Before things like databases and more sophisticated tools, businesses relied on manual methods and basic tools to manage customer relationships. This often involved handwritten notes, Rolodexes and even spreadsheets. What they all had in common was that they were disjointed systems. The process was time-consuming, error-prone and lacked efficiency and organisation.
Then came the era of data centres, with databases all on premises. Businesses needed resources and IT skills to install and maintain their IT systems, but it was worth it because they knew how important it was to get insightful reports so they could build relationships with their customers.
The modern business world adds another layer of complexity with the widespread use of mobile devices, social media and multiple platforms. On the other hand, the modern era also introduces valuable tools that enable businesses to navigate and enhance customer relationships more effectively.
In the dynamic world of business, fostering strong and lasting customer relationships is a cornerstone of success. The ability to understand, engage and meet the evolving needs of customers is more important than ever. The advent of CRM enables companies to improve the way they interact with their customers.
With a CRM in place, you and your sales and marketing teams can automate repetitive manual tasks, log calls and meetings, and gain insight from reports. It frees you and your team to spend as much time as possible with your customers, building relationships.
Freshworks is a complete customer engagement tool. It’s a suite of cloud-based tools for contact management, marketing, sales, communications and customer support. It started as Freshdesk in 2010 and changed its name to Freshworks in 2017. It moved its headquarters to San Mateo, US, a year later. Its clients include household names such as ITV and Bridgestone. Its customer base includes more than 50,000 organisations around the world.
Freshworks’ mission is to provide businesses with easy-to-understand tools that don’t require much setup, customisation or IT knowledge to use.
Pros and Cons
Freshworks is a set of scalable products that help you run different business processes. It’s not a single service. All the products work together to meet different needs within your business, performing different functions and streamlining different operations.
You can use them as standalone products or subscribe to all of them. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to find different service providers and get the products to work and talk to each other. You can mix and match products to create a software system that meets your unique business needs.
Pros
- Easy to get into and to use
- GDPR compliant
- Reasonable pricing
- Depending on your needs, you can choose just one product, select a few or get the whole suit.
- Mobile apps for the different products available for iOS and Android
Cons
- If there’s one criticism of Freshworks, it’s the limited customisation. But that’s to be expected, as their mission is to offer products that require little setup and customisation. There’s always a trade-off between ease of use and customisation.
Freshworks suite of products
The Freshworks suite of products are all cloud-based. They help you manage and organise aspects of your business more effectively: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) support for customer service, sales and marketing, and finally software support for IT and HR:
- Freshdesk, Freshworks’ first product, is a CRM focused on customer service across all channels. It’s a help desk with a ticketing system and centralises all your customer conversions into one team inbox.
- Freshchat is a customer messaging product that allows you to communicate with your customers no matter what chat app they’re using. This can be any web, mobile or social messenger. You can engage with your customers wherever they are, but conveniently from a single inbox.
- Freshservice is similar to Freshdesk in that it’s also a support CRM. But it’s specifically for IT. It’s specifically for you if you want to organise and manage internal processes and help IT teams work more efficiently. It has IT-specific functionality for handling incident management, change, problem and release management, and asset management.
- Freshservice for Business Teams was formerly called Freshteams. It’s the CRM to use if you want to centralise and automate HR operations.
- Freshsales is the CRM to use if you want to make the most of the efforts of your sales teams. It’s what you’d typically expect from a sales CRM, with features such as a visual sales pipeline and a system for automatically prioritising and qualifying leads.
- Freshmarketer is the CRM you want to use to automate your marketing processes and improve lead generation with Freshmarketer. It helps you run email marketing campaigns, optimise your website for maximum conversion and communicate directly with customers via email and chat.
- Freshsales Suite is the all-in-one marketing and sales solution. It’s made up of Freshmarketer and Freshsales. This suite provides everything you need to run campaigns to reach more customers, convert leads into sales and help your sales team focus on the customer.
At its core, it’s a CRM that you can use to manage the different aspects of your business. It’ll not only help you with your organisation’s contact details, it’ll also make your work easier through automation. You and your teams won’t miss a thing, whether your customers are chatting, emailing or calling you.
Who is Freshworks for?
Because you can mix and match all the different tools, Freshworks works well for startups, SMEs, and marketing and sales teams.
It’s very practical as an all-in-one CRM for small and medium-sized businesses. It’s also great if you’re moving away from manual, disparate systems. You can use one or a few products and make it work with your existing business tools thanks to a wide range of integrations.
You can use it to manage and run your HR and IT support. It’s also a good choice for your sales and/or marketing teams.
And if you’re already using one or more of their products, you can easily add another to your suite.
How easy is it to use Freshworks?
Anyone can create an account and get started. Signing up is refreshingly simple and Freshworks doesn’t ask for your credit card details.
Rather than letting you figure it all out from the start with a blank page, Freshworks pre-populates your account with sample data.
You can see how Freshworks lives up to its mission: It has a well-designed interface. And thanks to the sample data, it’s easy to find your way around. Navigation is simple and you can find everything you need in the menu on the left.
It’s all set up so you can get started straight away. You don’t need to spend time learning the ropes and you don’t need to configure or customise too much.
Key features
At the heart of all Freshworks products is contact management. With Freshworks, your customer data is centralised. Your marketing, sales and service teams see all interactions in one place.
Reporting
You can create custom reports. Reports are key to showing you how well you’re doing in terms of lead generation, conversion rate and other important metrics. It’s also important for you to find out if the product or service you’re selling has a flaw because it’s often reported.
Collaborate
Instead of working in silos, you can deliver a better customer experience when your marketing, sales and support teams work together. With Freshworks, your service team can easily reach out to others in your organisation to solve a problem.
Automation
You want your salespeople to do what they do best: communicate with customers and close deals. The same goes for your marketing teams: you want them to plan and launch marketing campaigns to reach more people. Finally, you want your service team to help your customers.
You want to automate tasks that are repetitive and time-consuming. Set up custom rules to automatically assign tasks. You can create sales sequences to automate repetitive tasks, such as sending welcome emails or following up with leads.
Integrations
All Freshworks products work and talk to each other out of the box. We also offer integrations with popular third-party collaboration, marketing automation, accounting and lead generation applications.
Freshworks customer support
You can use chat to get help when you’re logged into your account. You can leave a message at any time and Freshworks will respond as soon as they’re back. You can find chat and the FAQ in the question mark icon in the bottom right hand corner. You can also request a demo, ask questions about your billing and provide feedback.
Freshworks pricing
Freshworks offers a range of different products, so it should come as no surprise that prices vary depending on which product or feature you need. Each product also has 3 or 4 tiers. You get value for money with their pricing. It’s very competitive and the entry prices are very reasonable.
Some products have a forever free tier. Depending on the feature set and product, you’ll see prices ranging from $0 to $299. If you want to save 17%, you can choose to pay annually instead of monthly.
If you’re not sure what’s best for your business, talk to the Freshworks sales team – you can find phone numbers for different regions on their website.
Is Freshworks right for you?
Freshworks can be used in many different ways. Essentially, you can use any of the products on their own or in combination to help you gain insight into your customers and make the most of your marketing, sales and service efforts. It’s designed to grow with your business.
Its products can be used by entire sales, marketing and service teams, not just SMBs. Freshworks includes Freddy. Freddy is an AI tool that learns about your business and can give you insights into your deals. It can also help you chat and engage with your customers.
You can sign up to any of their products and try them out for free for 21 days if you like Freshworks.
Original post here: Freshworks review
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