Freshchat Release Notes - September 2023

New Features and Enhancements

Generative AI-based enhancements (Freddy AI)

Enhance support with post-resolution assessment, phone call summaries, and efficient email responses.

More details here.

Indian document verification with a new bot template

Hit the ground running with bot templates for identity verifications (powered by IDfy) to fit your unique business needs.

More details here.

WhatsApp lists for business from Freshchat

Enable your chatbots to send messages with a selectable list of options, making it easier for users to interact and get the information they need.

More details here.

Engage with customers over Zalo

Integrate Zalo with Freshchat through a custom app and engage with customers over Zalo.

More details here.

Display your privacy policy upfront

With this update, businesses can display their privacy policy to users on the Freshchat widget prior to initiating a conversation.

More details here.

Day pass utilization report

Access the day pass utilization report for insights into how your team handles volume fluctuations to optimize your team's schedules to ensure timely and effective customer support.

More details here.

Upcoming Features and Enhancements

Bug fixes

These were the bugs detected, and they’ve now been fixed.

Admin experience

1. Some Admins faced issues searching for names with spaces on the User Skills Management page. Similarly, erroneous messages were displayed when admins used special characters to search in the agent availability search box.
2. The CSAT widget links were sometimes clickable even while editing it — instead of being clickable only after saving the dashboard.
3. The agent skill was not getting updated in the conversation properties even after skill evaluation for some agents.
4. Sometimes, the count of total available skills was not visible on the skill definition page. Similarly, the agent count was not visible while editing skills on the edit skill page to assign an agent. Similarly, if the skill value were updated using the conversation properties sidebar, the skill would not immediately reflect everywhere.
5. The skill property is displayed as part of the conversation properties automatically for all conversations in an account that has skill-based round robin enabled (SBRR) — instead of displaying this property only for conversations assigned to a group that has SBRR enabled.
6. Admins sometimes saw errors when they tried adding more than thirty skills to the same agent.
7. Any public or shared canned responses with attachments/content created or edited by an agent can be used by other agents. When an admin deletes the agent and proceeds with a GDPR cleanup, the canned response would also be cleared up. When a different agent tries to use these public or shared canned responses, this will cause a failed response. This is an error as the content uploaded by the first agent is business/app-specific data and should not be cleaned up as part of agent data cleanup.
8. At times, accessing a custom dashboard that was recently deleted by using its URL would show a blank screen instead of an error message.
9. Occasionally, the agent availability dashboard does not list agents available on Freshchat after removing a filter that only showed the agents available on Freshdesk until the page was refreshed.
10. A few customers experienced discrepancies in the CSAT analytics where the completed CSAT surveys were not showing up in the dashboard. However, these completed surveys would remain part of the report's underlying data. 

Agent experience

1. The wrong source was displayed for messages sent via the web widget.
2. Some agents could not convert conversations to Freshservice tickets through the default integration.
3. Occasionally, while appending a conversation to a ticket, the chat transcript would display the incorrect date format.
4. The WhatsApp integration page was not loading for some agents with a non-English language set up in their profile.
5. The custom dashboard would not be listed at times for agents even when the visibility is set for all agents.
6. The name value was sometimes not displayed for emails sent from the default support emails.
7. Occasionally, the MMS options were not shown with the channel switcher to agents.
8. Sometimes, when agents respond to an incoming conversation (from any channel) using proactive messages from WhatsApp messages from a customer, it would get created as a new conversation. However, when any user responded, it would get appended to the original channel.
9. While responding to some conversations from the web widget, if agents switched to WhatsApp to respond using a template and switched back to the web widget channel, the editor would still show options to select templates.
10. When an agent switched from the email channel to WhatsApp to send a proactive message, at times, the agent could not see the send DM option after the customer responded.
11. Sometimes, an empty popup would be displayed when agents clicked on the reply button for conversations with the source set to mobile.
12. Creating a private note would cause some errors such as allowing agents to access the reply editor for all resolved conversations or with expired threading intervals.

Assignment rules and automations

1. Occasionally, the assignment rules would not work properly when defined using custom user properties.

Chatbots

1. The deploy button would sometimes be displayed when using a Shopify bot, even if the channel was not integrated.
2. Sometimes, customers reaching out on a Twilio number would only be able to view the responses by the bot once they sent multiple messages. Their bots had started responding only after receiving multiple inputs — while to agents this would appear as if the bot had responded immediately.
3. Customers faced occasional issues where the bot would keep looping conversations that would not appear in the Team Inbox.
4. Sometimes, the bot builder would throw a syntax error on condition expression when the conditions had single and double quotes.
5. Occasionally, the quick action from the widget menu would get translated into the wrong language.

Channels, Integrations, and Apps

1. Some Shopify orders were not displayed in the Freshchat app for Shopify.
2. When an admin tries to delete a number associated via Twilio, they would sometimes see an error message “Error in fetching campaign”.
3. Admins reintegrating existing Twilio numbers would get a success message with the default account name instead of the new account name.
4. Sending attachments or images via API was not blocked while responding to phone numbers that only support SMSes.
5. Customers were not receiving some images if bots were sending them over the Google Business Messages channel despite agents being able to.

Customer experience

1. Sometimes, customers would not receive longer texts sent by agents via Instagram DM, where only part of the text would be visible to the recipient.
2. Customers would sometimes not receive the away messages if they reopened a conversation outside business hours. This was also happening at times for channels like Facebook.
3. Occasionally, multilingual FAQs imported from Freshdesk would be rendered in the widget in languages that did not match the customer's language.
4. Customers faced occasional issues with the web widget in Safari browsers where they would not copy or paste URLs in the widget.
5. The business logo was not rendering correctly inside the widget.

Cheers!

Cheers!