat Bot Builder

When you log in at Freshchat, you see a dashboard with the most important analytics of your customer support team:

On the left side, you have multiple tabs you can manage Freshchat with:

• Freddy Insights – This is a bot support agents can use to get insights in how Freshchat performs
• Support Dashboard – Overall dashboard that gives you insights on how well your support team does
• Conversations Inbox – This is the live chat inbox of Freshchat
• Contacts  – Overview of everyone that talked with your chatbot
• FAQs – Frequently Asked Question articles you can add to your chatbot and widget
• Chatbots – This is where you design your bot flows
• Campaigns – Here you can set up website, SMS and WhatsApp campaigns
• Support Analytics – Deep-dive analytics of your support team and chatbots

When you start with creating the chat automations, Freshchat uses a bot builder where you can create your flows:

With the bot builder, you can add two types of elements to your flow: New message or New action .

With the new message element, you can either send a message or ask for user input.

When performing an action, you can choose from dozens of actions, such as storing property data, assigning the conversation to an agent or performing an API call.

Additionally, you can see all the flows of your chatbot in a  Holistic  View  so you easily see what flows are connected with each other:

Also, when you’ve created your chatbot flows you can preview them before actually publishing your chatbot:

Moreover, you can also keep track of different versions of your chatbot and easily go back and forth between them:

Overall, I think that Freshchat’s bot builder is pretty easy to use and you can set up your chatbot fast.

That being said, it can take some time before you fully understand the interface. Freshchat has many features and some simple features seem to be hidden in the interface or not as straightforward as expected. For example, it took me quite a while to understand how I could add conditions to my chatbot flows and how to add custom properties to Freshchat and store data in them.

There is also one other drawback: you need to create a separate chatbot per channel.

Chatbot elements

With Freshchat, you can add two elements to your chatbot flows:  New message  and  New action.

With the Message Element, you can just send messages (including images, files and video) and ask for user input (text, buttons, phone numbers, etc).

If you add an action to your chatbot flow, you can choose from many actions, including:

• Storing data in properties
• Assign a conversation for handover
• Trigger eCommerce actions

Additionally, you can also add conditions to your chatbot flow to create personalized experiences:

By using these elements, you can create a good chatbot.

The main drawback I had with the chatbot elements is that you cannot start another chatbot flow, without clicking on a button. This limits the scalability of your chatbot and you possibly need to copy/paste content across chatbot flows.

In Freshchat, you have an overview of all the contacts that talked with your chatbot:

When you click on a contact, you can see the status of the contact, contact details and all conversations they had:

In this overview, you can see that you can easily add custom fields (called “Properties” in Freshchat) and add tags (called “Conversation labels” in Freshchat) to contacts.

In Freshchat, you have properties on three levels:

• Conversation-level, these properties are stored for each conversation (such as someone’s order number)
• Contact-level, these properties are stored for each person (such as someone’s email)
• Bot-level, these properties are specific for each chatbot

Moreover, you can also create your own user segments, by defining conditions:

With Freshchat, you can send SMS and WhatsApp broadcasts to your contacts:

Moreover, you can also easily add multiple languages to your chatbot:

You can just download the file for a language, change the CSV and upload a new files with translation. In the Bot Builder, you have an action that detects someone’s language, allowing your chatbot to switch to a different language.

Freshchat AI Features

Freshchat has many AI features, including intent & entity detection & Freddy AI.

Using Intents & Detecting Customer Information

With Freshchat, you can understand the intent of the user. You can add training phrases to Freshchat so it can learn from them and automatically detect the intent of the user:

Then, you can connect these intents to one of your chatbot flows in the Bot Builder.

Furthermore, Freshchat can also automatically detect customer information from the conversation:

However, it is not possible to add your own entities and detect them as well, it’s only limited to Email, Name & Phone.

Freddy AI: Self Service, Copilot and Insights

Freshchat also offers Freddy AI, which consists of three components: Self Service, Copilot and Insights.

With Freddy Self Service, you can train Freddy on knowledgebase articles you add to Freshchat. Then, your chatbot can automatically answer questions with information in these articles and refer customers to them:

Additionally, Freddy can also summarize conversations (so your agents can work faster), suggest utterances for intents and rephrase content in your chatbot flows.

Freddy Copilot helps agents and assistants to improve their productivity. For example, rephrase texts from agents, summarize conversations (even over the phone), create knowledge base articles and detect the sentiment of a conversation.

With Freddy Prompts & Insights, admins in Freshchat can ask questions to an AI Bot and it can automatically perform tasks and generate insights for you:

With Freshchat, you can put a chatbot on 7 channels:

• Your website
• SMS (via Twilio or Gupshup)
• Facebook Messenger
• Google Business Messages

Moreover, you can also connect Freshchat with Voice to handle incoming phone calls (by using Freshcaller or another phone service), but it’s not possible to add a voice chatbot to that as well.

Furthermore, you can also send email campaigns to the contacts that talked with your chatbot.

Integrations

Freshchat has a built-in live chat, allowing you to hand over a conversation to a human agent:

This live chat is also really advanced because you can set up assignment rules, rules for conversation routing, SLA policies, and even automatically translate messages sent by live chat agents.

Additionally, Freshchat offers an iOS and Android app, allowing your agents to respond to customers via their phones.

Furthermore, Freshchat has direct integrations with other Freshworks products, such as Freshdesk and Freshsales. And they have integrations with:

• Slack (so you can reply to user questions from your Slack channel)
• Clearbit (to get company information from anonymous visitors)

Moreover, they also have an App Marketplace with over 400+ integrations to other applications (both free and paid), including Hubspot, Teamviewer and Calendly:

This allows you to connect Freshchat with many other applications.

If this is not enough, you can also connect Freshchat to your own application by using webhooks or calling the Freshchat API .

With Freshchat, you can add a widget to your website that you can fully customize to your own preferences:

Likewise, you can also add Topics and FAQ knowledge base articles to your widget:

Additionally, you can create full Customer Journeys in Freshchat. For example, you can send proactive messages if people are for a specific time on one of your website’s pages:

A slight drawback here is that you cannot connect this proactive message with a specific chatbot flow, but only with your chatbot in general.

Or you can invite contacts to a webinar via SMS with a customer journey:

Likewise, you can do the same thing via WhatsApp by sending WhatsApp Message Templates.

Freshchat Pricing

Freshchat offers a free plan and paid plans, starting at $19 per agent, per month.

Freshchat’s free plan is free forever for up to 10 agents. This plan comes with all the features required to have a live chat feature on your website. This plan doesn’t include any Freshbot sessions, so you cannot use Freshchat’s chatbots in this plan.

If you want to get more features and want to use the chatbot of Freshchat, you need to go with the Growth plan. This plan costs $19 per agent/month and comes with 500 Freshbot sessions, all the channels of Freshchat, the App Marketplace and Assignment Rules.

If this is not enough, you can for the Pro plan, starting at $49 per agent/month. This plan also comes with 500 Freshbot sessions, and includes more advanced features, such as advanced Liver Chat automations, Auto-Resolve, Advanced Dashboards and CSAT Surveys:

If you want to add more Freshbot sessions or want to use Freddy Copilot, you can buy these as add-ons:

• $100 for 1000 Freshbot sessions
• $29/agent/month for Freddy Copilot

Each of the plans comes with a 14-day free trial, allowing you to test the platform before paying for it.

Freshchat provides an analytics dashboard with many pre-built reports, including a Chat Conversations Reports, Chatbot Oteview Reports and SLA compliance report:

When you click on one of the reports, you can the most important analytics of your chatbot and live chat agents:

Additionally, you can also create your own custom reports by dragging widgets into a canvas and saving them:

Also, you can improve the answers of your chatbot easily, because you can see an overview of all the questions your chatbot did not understand:

Freshchat has a Shopify and WooCommerce integration, allowing you to automatically get data from your webshop, such as customer and order information.

Additionally, you can also install apps for other eCommerce platforms via the App Marketplac, such as Magento and BigCommerce.

Templates & Cloning

Freshchat provides 68 templates you can use to get started with creating your chatbot.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to create these chatbot templates yourself and share them with others.

On the other hand, you can duplicate your chatbots, your chatbot flows and any element within your chatbot.

Optimization

With Freshchat, it is impossible to do any optimization, such as A/B testing.

Freshchat has a lot of documentation and tutorials on how you can use their platform.

Moreover, they provide support via live chat and email.

So, should you use Freshchat to create your chatbots?

Yes, you should.

I was actually quite impressed with the features Freshchat has. The platform has grown a lot over the years.

Moreover, you can translate your chatbot to any language, publish your chatbot in 7 channels, send WhatsApp and SMS campaigns and create your own curated analytics reports.

Go to Freshchat

If you are considering buying Freshchat as your customer support tool, there are also some cons to keep into account:

• Some features are hidden in the interface
• Proactively sending messages on websites cannot be connected to specific chatbot flows
• No marketing possiblities on Facebook and Instagram

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• More Networks

Freshchat Assignment Example

Freshchat pricing

Bots and messaging for all businesses - small, medium, and enterprise

• Customer Service Suite

Freshcaller

• Freshservice

For getting started

forever upto 10 agents

No FREE sessions

Inbox Views

Conversation Labels

Bulk Actions

User Properties

Conversation Switch

Contact enhancement

Conversation properties

Chatbot Analytics

For fast growth

/agent/month, billed annually

Everything in Free and...

Assignment Rules

Priority Inbox

Canned Responses

Private Notes

User Events & Timeline

User Segmentation

Business Hours (Global)

Offline experience

Basic Dashboard

Conversations Overview Report

Facebook Messenger

Marketplace (App Store)

WhatsApp Business

Freshdesk integration

Instagram DM

Google Business Messages

Task management

Telephony in Freshchat

For high performance

Everything in Growth and...

Auto-resolve

IntelliAssign

Business Hours (by Groups)

Live Translate

Advanced Dashboard

Team Performance Report

Agent Availability Report

Roles and Permissions

CSAT Survey and Report

Conversation APIs

Advanced Automations

For enterprise-grade support

Everything in Pro and...

Allowed Domains

User Authentication(JWT)

Skill based routing

Enhance your Freshchat experience

Freshbots by freddy self service.

Freshbot sessions let you engage with customers 24/7 across web channels.

Freddy Copilot

Personal generative AI assistant for your support team

Freddy Insights

Generative AI-powered performance analysis and recommendations for leaders

Marketing Contacts

Purchase additional contact records to expand your marketing outreach

Engage customers over phone with the Frescaller add-on.

Add extra agents to your account for a day

Frequently asked questions

How does the 14-day free trial work.

When you sign up, you instantly get access to our Enterprise plan for 14 days. We will alert you before your trial expires. You can then select a plan and pay by credit card to continue using the product. If you choose not to continue, your account will be suspended.

Can I upgrade or downgrade my subscription?

Yes, you can choose to upgrade your subscription instantly. If you wish to downgrade or cancel your subscription, you can do so at the end of your term. Click on ‘Billing’ in your Freshworks Customer Service Suite account to modify your subscription details.

How safe is my data?

We take security seriously and you get to choose your data center from the get-go. Our servers are hosted in world-class data centers that are protected by biometric locks and 24-hour surveillance. We ensure that our application is always up to date with the latest security patches.

Do you have any cancellation fees?

No. Freshworks Customer Service Suite is a pay-as-you-go service. We do not have any cancellation fees. You can cancel whenever you want but your cancellation will come into effect only after the end of your term.

What types of payment do you accept?

We accept Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express. We do not accept PayPal. We will not be able to accept purchase orders over the phone. All of our offline payments follow USD pricing.

What is Freddy AI?

Freddy AI is a user-friendly AI solution that boosts productivity, fosters innovation, and delivers personalized customer experiences with its powerful generative AI capabilities. To know more about Freddy, click here .

What does beta mean for Freddy Copilot and Freddy Insights?

The beta program aims to help more customers try out our AI offerings. We also want to maximize customer feedback and fine-tune our features before we launch them publicly.

What happens to Freddy Copilot and Freddy Insights after the beta program ends?

Once both add-ons are released publicly after the beta program, customers on the Pro and Enterprise plans will be able to purchase them individually for their Freshworks accounts.

What is a Freshbot session?

A Freshbot session is any unique interaction between an end-user and a bot:

- On email, every email response is counted as 1 bot session

- On voice, every voice bot response is counted as 1 bot session

- On chat, all end-users-to-bot interactions that happen within a span of 24 hours from the time end-users initiate a session are counted as 1 bot session

- Only customer-facing AI features and bots consume sessions. Agent-facing AI features and bots don’t consume bot sessions.

Do I get free Freshbots sessions?

We offer 500 sessions with all paid plans to try out chatbots. This is limited to once per account. Once exhausted, you need to buy additional sessions based on your requirements.

Upon purchasing additional bot sessions, any remaining free sessions will be forfeited and replaced by the newly purchased sessions.

How can I buy additional Freshbots sessions? What’s the validity

You can purchase an unlimited number of Freshbots sessions. The validity aligns with your payment cycle. For example: if you choose to pay quarterly, your Freshbots sessions will also expire quarterly.

How many campaign contacts do I get as part of my plans?

You get 100 campaign contacts per account per month for the free plan. Similarly, you can get 500 campaign contacts per account per month for any paid plan.