Customers today expect extremely high-quality service from brands across every touchpoint and device. Research shows that a staggering 81% consumers say experience is as valuable as your products and services.
However, with customers adopting newer engagement channels like messaging apps and social media, delivering seamless omnichannel support has become highly complex for most businesses. Common pain points faced by companies include:
- Support teams forced to juggle many single-channel tools
- Missing unified customer context across channels
- Lack of support process automation capabilities
- Inability to analyze customer data effectively
This is where Freshchat comes in as a consolidated, omnichannel customer engagement platform designed keeping the above gaps in mind.
How Freshchat becomes your customer experience command center
Freshchat combines essential capabilities like unified messaging, automation, analytics and customer context into one easy-to-use platform:
Messaging: Talk to customers on their favorite channels
Engage with your audience on the channels they already use daily like phone, email, texts and leading messaging platforms:
- Live chat
- Facebook Messenger
- Apple Business Chat
- Google Business Messages
- Line, Telegram and more
This eliminates the need to set up and manage individual tools for each channel and train teams on multiple interfaces.
As per Freshworks customer data, enabling even 2 extra channels beyond email can boost agent productivity by 25%. For many brands, over 50% of conversations now happen on messaging channels instead of traditional emails and calls.
Bots: Let AI handle the repetitive work
The best practice is to reserve your skilled human agents to handle complex issues that AI cannot solve. Freshchat‘s dialogue bots, affectionately called Freddy, act as the first line of automated defense:
- Reduce wait times drastically with bot-assisted triage. For Indian insurance major PolicyBazaar.com, this decreased waiting period from 20 minutes to 30 seconds!
- Resolve routine queries instantly instead of staffing round the clock for repetition questions
- Freddy bots achieve up to 80% containment rate saving enormous manual hours daily
To ensure optimal handoffs to agents, Freddy bots become smarter with use by consuming contextual data around resolutions.
Tickets: Streamline support workflows
Managing customer issues via tickets ensures proper accountability, tracking and collaboration. With Freshchat‘s natively unified ticketing:
- Agents get 360-degree customer context from past conversations to resolve tickets better
- Find requests easily with advanced search and filters
- Auto-assignment rules route tickets smarter to match agent skill sets
- Robust SLA policies reduce delays and improve accountability
- Seamlessly integrate external tools like Zendesk or Salesforce
Leading Indian stock brokerage Zerodha was able to improve ticket resolution rates by 73% using context from Freshchat customer conversations.
Teamwork: Making coordination easier
Coordinating between agents, teams and leadership gets much easier with features like:
- Shared team inboxes to access and respond to all incoming queries
- @mention colleagues when input is needed from others
- Conversation tags to logically categorize issues for faster processing
- Internal agent notes that are hidden from customers
- Trigger custom alerts and notifications for defined events
Such aid ensures customer issues don‘t fall through gaps between teams and agents. Conversations can also seamlessly move across regions, departments and brands keeping full track of history.
Analytics: Convert data to insights to action
With multiple analytics modules, Freshchat replaces manual reporting needs with on-demand, shareable reports on all key metrics:
- Agent productivity – First response time, conversations handled etc.
- Business impact – Volume, resolution speed, customer satisfaction per channel
- Conversation analysis – Response times, durations, outcomes etc.
- Campaign effectiveness – Engagement rates, CSAT, sales impact
Power users can also create fully customized reports going beyond out-of-the-box templates for unique business needs.
For global retailers like Hamleys, analytics-driven experimentation using Freshchat increased website conversions 45% above the category benchmark.
Customer history: Engage based on who they are
Follow people not devices by unifying data across sessions into rich customer profiles automatically:
- Every conversation and data point tracked against unified profiles
- View detailed timelines of past interactions across channels
- Custom data fields to capture special requirements, preferences etc. that persist
- Define segmentations, high-value tiers and personalize service
- Identify unhappy customers proactively via sentiment analysis
Quick customer identification without repetitive questions means happier customers and lower handling times for agents.
Journey orchestration: Guide users strategically
Craft ideal user journeys tailored to client segments and high-value scenarios e.g:
- Onboard new users with tips, education and offers
- Upsell VIP buyers with exclusive compensation for issues
- Win back inactive users via targeted re-engagement
Execute via automated campaigns across channels based on triggers like:
- In-app behaviors e.g add to cart abandoned
- Customer attributes like tier, spend levels
- Web/mobile analytics data points
Global music platform JioSaavn tripled customer engagements by launching personalized campaigns via Freshchat.
Making the rollout process smooth
Here are some best practices I recommend for ensuring maximum ROI from your Freshchat adoption:
1. Phase rollout with critical channels first
Instead of activating all features together, I advise going live in phases starting with the highest priority channels based on volume – usually messaging, email and web chat. This allows your teams to get comfortable with core functionalities and build take-up habits one-by-one vs tackling everything at once.
2. Use pilot testing to refine processes before expansion
Before rolling out Freshchat organization wide, conduct smaller pilot tests with selected teams/regions. For example, you can first enable it only across English support or for high-value enterprise customers.
Measure metrics pre and post launch to validate impact. Also gather feedback from pilot teams on gaps observed to address via additional training, custom fields, automations etc. This will ensure large scale roll outs are better prepared.
3. Continuously iterate and optimize over time
Post launch, leverage Freshchat and third-party analytics to define optimization opportunities – be it better skills based assignment, dynamic canned responses or self-service content improvements for popular repeat queries.
Also conduct periodic agent surveys and focus group discussions to gather qualitative feedback on improving adoption. Share success stories and best practices organization wide to motivate all user groups towards maximum usage.
Sample rollout plans
E-commerce company
- Pilot: Mobile app stores team managing high lifetime value customers
- Phase 1: Complete mobile + web channels
- Phase 2: Email and call support teams
- Phase 3: Regional social media and messaging channels
Enterprise IT company
- Pilot: North America managed services team
- Phase 1: Remaining geo managed services teams
- Phase 2: Global customer support team
- Phase 3: Professional services and partner support
Digital media site
- Pilot test: Login, payments and policy support
- Phase 1: Content access, streaming and downloads support
- Phase 2: Targeted outbound journeys for inactive subscriber reactivation
Expert tips from my 20+ years in CX
Delivering excellent, prompt and personalized customer service across fragmented channels is extremely challenging for brands without the right tools. And poor experience means losing customers – 68% consumers say they have switched brands due to unsatisfactory service.
This is why consolidating all conversations and engagement via solutions like Freshchat has become mission critical for CX success today. After evaluating dozens of vendors in the category for global deployments, here is why I find Freshchat world-class:
- Native essential capabilities instead of isolated apps duct-taped via integration
- Thoughtful automation powered by both rules and AI out of the box
- Team-centric UI design vs other products targeting end consumers
- Speed of enhancements given aggressive development roadmap
I‘m also excited to see how Freshchat leverages parent company Freshwork‘s strengths around integrated sales, marketing and support clouds to disrupt legacy customer data silos in near future. I foresee a future where the entire customer data estate from lead to renewal is unified on an integrated customer data platform.
Freshchat, especially with its recent Freshsales integration already seems poised to deliver this promise via aligned products – not loosely coupled partnerships. This holds tremendous potential to realize customer 360 and deliver hyper-personalized lifetime journeys.
Make your next move to better customer engagement
I hope this guide offered you a comprehensive overview of Freshchat‘s market-leading capabilities when it comes to elevating your customer experience strategy. To summarize, Freshchat‘s unique strengths:
✔️ Unify data and conversations across channels
✔️ Deploy smart bots and automation to scale
✔️ Access customer history for personalization
✔️ Gain actionable CX insights pre-built
✔️ Build 1:1 customer journeys across touchpoints
Ready to enable next-gen customer experiences? Get started with Freshchat via a free 21 day trial to experience the platform firsthand across your business requirements. Kindly reach out for any other questions you may have or custom pilot support needs.
