Contents
What makes a business venture truly successful in a sense are the customers, the people who are interested in what you do and ultimately make the purchases.
Needless to say, one of the most crucial aspects of any business is therefore, the customer base.
You need a proper strategy and resources through which you can promote your products and services, create buzz to gain attention, engage with prospects, retain loyal customer base and more.
There are tons of customer support softwares claiming to effectively help you engage with customers and satisfy their requirements, but really how worth these services are. 😚
However, one of the well known, industry leading and highly reliable platforms for customer retention and support is Freshworks. In this Freshworks review, we will be covering multiple aspects of the platform along with the brief overview.
Some of the factors on which we will be rating the platform include key features, products, pricing structure, security mechanisms, support resources, contact services and more.
What is Freshworks?
Launched in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy as Freshdesk, it was later rebranded to Freshworks in 2017. With its headquarters in San Mateo, California, Freshworks operates from 13 global locations in order to serve their customers all around the world.
Freshworks focuses on developing and delivering software as a service (SaaS) designed to be used by everyone from IT, to customer service, from sales, to marketers and Human Resources. The software is built for end users, is affordable, and quick to implement.
Although started with just customer support experience services, they have added sales and CRM tools along with marketing features to provide seamless customer and employee experience.
Besides customer support software, the platform also provides expertise in areas such as Helpdesk, Customer Relationship Management, IT Service Management, Web 2.0, Web Based Support Ticket System, Applicant Tracking System, Sales & Marketing Automation and Conversion Optimization Suite.
More than 50,000 companies from over 120 countries around the world use Freshworks’ SaaS to enable a better customer and employee experience. The offered SaaS solutions solve complex business problems for companies of all sizes.
Some of the organizations that have been using the Freshworks’ services include Pearson, Fiverr, Trainline, Klarna, Exabytes and more. Stick till the end of this Freshworks review to know more about the platform and their services.
Freshworks Products & Key Features
The platform offers a plethora of features useful for various aspects of a business including sales, marketing and customer support.
Every launched Freshworks product has their own exclusive attributes. However, let us only discuss the main functionalities and benefits of the products offered by the platform in this section of Freshworks review.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is an on-demand omnichannel customer support solution that seamlessly aligns your help desk operations. With Freshdesk you can automate the daily repetitive tasks to save time, streamline collaboration between teams, facilitate meaningful and engaging conversations with prospects and customers. The key aspects of Freshdesk are as follows. 😍
Ticketing – The ticketing system offered by Freshdesk helps you prioritize tickets according to the keywords, sort and assign them. You can leverage the power of your team to deliver the best customer experience ever. Team Inbox lets you filter tickets and assign them to specific agents.
You can see who else is viewing and replying to a particular ticket, save replies for common ticket queries, custom ticket views, merge tickets with the related issues together and more. You can split and share ownership of tickets without losing visibility, link as well as track related tickets while sending bulk updates to the customers, automatically suggest ticket fields to sort them into categories, etc.
Automations – You can use AI driven automations to manage your mundane repetitive tasks and streamline workflow across various business departments. Automations scan through every inquiry and perform actions depending on factors like where and what they’ve contacted you about and more.
The tickets can be automatically assigned to agents on factors such as skills, agent’s workload or equally amongst the entire team. The AI powered automations provided by Freshdesk are easy to set up, scalable, flexible, support multi level logical operators, and manage deficiencies effectively.
Reporting & Analytics – Do you prefer to make data driven decisions for your company? Freshdesk develops and supports data directed culture and therefore offers immensely advanced analytical capabilities. You can leverage in-built as well as customized reports from libraries for your business requirements to make strategies regarding internal and external environments.
You can also personalize the team dashboard by displaying preferred metrics, send notifications to admins when necessary, access and analyze the granular data and insights from anywhere using a mobile app, share your business performance with relevant collaborators, team members, customers and more.
Freshsales
Are you looking for an all in one marketing and sales solution? Look no further than the Freshsales suite. It offers robust features to serve all of your email marketing and CRM needs which are developed to maximize the effectiveness of sales teams. The key attributes of Freshsales includes but is not limited to the following given below. 😊
Contact Management – You have the ability to access complete records including that of your marketing contacts and sales leads. With contact management, you have access to a 360 degree view of contacts with which you can unify data to devise better marketing campaigns, improve engagement and communication to develop better customer relationships.
You can also use the activity timeline to analyze the audience’s online interactions such as website and email activities, rank prospects using Predictive Contact Scoring, automatically assign leads and group teams on the basis of sorting filters like geography, deal size and more.
Deal Management – Some of the tasks that can be executed includes the following; monitoring and managing all your deals in the pipeline, identifying leads with high converting rates, using AI powered insights to take right actions for each deal, seamlessly collaborating with different teams to achieve greater productivity, setting up weighted pipelines to predict revenue for each project, managing incentives for different sales teams and more.
Email Integration – You have the ability to manage your third party email accounts directly from your CRM software enabling you to create and send emails with unmatched deliverability rates. With Freshsales you can schedule your email campaigns to be sent out on a particular date and time, set real time alerts to connect with potential clients, customize emails using custom HTML code and templates, automate sales sequences, workflows, outbound email campaigns, etc.
Freshmarketer
It helps you streamline and automate all of your marketing activities to increase conversions using various channels. The key aspects of Freshmarketer include the following.
Email Campaigns – You are allowed to send promotional emails to engage and convert your audience, schedule the regularly sent out newsletters to educate your customers about your products and services, send event invites, communicate via emails to provide them the updates, and more.
Event Tracking – You can track your contact’s activities, optimize in-app experiences, improve marketing campaign’s performance by segmenting and targeting audiences according to their interests and various events, enable closed loop marketing, maximize retention by monitoring your product and nurturing relationships with customers, etc.
Marketing Reports – You have access to insights needed to make the correct decisions. You can analyze high performing marketing lists, discover and identify sources of conversions, track campaigns’ performance in terms of engagement, measure marketing results using in depth reports and more. 😘
Freshworks – Pricing & Plans
Different Freshworks’ products charge a little differently even though all these products have three paid pricing criteria. The details regarding the pricing structure is given below.
Freshdesk Prices
You have access to 21 days of free trial period and can either subscribe for a support desk or omnichannel service.
Support Desk – You can either use the free version or subscribe to a paid plan. The “Growth” package costs $15, “Pro” costs $49 and “Enterprise” costs $79 per agent per month when billed annually.
Omnichannel – The “Growth Omnichannel” package costs $29, “Pro Omnichannel” costs $59 and “Enterprise Omnichannel” costs $99 per agent per month when billed annually.
Freshsales Prices
You can either use the Freshsales free version or subscribe to one of three available paid versions. The “Growth” package costs $15, “Pro” costs $39 and “Enterprise” costs $69 per user every month when billed annually.
Freshmarketers Prices
Freshmarketer also offers a free version along with three other paid plans. The “Growth” package is available at $19, “Pro” at $149 and “Enterprise” for $299 on a monthly basis when billed annually.
Freshworks Security
It is important to safeguard your private data along with all the customers’ related sensitive information. With Freshworks’ products, you can very easily scale up your business without having to worry about cross-border security checks as it is a globally secured platform. Some of the security measures and safety mechanisms supported are as follows. 😇
SSL Certificate – SSL certificates ensure secure information access by encrypting the communication between web browsers and servers.
Single Sign On – You can simplify and secure your login access using SSO scripts which authenticates users if only the valid credentials are used.
IP Whitelisting – You can create exclusive access rights for team members and agents by only allowing office network addresses to bypass. This feature blocks all the IPs trying to access the system from outside of the specified network.
Create Fresh ID – You can register for a dedicated Fresh ID which is accepted across all the Freshworks accounts including Freshsales, Freshconnect, Freshdesk Contact Center, Freshmarketer, Freshservice, Freshdesk Messaging, and Freshteam. This supports hassle free safety checking and offers easy access retrieval in case login credentials expire.
HIPAA & GDPR Compliance – The platform is compliant with HIPAA through which you can safely store healthcare data as per ePHI standards, configure a custom mail server for your email transactions, add encrypted fields in order to manage private customer data, etc. The platform is equipped with GDPR features which lets you perform tasks like delete end user’s and agent’s profiles when requested, export contact details, forums, tickets and more, send data access requests from customers, etc.
Additional Product Security Features – It includes Click-jacking prevention, Granular app management, SHA 256 encoding, Data encryption at rest, JWT authentication for APIs and Cross-site scripting mitigation.
Freshworks – Customer Support
Coming onto the customer support aspect of this Freshworks review, it is important to mention that the platform offers extensive, professional and speedy help.
You have access to comprehensive and elaborative self help resources including blog posts, webinars, how to guides, a dedicated academy, videos, resource library, and community options.
To reach out to the support team you can either contact them via phone call, live chat or by submitting a support ticket. You can also connect with them on social media forums.
Conclusion – Final Verdict
Wrapping up our Freshworks review by putting forth our final verdict. The platform offers top notch products along with great features for business aspects including that of CRM, Sales, Marketing and Customer Support. 😉
The pricing plans are quite affordable when compared with the alternatives, customer support is professional, and the services are easy to use.
However, on the downside, the advanced plans of Freshworks’ products can be a little expensive for some people. But, in all its entirety, from our perspective, Freshworks is really worth investing in.
