Freshchat Review

Freshchat is a live chat and chatbot builder for your website, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. But should you use Freshchat to create your chatbots?

Let’s dive in!

What is Freshchat?

Freshchat is customer messaging software that you can use to put live chat and a chatbot on your website, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

Besides this, it is also possible to:

• Create FAQ articles and display these in your chatbot
• Send email marketing campaigns

In this review, I will only focus on the chat side of Freshchat.

 

User Interface

If you log in at Freshchat for the first time, you automatically get a quick-start guide, which helps you get started with their platform:

When you’ve set this up, you can see the complete interface of Freshchat showing the latest statistics of your chatbot:

Once you are going to create your chatbot flows, you can use the Visual Flow Builder of Freshchat:

In Freshchat, a chatbot element can be a Text or a Response of your user. The response can be buttons but also free text input:

Moreover, before your chatbot flows go live, you can test your chatbot:

Overall, I think that the interface of Freshchat is easy to use and it is easy to set up your chatbot.

• Visual Flow Builder

  Create chatbot dialogs with a visual flow builder.
• Test chatbot

  Is it possible to test the chatbot before putting your new flows or changes live?
• Interface easy to use?

  Is the chatbot platform easy-to-use?
• Easy to setup a chatbot?

  Is it easy to set up your chatbot with this chatbot platform?

Chatbot elements

To be honest, the number of chatbot elements in Freshchat are pretty minimal.

They are missing some important elements, Video and Galleries.

But, they still provide enough elements to create your chatbot!

• Delays

  Use delays between messages in your chatbot
• Images

  Can you send images via your chatbot?
• Video

  Can you send video via your chatbot?
• Audio

  Can you send audio via your chatbot?
• Attachments

  Can you send attachments via your chatbot?
• Gallery (Horizontal list)

  Show a gallery of cards inside your chatbot. A card consists of an image, title, subtitle and button.
• Vertical list

  Show a vertical list of items inside your chatbot
• Emojis

  Can you use emojis inside your chatbot?
• Persistent Menu

  Can you add a persistent menu to your chatbot?
• Quick Replies

  Can you add quick replies to your chatbot where users can click on?
• Buttons

  Can you add buttons to your chatbot where users can click on?
• Free text input

  Can chatbot users freely type text to your chatbot whenever they want to?
• Location sharing

  Can users share their location inside the chatbot?
• Email validation

  When a chatbot user gives their email, can the platform validate it's a correct email address?
• Phone number validation

  When a chatbot user gives their phone number, can the platform validate it's a correct phone number?
• Date validation

  When a chatbot user gives a date, can the platform validate it's a correct date?

Users

In Freshchat, you can see a complete overview of all the user that talked to your chatbot:

If you click on one of the users, you can see the user details and the last chat they had:

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

Moreover, you can also create your own user segments.

• Custom fields

  Store information from your chatbot users inside fields. For example, you can ask for someone's email and store it inside the "email" custom field.
• Tags

  Add tags to users in your chatbot flows to organize and categorize contacts.
• User segments

  Can you create user segments based on custom fields and tags?

Messages

Unfortunately, you cannot send broadcasts and sequences with Freshchat.

Also, it is not possible to use conditions in your chatbot flows. And this is a drawback, because this would allow you to create more personalized chatbot experiences.

What I like a lot about Freshchat is that it is really easy to translate your chatbot to multiple languages:

• Broadcasts

  Send a message to all or a part of your chatbot users at a specific date and time
• Sequences

  Send messages on a pre-defined schedule with a certain time interval between those messages
• Conditions

  Make checks in your chatbot flow based on if-then logic. For example, if the user has not given their email, ask for their email.
• Multiple languages

  Is it possible to create a chatbot in multiple languages?
• Easy to translate

  Can you translate text to other languages without using a third-party platform and without creating duplicate flows?

AI & NLP

With Freshchat, you can understand the intent of the user. You can just provide multiple example questions and Freshchat will automatically learn the intent of the user:

Unfortunately, it is not possible to use Entities in your Freshchat chatbot.

• Keywords

  Trigger chatbot flow based on certain words or phrases a user says to the chatbot.
• Intents

  Trigger a chatbot flow by understanding the intent of the user.
• Entities

  Capture specific information from sentences. For example, if a user says "veggie pizza", the chatbot can understand it's not a regular pizza, but a veggie pizza.
• Dialogflow integration

  Does the chatbot platform provide a direct integration with Google's AI Platform?

Channels

With Freshchat, you can put a chatbot on 3 channels:

• Your website
• Facebook Messenger
• WhatsApp

Furthermore, you can also send email campaigns to your users.

• Website

  Can you publish your chatbot on your website?
• Facebook

  Can you publish your chatbot on Facebook?
• Instagram
• Whatsapp

  Can you publish your chatbot on WhatsApp?
• Telegram

  Can you publish your chatbot on Telegram?
• SMS

  Can you publish your chatbot on SMS?
• Slack

  Can you publish your chatbot on Slack?
• Skype

  Can you publish your chatbot on Skype?
• Email

  Can you publish your chatbot on email?

Integrations

Freshchat a built-in live chat, which is the most important integration of any chatbot software:

Moreover, Freshchat has an iOS and Android app, so you can answer users’ questions on the go.

Furthermore, Freshchat has integration with the other Freshworks products, such as Freshdesk and Freshsales. Additionally, they have integrations with:

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

If this is not enough, you can also create your own webhooks.

• Livechat

  Direct integration with live chat, either via a built-in live chat functionality or a third-party live chat platform.
• Zapier

  Direct integration with Zapier, one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
• Make (formerly Integromat)

  Direct integration with Make (formerly Integromat), one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
• Google Sheets

  Direct integration with Google Sheets, to store or retrieve data from sheets.
• Webhooks

  Can you call an API inside your chatbot flow to send or get data from other applications?

Marketing

The marketing possibilities of Freshchat are mostly focused on websites.

It is only possible to put a native widget on your website. You can change the colors and appearance of this widget so that it matches your website’s branding:

A slight drawback is that you cannot set a different greeting message per page on your website.

• Facebook website widget

  Embed your chatbot as a Facebook Widget on your website.
• Native website widget

  Embed your chatbot as a native widget (your own branding & colors) on your website.
• Landing pages

  Can you create a simple landing page to drive users to your chatbot?
• Facebook Ads

  Start a conversation with your chatbot when someone clicks on a Facebook Ad
• One-Time Notification

  Send one-time notifications via Facebook Messenger for a topic that a chatbot user has opted-in for
• Facebook comments auto-reply

  Automatically reply with your chatbot to users who comment on your Facebook Posts
• Button creator

  Add a button to your website to drive users to your chatbot
• Custom URLs for your chatbot

  Generate a simple URL that can be shared anywhere to send users to your chatbot

Pricing

Freshchat provides a free plan that comes with 100 agents, 10.000 unique visitors that can talk with your chat, but only provides access to the live chat (not the chatbot).

If you want to have a chatbot with Freshchat, you need to have the Forest plan of Freshchat.

The Forest Plan costs $69 per agent per month, and comes with 5000 chatbot conversations (called “Freddy sessions”), more channels (Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp) and chatbot analytics:

If these 5000 chatbot conversations are not enough, you can buy extra Freddy sessions for $100 per 1000 sessions:

By the way, if you want to have WhatsApp as a channel it costs $49 per month extra. Also, each plan comes with a 21-day free trial.

• Free trial

  Does the chatbot platform provide a free trial?
• Free plan

  Does the chatbot platform provide a free plan?
• Price per month

  What is the lowest price per month for creating a chatbot on this platform?
  69
• Monthly pricing available?

  Is it possible to pay monthly?
• Money back guarantee

  Is there a money-back guarantee in case you are not satisfied with the platform?

Analytics

Freshchat provides multiple dashboards showing the number of conversations, messages and API calls (click on the images to make them larger):

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:

But the best part is this: with Freddy Self-Service you can create your own custom reports consisting of several widgets:

• Dashboard

  Dashboard that provides general analytics of your chatbot.
• User input

  Get the input from users that your chatbot didn't understand.
• Sent messages

  The number of messages that were sent by your chatbot.
• Open rate

  The percentage of chatbot users that opened a message inside your chatbot.
• Click rate

  The percentage of chatbot users that click on a button inside your chatbot.
• Conversion rate

  The percentage of users that converted through your chatbot. For example, the percentage of users that gave their email address
• Fall back rate

  The percentage of interactions where the chatbot did not know an answer to a question.
• Custom dashboards/reports

  Can you create your own dashboard or reports?

eCommerce

Freshchat has a Shopify integration that can send Shopify properties (such as the Order ID) to Freshchat, so one of your live chat agents can help the user more easily.

To me, it is unclear whether you can use these properties also automatically with your chatbot.

• Payments

  Collect payments inside your chatbot
• Shopify

  Direct integration with Shopify to get products, order information and cart data.
• WooCommerce

  Direct integration with WooCommerce to get products, order information and cart data.
• Buy directly within the chatbot

  Ability for chatbot users to buy products or services directly from a chatbot
• Cart abandonment

  Trigger messages in the chatbot when a user abandons their cart on a website or inside the chatbot

Templates & Cloning

Freshchat doesn’t provide any templates to get started with creating your chatbot. Likewise, you cannot create your own templates and share them with others.

Also, you cannot duplicate your chatbot flows and chatbot elements.

• Templates

  How many pre-built templates does the chatbot platform provide?
  0
• Make template

  Can you make templates yourself?
• Share template

  Can you share self-created templates with others?
• Duplicate chatbot flows

  Is it possible to duplicate chatbot flows, so you can easily reuse them?
• Duplicate chatbot elements

  Is it possible to duplicate chatbot elements, so you can easily reuse them?

Optimization

With Freshchat, it is not possible to do any optimization, such as A/B testing.

• A/B Testing

  Can you optimize your chatbot flows by performing A/B tests?

Support

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

Moreover, they provide support via live chat and email.

• Tutorials

  Does the chatbot platform provide tutorials on how to use its platform?
• Documentation

  Does the chatbot platform provide documentation on how to use its platform?
• Customer support

  Does the chatbot platform provide customer support?

Conclusion

So, should you use Freshchat to create your chatbots?

Yes, I would recommend that.

Freshchat has an easy-to-use visual flow builder, built-in live chat, you can easily translate your chatbot to multiple languages, built-in AI, put your chatbot on 4 channels and advanced chatbot analytics.

But Freshchat also has some drawbacks:

• Limited marketing possibilities
• Cannot use conditions in chatbot flows
• Minimal chatbot elements