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Freshcaller is an easy-to-start, fully-capable VoIP provider that makes things easy. You can use it to build a capable customer calling infrastructure for a wide range of business sizes. In all, Freshcaller's intuitive use and easy onboarding make it ideal for beginners.
If you're going to go through everything it takes to onboard with a VoIP, you might as well pick one that can grow with you.
If you're starting out as a solopreneur but have big ambitions as a midsize enterprise with lots of incoming calls thanks to expanding customer needs, Freshcaller is a great choice.
What separates it from the crowd? A ridiculously easy onboarding process, for starters. The navigation is relatively simple to get through, letting you set up your phone number and office hours on the same day you onboard.
Overall, Freshcaller has the features (and the pricing tiers) to grow alongside your business. Here's what we liked about it.
With a lot of VoIP providers, their target audience is clear. Some may be for solopreneurs; others offer robust features needed for customer communication at the enterprise level. With Freshcaller, there's a nice mix between features that can scale to a large organization, but with ease of use appropriate for small businesses.
If you're a solopreneur, a small business, or a growing medium-sized business, Freshcaller is really good enough to handle anything you can throw at it. And as you'll see later, the lowest pricing tier is best for solopreneurs who expect to use almost no minutes.
You'll see the usual suspects here: call forwarding, setting messages for out-of-office calls, and getting your own dedicated business line. But more stood out upon review.
Want to brush up on your phone etiquette? You need to know what's happening now.
If you're a solopreneur simply looking for a new business line to keep your personal number separate from what you list on your website, this feature isn't for you. However, if you're a medium-to-large organization that needs to monitor how well it's handling an influx of calls, the Live Dashboard will be a useful feature.
Zip over to the Live Dashboard to view the following:
Essentially, it's a dashboard that lets you review the success of your customer service lines at any point in time. Sorting by longest wait time, in particular, will show you how well you're handling calls during peak business hours.
This is always a good measuring-stick for the user interface of any VoIP software. Since setting your business hours is something they all share, the ease with which you set your business hours will give you an idea of how easy the entire tool is to use.
How does Freshcaller stack up? It wasn't the easiest to figure out, but once you learn how to create a new "Name" for your business hours, it's relatively straightforward. Here you can add business hours and designate holidays. You'll also want to pay close attention to setting a good "home" time zone so you don't accidentally turn away calls during business hours as you get set up.
One of the features that suggests Freshcaller is for a larger team than a single entrepreneur is that of the Call Queue. You can find this under Call Workflows. Here, you'll get to pick a specific welcome message for certain callers.
Or, if you want to play a "hangup" message for certain callers, you can do that too.
Call Workflows essentially let you map out how you want your callers to enter your system. You can use Basic IVR here, which refers to the digital inputs, or the keys they punch on the other end as they navigate your system. You can also route these to the proper agents as part of your communication strategies.
This creates some nice scalability if you have a growing business. You may give off the impression of being a huge business. "For the Sales Department, Press 1," for example. In your initial call queue, that may only route to one individual, or it might go to a team -- it's up to you.
VoIP can be a tough nut to crack when it comes to ease of use. There are solopreneur solutions that you can onboard with and start receiving business calls on your smartphone today. Then there are enterprise-level solutions that may feel like they take an entire IT department to figure out.
Fortunately, Freshcaller falls on the "easy" side of the spectrum. Here are the particulars:
Freshcaller isn't as easy to use as a service designed for a solopreneur, true. But that's an unfair comparison. Because Freshcaller can scale up easily and requires different settings to create entire teams of workflows, its ease of use definitely earns top marks.
Freshcaller is unique in two ways when it comes to pricing. First, it has a robust $0/month option that includes unlimited agents, allowing a pay-per-minute structure that makes sense for small businesses who need a number but don't spend a lot of time on the phone.
Second, Freshcaller has five distinct pricing tiers. Here's how they all shake out:
It's tempting to say that Freshcaller's "Sprout" tier should earn it full ratings on pricing. But considering the features on offer for these tiers, it may not be ideal for your use.
Like many VoIP providers, Freshcaller wants you to do a little homework before you contact them.
Given how pressing VoIP needs can be for some businesses, this can get a bit frustrating. Why do so many VoIP providers want you to troubleshoot your own problems at their help desk when you may be having issues communicating with live, paying customers?
Freshcaller does feature pretty robust explanations for how everything works, and it's worth giving them a read-through if you have the time. The problem: Who has the time? If you do have a customer support issue that's pressing, you can click Help. But this will again try to steer you to their support documentation.
Reaching out to Freshcaller requires filling out an online form. But it may be useful for you to save as much time as possible and call their phone number directly.
There's plenty to like here, but the following stood out as the most obvious:
Need a VoIP provider who can help you monitor real time communication? The live dashboard here is a great, easy-to-use find. You can set up an entire business on VoIP and start monitoring your calls on the same day.
The quibbles here are relatively minor: support that could be a little more proactive, a little trouble poking around to use every feature. All in all, it's a VoIP service provider for small and medium-tier businesses with some flexibility for growth, and a solid choice for getting your company on VoIP.
There's no single answer, thanks to five pricing tiers. The bottom tier is $0, but don't be fooled: You'll still have to buy minutes. But the great news is that you can try out Freshcaller's lowest tiers with minimal commitment, which is something relatively few VoIP providers can say.
Of all the features on offer (Call Queue, for example), the Live Dashboard made the biggest impression. It's designed for a company with a lot of incoming customer calls, sure, but if you want to make sure that none of your customers are kept waiting, the dashboard is an easy reference. It lets you identify who's been waiting long, and how well the team is performing.
As with many VoIP services, your results will vary. Freshcaller has plenty of documentation for you to review, but if you need to get quick answers, there's a chance of frustration. The good news is that getting started is easy enough to make for a mostly frustration-free experience.
Our Small Business Expert
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