A mantra for user empowerment
[Edit Notes: This blog is part of our series on Indian Democratic Design, a uniquely Indian approach to designing simple, scalable, well-crafted and affordable solutions that makes our customers self-reliant. In this piece, David Thompson, our chief marketing officer, talks about the need to democratize good software, by empowering users, pricing it transparently and making it affordable. To learn more about Indian Democratic Design go here.]
The Freshworks Customer-for-Life platform is designed to make it simple and quick to integrate customer engagement with existing systems. Our serverless application architecture based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a game-changer for several companies like Blue Nile and Shopify. They were able to deploy our customer support and IT service applications rapidly with minimal disruption, and easily integrate them with existing systems, saving millions of dollars on consulting and implementation fees in the process.
“Most enterprise software, even cloud software these days, have become hopelessly complex, expensive and time-consuming to implement, and very frustrating for users,” says David Thompson. Indian Democratic Design eschews all those approaches and seeks the simplest way to empower users, developers and IT personnel to make a quick dent in driving business value. The principles of Indian Democratic Design serve as our guiding light.
But why is this relevant for the larger world of SaaS? Why talk about it? Because it is time the industry really understands what customers actually want and caters to those demands. Companies can no longer get away with bloatware. Cloud software was meant to be simple and not require an army of consultants to help you figure out how to use it. But SaaS behemoths have made complex software and consultants a way of life. IDD is the panacea. This mantra will make products useful, beautiful and affordable again.
“Over a period of time, the real users—agents and IT service folks—were pushed out of the decision-making process and all the power went into the hands of the top management.
They decided the software to use and SaaS companies catered to them rather than the end-user. We want to change that with our software,” says David. Whether it’s the user experience itself, designed by and for end-users, or the deployment and implementation process, our engineers and designers are fanatical about simplifying complex processes and thereby reducing the time and cost. Making complex things affordable and simple is our mantra. Even our pricing is affordable. We have no hidden costs, what you see is what you get. During our free trial, we do not even ask for your credit card details. It is literally a free trial, no questions asked.
These little things matter a lot to us.
