About the Company
Founded in 2010, Freshworks is firmly established as a SaaS leader, specialising in customer support, ITSM, and marketing automation. The company has a wide variety of solutions in the task automation and CX space, with three options for customer relationship management – Customer for Life Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Marketing Cloud.
The company recently rebranded its Freshsales offering as Freshworks CRM, bundling marketing and sales automation with customer relationship management and cross-department workflows. This makes perfect sense, as it allows the platform to gain from a consolidated database and apply Freshworks’ proprietary Freddy AI for analytics. The solution is used by large companies such as Cisco and Honda, although its $29 per user per month price tag makes it accessible for SMBs as well.
Let us now review the core capabilities of Freshworks CRM in more detail.
Inside Freshworks CRM
Essentially, Freshworks CRM is a unified solution for marketing and sales operations, helping you attract customers, engage with them, close deals, and nurture relationships through the Freshdesk (customer service desk) integration.
Deeper customisations
You can configure nearly every aspect of the CRM system as per your business needs, starting from the contact lifecycle to transaction currencies and languages. All the automated workflows are customisable, letting you capture additional data, create custom activities, and deliver unique outcomes.
Productivity enablers
Freshworks CRM has several features to enhance the productivity of your workforce. You can send notifications, create and monitor tasks, auto-assign leads based on business rules, and even connect the CRM with Slack for further collaboration. In other words, it doubles up as a project management solution for sales and marketing teams.
Omni-channel communication
You can use Freshworks CRM to interact with customers via email, phone, chat, and SMS, either through automation or manually. The platform has recently added support for WhatsApp Business, and Apple Business Chat, further extending your CRM reach.
Marketing automation
This is among the top reasons why companies choose Freshworks CRM. it ships with advanced capabilities for workflow automation and automated analysis. For example, you can use triggers, delays, and actions to craft intricate customer journeys and automate the chain of communication. You can also analyse and create automated segments from your audience by leveraging omnichannel data.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
Freddie AI is Freshworks’ proprietary algorithm that powers its CRM solutions. Freddie plays a role in lead generation, lead deduplication, contact prioritisation, and automatically enriching customer profiles with publicly available data.
Deal management
While Freddie AI helps to prioritise deals, you can take further action on them based on your sales goals and forecasting. The platform lets you visualise sales processes so you can build pipelines incorporating the necessary deal stages. An important feature is the ability to add your product catalogue to the platform so you can auto-calculate deal value without any missed steps.
Analytics insights
Freshworks includes several pre-built report formats including attribution reports to track your marketing outcomes, conversion reports to map deal wins, and win-loss analysis. Most of the dashboards present on the platform can be used to generate standard reports. There’s also a custom report module, where you can create reports from scratch using the necessary metrics, charts, and widgets.
Security
Freshworks CRM has put a lot of effort into role-based access controls, where access to CRM data depends on permissions, user roles, and responsibilities. All data access activity will be mapped using audit logs for later review.
Mobile application
Freshworks CRM has an extremely competent mobile version that syncs with Google Maps, Gmail, and Outlook. We particularly liked the mobile offline mode that lets you store records locally for offline access and add data that will be updated/synchronised later.
Why Freshworks CRM Makes a Difference
Freshworks CRM’s real secret weapon is its ability to integrate with other apps inside and outside of the Freshworks ecosystem. Within Freshworks, you can hook it up with Freshdesk for sales-to-service connectivity, or Freshsuccess, if you are dealing with high-value customers and need to empower dedicated account managers. Apart from this, Freshworks has a marketplace of 100+ native integrations, not to mention custom integrations through APIs and webhooks.
What We Think
Freshworks offers a massive suite of capabilities at a smart price, starting at $29 per user per month and going up to $69 and $125. This lets you add 1000-5000 marketing contacts, up to 100 automated workflows, and up to 25 sales sequences. Keep in mind that additional marketing contacts are available for an extra fee, as are business-specific add-ons like configure, price, quote (CPQ), phone credits for in-CRM telephony, and WhatsApp Business.
