7 days free in E-chat — how to test the service before you pay

A free trial is not a gift. It is a working tool with a deadline. Seven free days in E-chat are enough to connect a number, link it to your CRM, run real conversations with real customers and hear what your sales reps think about it. There is one condition, though: the test has to be planned in advance. Otherwise the week goes into clicking around the interface, and the payment decision gets made blind. Below is a day-by-day checklist for the business owner, the CRM administrator and the head of sales.

Key takeaways:

• A full evaluation fits into the 7-day trial if you connect the number and the CRM on day 1 instead of postponing it to midweek

• Test on live customers and open deals — a demo chat with a colleague proves nothing

• There are 5 mandatory scenarios: outbound first message, inbound messages landing in the contact card, files and voice notes, automated notifications, handing a deal to another rep

• Convenience for the team is measured in numbers, not feelings — response time, unanswered chats per day, window switches per enquiry

• Make the payment decision on day 7 against criteria written down in advance; the discount of up to 40 % on multiple numbers paid for 3 months or longer simplifies the maths

Why the trial needs a plan

Most companies spend a trial the same way. They sign up, look at the dashboard, send a couple of messages to themselves and forget about the service until the “your trial is ending” email arrives. Then they either subscribe on a hunch or cancel on a hunch. Both mistakes cost money.

The E-chat trial runs for 7 days, which is longer than the 3 days many messenger-to-CRM services offer. That is enough time for a complete cycle, from connection to an informed decision. But each role in the company has its own questions, and those questions need to be answered in parallel rather than one after another.

What the business owner checks

Owners care about 3 things. Does the maths work, will conversations survive an employee leaving, and will sales grow. All 3 can be answered in a week. The maths takes 2 minutes in the calculator on the website. Data retention is visible immediately — the entire history is written into the customer card inside your CRM instead of sitting on a rep’s phone. Sales growth cannot be measured in 7 days, but response speed can, and response speed drives conversion directly.

What the CRM administrator checks

Administrators care that the integration installs without developers, breaks nothing and does not demand weeks of support. The test here is simple: time yourself from sign-up to the first message appearing in a customer card. In E-chat the CRM connection follows a step-by-step guide and takes under a minute, while activating a number takes a few minutes. If your system is not on the list of ready-made integrations, there is a route through Apix-Drive, Wepster or the open API.

What the head of sales checks

Sales leaders need visibility and control. Are all team conversations visible, can a stalled chat be picked up by someone else, does the history follow a deal when it changes hands. Plus the human factor that decides everything — will the team use the tool voluntarily. More on that in the day 5 and 6 section.

Day 1 — connect everything

The first day decides the fate of the whole trial. If the number is not linked to the CRM by the evening, you have burned a full day out of seven. The good news: connection in E-chat is 4 steps and fits into 1 hour even without prior experience.

Start by creating an account on the profile page. Then work through the following.

Activate a working number

Add the number to the service and confirm it from your mobile phone — synchronisation follows the same principle as the desktop versions of the messengers. A practical tip: use a real number that customers already write to, not a fresh test SIM. Then live conversations start flowing on day 2 and the trial becomes a real-world test immediately. E-chat supports WhatsApp, Telegram and Viber, so pick the channel that carries most of your customer messaging.

Link the number to your CRM

Connect the service to your CRM using the built-in instructions. Then run a control check: send a message from your personal phone to the connected number and confirm that it appears in the system and lands in the contact card. If no card existed, one should be created automatically.

Add your team

Add everyone who talks to customers. E-chat places no cap on the number of users on any plan, so do not economise on trial participants — the more people try the tool, the more honest the feedback at the end of the week. Appoint an owner for the test, usually the CRM administrator, who collects the team’s questions and passes them to support.

Days 2–4 — run the real scenarios

The middle of the week is the substantive part. The job is to push every scenario your sales process contains through the service and record the outcome of each. Do not rely on memory; keep a simple table with the columns “scenario”, “works”, “questions”.

Here are the 5 mandatory checks.

The first message to a customer

The ability to message first is what most companies connect an integration for. Take a fresh lead with a phone number but no chat history and send a message straight from the card in your CRM. Check that the conversation is created, that the reply lands in the system and that the notification is not lost. For a sales team this is the key scenario — website enquiries and phone leads turn into conversations without anyone retyping numbers into a phone.

Inbound enquiries and cards

Ask 2 or 3 real customers to message you, or simply wait for natural inbound traffic. Watch 3 things: how fast the message appears in the CRM, whether it attaches to the correct existing card, and whether a new card is created for an unknown number. Check history separately — the whole conversation must be visible to the next person who opens the deal.

Files, voice notes and video

Send a PDF invoice, a product photo and a short video. Receive a voice note. E-chat supports documents, images, video, voice and video messages, and in daily work you need all of them — price lists, contracts, photo reports. Confirm that files open on both sides and stay in the history.

Automated notifications

If your CRM can send trigger-based messages, configure at least 1 scenario: order confirmation, appointment reminder, shipping notification. Through E-chat your CRM automation works in messengers exactly as it does in email, and it is automation that takes the biggest load off your reps. One scenario takes 15–30 minutes to set up and saves hours of manual work every month.

Handing a conversation to another rep

Change the deal owner and check that the new person sees the full history and can continue without asking the customer to repeat themselves. This scenario is rarely tested and later turns out to be the most important one, because holidays, resignations and territory reshuffles happen constantly.

Expert note. “During trials, people almost always forget to test the edge cases. Send a message to a number with no messenger account, write to a customer in another country, try a 50 MB file. How a service handles those cases says more about its maturity than a polished interface. And do send at least 1 question to support in the first days — response speed and quality are part of what you buy,” says the head of implementation at E-chat.

Days 5–6 — measure convenience for the team

A service can work flawlessly on the technical level and still fail if the team keeps replying from personal phones. So dedicate 2 days to people rather than features.

Convenience is measurable. Compare 3 metrics before and during the trial: average response time to an inbound message, unanswered enquiries per day, and the number of window switches needed to handle 1 enquiry. The “before” figures live in your messengers and CRM; the “during” figures accumulate on their own after 2 days of active use.

Collect feedback from the team

At the end of day 6, survey every rep with 4 questions. Is replying faster now. What is annoying. What is missing. Would you work in this tool permanently. Record the answers verbatim — on day 7 they become arguments for or against. In practice, teams adopt tools that free them from copying numbers and hunting for chats across 3 apps, and that is precisely the problem E-chat solves: every conversation lives in the customer card.

Test different devices

Have at least 1 person work through the CRM mobile app rather than the desktop. Field sales, site surveys, delivery — in many businesses half of all customer communication happens on a phone. Conversations through E-chat are available both from the CRM app and from the messenger itself, and the full history is recorded in the CRM either way.

Day 7 — decide by the numbers

The last day of the trial is for conclusions, not new experiments. Open your scenario table, your speed metrics and the team surveys. The decision is usually obvious from the records.

If all 5 scenarios work, response time has dropped and the team votes yes, do the maths and subscribe. If something did not work, message support before the trial ends. Many issues are a 10-minute settings change, and it would be a shame to walk away from a tool over an unticked checkbox.

Price it for your channels

E-chat pricing is tied to numbers, not to messages or headcount. WhatsApp costs $15.99 per number per month, Telegram $16.99, Viber $29.99. Inbound and outbound messages are unlimited, and so is the number of users. The website has a calculator: paying for several numbers over 3, 6 or 12 months brings the discount up to 40 %. For comparison, work out what 1 lost enquiry costs your company and multiply it by the unanswered enquiries you counted during the trial. That calculation usually settles the price question by itself.

Write the process down before you pay

Before the paid period starts, put together a short internal document. Who answers inbound messages and within what time, which automated messages are switched on, how conversations move when someone is away. The trial has already given you the answers; all that is left is to write them down. Companies that do this on day 7 hit full speed in their first paid week.

The easiest way to start is right now — registering an E-chat account takes a couple of minutes, and from that moment you have 7 full days to work through this checklist.

FAQ:

Question: Do I need a credit card to start the trial?

Answer: No. Registering an account is enough. Payment is only required after the 7 days if you decide to continue, and support will help you pick a payment method that works in your country.

Question: What happens to our conversations if we change the connected number after the test?

Answer: Nothing is lost. When you change a number in E-chat, the full history stays in the customer cards inside your CRM, and the new number continues writing into the same conversations.

Question: Our customers use both WhatsApp and Telegram. Is 7 days enough to test 2 channels?

Answer: Yes. Connecting a second channel follows the same steps and takes minutes, so from day 2 you can run both messengers in parallel. For multichannel companies this is actually more useful, because you immediately see conversations from different sources collecting in 1 card.

Question: We run a custom-built CRM that is not on the integration list. Is there any point in starting?

Answer: Yes. E-chat connects to any system through Apix-Drive and Wepster, and the API is open for in-house solutions. Seven days is enough for a developer to build and verify the basic loop: receiving, sending and logging messages.

Question: Is there a risk of getting a number restricted during an active trial?

Answer: E-chat imposes no limits on messages or contacts, but the messengers have their own rules for active numbers. Viber is stricter about messages to new contacts, Telegram is noticeably more relaxed. During the trial, write to live customers about their own enquiries and avoid bulk outreach to cold lists — restrictions will not become an issue.