For startups, small-sized businesses, or even large businesses, Freshworks products are pretty common. Considering most companies, even traditional ones, have integrated a digital aspect. Many companies have sprouted that offer various solutions to address specific facets of business operation. Thus, IT management software solutions have become a crucial part of the current business world.
Freshworks, formerly known as Freshdesk, is a company that offers software as a service (SaaS) that is channeled in this direction. Freshworks provides a couple of business-oriented IT management solutions integrated into various aspects.
Some of the products from Freshworks provide include software solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), Live Chat software, Marketing Automation software, and also IT service management (ITSM). So, the company has several solutions including the following;
- Freshdesk – A helpdesk software
- Freshservice – An IT Service desk software
- Freshsales – A Customer Relationship Management software
- Freshchat – A modern Live Chat software
- Freshmarketer – A Marketing Automation software
As you can tell, each software has its explicit function.
Freshworks as a company was started back in 2010, and to date, the company’s products serve over 150,000 companies in over 140 countries. Some of their customers, including traditional behemoths like Toshiba, Cisco, Avast, and Honda, to name a few.
In this article, we are going to take you through the various products mentioned before. We will offer a review of the pricing, features, app integrations, and every nitty-gritty detail that you should know. With this product review, we will also help you gauge your needs and see whether the various products are worth your trial to solve your IT management software needs in your business.
Freshdesk – A Helpdesk Software
Freshdesk, one of the Freshworks products, is an intuitive, feature-rich, affordable customer support software. As a customer support software, Freshdesk features a tone of features to make it easier for your team to support your business customers. Some of the tools included in Freshdesk include a ticketing tool, collaboration, multi-channel, self-service, and even automation tools.
Freshdesk Features
1. Ticketing
Freshdesk has a built-in ticketing system that helps you convert incoming emails into tickets. Converting email inquiries into tickets first enables you to prioritize the emails, and also categorize them depending on the customer’s need. This will then help you assign a given task to the right people responsible for tending to the tickets. And it’s not just emails; the same case applies to calls. With a ticketing system, Freshdesk, therefore, helps your customer support team no to miss out on any follow-ups and delaying replies.
To make it easier for collaboration between support agents, Freshdesk offers a Team Inbox tool. Team Inbox, as you would expect, is a tool that brings together all the tickets. Thus, customer support teams can be able to sort them out quickly using keywords.
Team Inbox helps avoid collision between support agents with its collision detection tool. Other features included in Team inbox includes canned messages, custom notifications, custom ticket views, merging tickets, and an activity log. Plus, ticketing is also included with an SLA Management tool for setting deadlines for ticket response and resolution depending on different business hours or categories.
2. Collaboration
Freshdesk collaboration aims at making it easier for customer support teams to work together cohesively. Well, you might be thinking about the Team Inbox feature in the ticketing feature? This one is different.
With the collaboration tool, teams can loop in teammates for discussions directly inside the ticket. Plus, the other agent will also retain visibility into tickets even if another agent is working on it courtesy of Shared Ownership feature. Shared Ownership helps other agents maintain visibility of the ticket and see the continued progress being made with the issue. With Freshdesk, teams can also split tasks, especially those issues that are complex and need multi-categories of agents to handle them. Termed as Parent-child Ticketing, agents can break tasks and work independently on them.
3. Multi-Channel Helpdesk
Freshdesk can unify all the support channels into one multi-channel helpdesk where your customer support team will be able to handle all the inquiries from. These channels can include social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, chat support, website, email, and also phone support. Here is how each works;
Phone support enables you to create a call center on the cloud integrated with Freshdesk. Email support is a bit different from your regular email inbox. It includes various categories and has added functionality like the ability to prioritize an email and assign it to a support agent through the creation of a trackable ticket. Website and chat support are no different. For social media support channels, currently, Freshdesk only allows integration of Twitter and Facebook. But we believe these two are the major social platforms, so this should be enough.
4. Helpdesk Automation
Freshdesk is built-in with automation capabilities to help with repetitive tasks. With an automation tool, Freshdesk can automatically categorize an incoming ticket, prioritize it and even assign it to the relevant support agent or group of agents depending on predefined factors. These preset actors can include language, source of the inquiry, or even what a customer writes in the support ticket. Automation also ensures work between support agents is distributed optimally and can yet be distributed according to the level of expertise. What’s even good the system can also adjust for when a particular agent is taking a break. Follow-ups can also be automated to prevent customer frustration.
5. Self-Service
Through self-service, customers can be able to find answers to some of their queries directly by getting help from answer bots. Answer bots can be integrated into various support channels including website, social media, chat, and even mobile app by having access to the knowledge base. Using the self-service feature, you can also include translations to multiple languages. This helps your customers to improve themselves in the language they prefer.
6. Helpdesk Analytics
With Freshdesk Analytics and reporting, you can be able to view the performance of your team in one click. Furthermore, the Software has been optimized to not only capture the data of your customer support team but also helps you with the analysis of these data to give you the essential metrics only. The analytics are bespoke, making it possible to customize and build your reports depending on your needs with no coding required or depending on a data analyst and neither of that external business intelligence (BI) tools.
The real-time data about tickets, trends, and groups can also be viewed via a provided dashboard. You can view customer satisfaction ratings and how various agents or support groups are performing based on multiple helpdesk metrics.
You can also choose to schedule when you want to get these reports. Freshdesk delivers reports in PDF format, which includes data visualization to make sense of data provided quickly.
7. Helpdesk Customization
Apart from all the functionalities mentioned above, Freshdesk also allows you to customize the Software based on your needs. This customization can range from, branding, i.e., curating your support portal colors to match your website and also personalize your support URL. Besides, Freshdesk allows you to build customized feedback forms and even build your custom apps.
8. Security
Security lies at the core of every business that offers Software as a service (SaaS). Freshworks is no different. Freshdesk comes with custom SSL certificates, IP and Network restrictions tools and Identity & access management like single sign-on (SSO) script.
Besides, the company also relies on SHA 256 encoding technology. Other security tools available in Freshdesk include; click-jacking prevention, JWT authentication for APIs, granular app management, data encryption at rest, and cross-site scripting mitigation.
9. Freshdesk Pricing
Freshdesk has a free plan with limited features. Besides, there are also four payment plans ranging from a price of $15 per agent per month billed annually up to $109 per agent per month billed annually for large enterprises.
Freshservice – An IT Service Desk Software
As we had mentioned before, Freshservice is an IT service management software. Another Freshworks product. Freshservice has been built optimally to ensure proactive IT service management that is both easy to use and easy to setup. Freshservice packs the following features;
1. IT Service Desk
An IT service desk allows for incident management – users can raise tickets in variant ways including phone, email, a self-service portal, or in person. With incident management, its easier to track, prioritize, and also assign tasks. The system has also been integrated with SLA Management to schedule due time of tasks depending on working hours. Like Freshdesk, Freshservice also offers a team collaboration functionality in-chat.
You can also create a knowledge base and a service catalog to showcase your products. Users also get to enjoy a self-service portal to reduce congestion for issues that may be quickly resolved via the knowledge base center.
2. ITSM (IT Service Management) Software
ITSM is pegged around problem management, change management, and release management. Freshservice enables customer agents to team up on given problems to solve them efficiently, and link to previous solved or existing problems. For change management, ITSM helps keep every team member updated with a new release by start date and end date. Trials and test plans can also be pushed in Freshservice via announcements.
3. IT Project Management
IT Project management tools help in task management, real-time project management dashboard, and ITSM Platform integration. ITPM brings easy collaboration and assigning of tasks and subtasks to various team members to streamline both individual and team workflow. After the task assignment, the real-time project management dashboard helps you monitor the progress of different team members.
4. IT Asset Management
This feature helps you keep tabs on your assets or due contracts. IT asset management is equipped with an inventory management tool that keeps track of all the hardware and software purchases by the teams for control of various IT repositories which can be hard to track. With Asset auto-discovery, Freshservice tracks all the new assets, any hardware or software changes and updated the information accordingly.
CMDB/ Configuration Management is another tool under IT asset management that helps you maintain a repository of all assets in your organization and how they are coordinated in their functions. Furthermore, Freshservice provides you with a contract management tool to keep track of your contracts – like the renewal of expiring ones. And with “Asset Lifecycle management,” you can manage and track all your assets in a single view.
5. Analytics
Using the available analytics tools in Freshservice, you can use it as a tool to make informed business decisions. Administrators can measure service desk performance by identifying bottlenecks and keeping track of key performance indicators (KPIs). These can be achieved by leveraging on the premade reports on changes in assets. Users can also tailor the reports by filtering the information they need, which can be scheduled to be delivered to various stakeholders after specific periods. In the reports, Freshservice also includes Interactive Visualizations for easy breakdown and understanding of data.
6. Security
Security is at the core of Freshservice like Freshdesk.
7. Integrations
Freshservice also comes with native integrations which include; ATLASSIAN Jira, FreshBooks, G-Suite, Zapier, Dropbox, Box, Survey Monkey, Amazon Webservice, Quickbooks, ClearGraph, CloudWatch, BOMGAR, Paperduty, and HARVEST.
8. Pricing
Freshservice also offers a free plan that you can try and see if this works for you. However, you can also try the paid plan for free for 21 days. Moving forward, you will be charged depending on various categories. You can pay for a monthly or yearly basis, but we recommend an annual basis – you will save a lot.
The cheapest plan goes for $29 per agent per month ($19/agent/month, yearly) while the highest plan will set you back by $99 per agent per year – there is no monthly payment plan. Apart from these two, there is a $49 plan and a $79 plan per agent per year if you choose to pay annually.
Freshsales – A Customer Relationship Management Software
Freshsales is yet among products from Freshworks, but this one is a CRM software. It packs various features including;
1. Lead Management Tool
The inbuilt lead management tool helps in the identification of promising leads to closure. And by promising leads, the software presents you with all the data; including how the user interacted with your website or even your product. The lead management tool compiles these data and generates scores on analyzed leads depending on their profile for easy identification of sales-ready leads that need closure. This immensely increases the chances of making a sale.
Freshsales also uses the lead management tool to auto-assign leads to the right salesperson. Plus, the tool is optimized for collaboration between team members for easy follow-ups on potential leads. Auto-profile enrichment, on the other hand, helps you know your customers better by filling their social profile information and photo automatically after signing up for the sales CRM.
2. Deal Management
With Freshsales’ visual sales pipeline, you can view stagnant deals across all channels. Plus, you can also visualize and customize your sales pipeline depending on your sales process. You can see all the sales pipeline like the number of deals and their worth. It also comes with an inbuilt drag and drop feature that lets you drag and drop any deal at any stage. The deal management tool is also equipped with action-oriented follow-ups, a deal tracker, and an all in one CRM tool. You are provided with the pipeline dashboard, lost deal analysis, and an easy way to filter and sort out deals.
3. Event Tracking
The event tracking tool is optimized together with the deal management tool to track your customer’s journey. Event tracking provides an in-depth analysis of the customers’ interaction with your business both on the website and in-app through the website and in-app tracking features. It also includes behavior-based segmentation which provides a chronological timeline for the customer’s interaction. Plus, you can also add the tracking feature to other traffic channels like email and appointments or even calls. Furthermore, like Freshdesk, you also get a lead scoring feature that helps you know which lead is ready to close the sale.
4. Built-in Phone
Seen those times when you juggle between a CRM and phone – this is an issue of the past with Freshsales CRM tool. It has an inbuilt phone powered by their Freshcaller product. The tool only needs a one-click install, so it’s easy to set up. Plus there are no additional charges that will have to be paid for installation.
With the built-in phone, you can assign your sales agent-specific local numbers that cover given territories, so it is easy to contact the customers within those territories. Furthermore, you can view all the entire call history and interaction of your sales team with customers. The calls are customizable with pre-recorded welcome and voicemail messages. Besides, you can even type your message, and Freshsales will convert it to audio, using the text-to-speech functionality. Other features of the built-in phone include; call transfer, Phone activity reports, and one-click calling.
5. CRM Email Integration
Freshsales CRM Email integration brings all your email management to your CRM tool. As a result, you can send, manage, and track all your emails directly from your sales CRM. This feature brings a two-way email syncing, direct sales campaigns to your mailing list, personalized email templates, a team inbox, and an insightful email metrics feature. Other features of the CRM email integration include; email scheduling and calendar sync.
6. Sales Reports
With sales reports, Freshsales helps you view how your sales funnel is fairing on. It provides analytics on the progress of the sale visually to help you forecast. It also has a reporting dashboard that provides insights that are useful to your business. You can customize this report by viewing revenue analytics from a specific CRM source, sales rep, and more. Revenue analytics helps you identify the strong points and weak points that your sales team should capitalize on or work on. You can also view trendline reports, sales cycle, and velocity reports plus sales activity reports like emails, calls, tasks, and even appointments. What’s, even more, is that these reports can be scheduled depending on your preference and timelines. For instant reports, Freshsales allows one to export in either PDF or CSV for sharing.
7. Intelligent Workflows
Intelligent workflows focus on cutting down some work on sales representatives. They help in the automation of some processes like following up on leads, sending emails or raising an invoice, and more. Freshsales can help in even automation some complex processes using “if-then” kind of rules which can be paired up with a respective trigger depending on the customer activity.
Furthermore, you can also connect to other apps using webhooks to integrate with helpdesks and accounting tools.
8. Mobile Support
In the present world, most people have smartphones apart from desktops or laptops. Freshsales has a mobile app both available on Android and iOS for the sales team to make more sales on the go. The mobile app is also integrated with a calendar app to help sales agents plan directly from the Freshsales mobile app. Freshsales mobile apps also leverage push notifications to help sales agents keep up with real-time activities. Besides, the mobile app also helps in logging calls, adding notes, tasks, and appointments.
9. Freshsales Integrations
Freshsales can also be integrated with other business tools for increased productivity. It features native integrations with other business apps and tools including; Freshdesk, Freshcaller, Freshchat, Freshconnect, Google Connect, MailChimp, Segment, Office 365 Calendar, Hubspot, Zapier, Piesync, Zero, Google apps for work, Quickbooks, Google Contacts, Trello among others. Freshsales also plans to include the integration of Shopify, DocuSign, and Magento soon.
10. Freshsales Pricing
Freshsales offers a 21-day free trial that we recommend checking out before opting for the paid plans. However, the paid plans are not so expensive as you’d expect. The cheapest plan will set you back by $12 per agent per month and a maximum of $79 per agent per month for annual payment. There is also a $25 plan and a $49 plan. Each plan includes various limitations, but the higher-tier plan that gives you access to all the features in Freshsales.
Freshchat – A Modern Live Chat Software
Freshchat is a live chat software for both marketing, sales, and support. Some of the features included in Freshchat include;
1. Messenger
Freshchat messenger is included in Freshchat, which helps in solving some customer queries with built-in in-messenger FAQs. Some features of Freshchat messenger include; multi-channel, unlimited contacts, priority box, and team widgets. The web messenger includes features like chat history, rich media support, and team profiles.
2. Chatbots
Chatbots bring automated functionality in Freshchat. You can customize how the bots interact with customers, which questions they ask, and the relevant follow-up workflow. Besides, bots also auto-upload all the collected leads in Freshsales CRM.
3. Campaigns
Freshchat also triggers specific messages on your customers on the website depending on their interaction. With in-app campaigns, Freshchat includes tutorials to new customers, collection of customer feedback, and announcements. Campaigns are also automizable using chatbots that ditch the need for pre-chat forms resulting in minimization of chat drop off rates.
4. Mobile App Support
Freshchat also supports in-app integrations. The sales team can be able to chat with mobile users in-app, respond to support queries, and in-app campaigns messages. The mobile app also brings easy real-time updates using the push notifications feature. Besides, Freshchat can also be used by team members in support and management of customer queries using the available Android and iOS app.
5. Insights
Freshchat includes an inbuilt analytics tool that provides real-time analytics of your team’s performance. You can view customer satisfaction ratings, incoming conversations, response speeds, and conversation status metrics. With the real-time dashboard, you can also monitor team member performance.
6. Routing
With intelligent assign, Freshchat can auto-assign individual conversations to specific team members or groups based on their skill levels and conversation load. Additionally, assignment rules are also customizable depending on certain aspects like time of the day, message text, and even the user properties.
7. Self-Service
For more comfortable support, Freshchat includes a self-service feature. This includes features optimized to help the customers easily find what they are looking for. Self-service includes features like multi-lingual support, integrated FAQs in messenger plus FAQ insights like user feedback options.
8. Team Inbox
Team inbox helps your team work together, collaboratively in handling tasks. Some of the team productivity features included are; smart plugs, canned responses, private notes, read receipts, labels, and bulk actions.
9. Integrations
For more natural support, Freshchat can be integrated with other business tools to bring all work under one channel for easy management. Freshchat can be combined with WhatsApp, Facebook, Freshdesk, Freshsales, Shopify, Clearbit, Zendesk, Slack, and WordPress plus OBI4WAN.
10. Freshchat Pricing
Freshchat has a free plan which is limited to only ten team members. Other paid plans charge per agent per month. The cheapest plan starts at $15 per agent per month, paid annually while the highest plan goes for $79 per user per month, paid annually. Monthly plans are also available but are a bit expensive than yearly plans. Besides, you can also avail yourself of a 21-day trial period to test the waters.
Freshmarketer – A Marketing Automation Software
Lastly, Freshmarketer is an intelligent marketing automation software. Freshworks says the products aim at delivering faster sale conversion. Here are some of the Freshmarketer’s features;
1. Email Marketing
The email marketing feature helps you create better email templates that are customizable to your liking. More so, the Freshmarketer email marketing feature includes a contact management tool for easy management and sorting out of your mailing lists. Additionally, you get a customer segmentation tool, email analytics tool, and a domain verification feature that improves the email delivery rate.
2. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation tools incorporated in Freshmarketer include the following. Tracking of the customers’ journey to trigger notifications depending on the buyer journey, website tracking for how customers interact with your website, and a form tracking feature for easy conversion of leads to customers.
3. Conversion Optimization
It brings an automated structured approach curated by Freshmarketer to optimize your website and deliver more sales.
4. Integration
Freshmarketer can be integrated with both CRM and CRO tools.
5. Pricing
Unlike other Freshworks products, Freshmarketer includes a 14-day trial period. There is also a free plan limited to 500 Contacts, 5000 Visitors 100 Emails (Monthly). The paid plans will set you back by $49 monthly billed annually which includes 10K Visitors 5x Contacts Email Limit (Monthly). You can also customize the number of contacts up to over 25,000 depending on your needs.
