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Photo credit: Pixabay.

Cloud-based business software provider Freshworks, whose best known products are Freshdesk and Freshsales, today launched a new product: Freshchat. It aims to help businesses engage better with customers, capture more leads, and drive sales.

“Businesses today want to provide their consumers with contextual and personalized chat experiences,” says Freshworks CEO and founder Girish Mathrubootham.

He believes messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have created new expectations on user experience and the live chat products in business software are lagging. “Sales and support agents need to be empowered with a single platform that provides the flexibility to engage with prospects and customers who are always multi-tasking.”

Sales and support agents need to be empowered with a single platform that provides the flexibility to engage with prospects and customers who are always multi-tasking.

A Gartner survey shows digital marketing spend has been rising, but conversion of visitors into customers remains poor at 2 to 3 percent, points out Freshworks in a statement on the launch of Freshchat. To improve conversion, Freshchat uses an intelligent bot to screen leads and provide context to sales reps.

There are standalone products applying artificial intelligence to sales leads, such as Lucep. In the case of Freshchat, it works in sync with Freshdesk and Freshsales to be a part of the workflow.

See: Meet the artificially intelligent sales gorilla that closes deals faster

Freshworks has been building up its messaging tech with acquisitions over a period of time. Its very first acquisition two years ago was Bangalore-based 1Click, whose software enabled live video chat and co-browsing in Freshdesk. The acquisition of Frilp followed soon afterwards: this provided natural language processing for crowdsourcing of customer support.

Its third acquisition the same year was chat app Konotor. Then, last year it acquired Framebench, whose cloud-based software allowed teams to share comments and feedback on videos, images, and presentations. Freshworks is leveraging the tech and talent from all these acquisitions to build its full-blown messaging product.

See: Q&A: SaaS superstar Girish Mathrubootham on ambitions, fears, and secret strategies

Freshchat has features to route and manage conversations, to avoid timed-out sessions and missed chats. It can also be integrated into websites, apps, and other messaging products.

Last year, Salesforce – the big gorilla that Freshsales has challenged – integrated the enterprise chat app Slack into its product. With Freshchat, the Indian SaaS rival refuses to be left behind.

This post Salesforce integrated Slack. Now Freshworks has an answer: Freshchat. appeared first on Tech in Asia.

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