Capping a decade of blitzscaling, Freshworks makes big splash in CRM and platform play

Oftentimes, it starts like a dream—fleeting, chaotic, unsolicited, and without structure. The idea is a strange thing, isn’t it? The way it begins and evolves is like life itself—literally out of nowhere, and then, in a hard act to follow, it branches out and sprouts arms and legs, and lands firmly upon the ground of reason to sustain itself through the years.

In realization of this abstract thought, Freshworks at its global conference Refresh 2020 took the wraps off several ideas that were birthed as fleeting visions, mumbles, and side remarks from customers, partners, software writers, and product thinkers who envisioned a better experience of using business software.

Just turning the one-decade milestone, Freshworks took the conference totally virtual. Four engaging Keynote sessions and a day-and-a-half worth of product and customer-centric discussions were on offer, along with significant product launches–the Freshworks CRM and FreshworksNeo, the company’s big splash into platform play.

In the words of CEO Girish Mathrubootham, the customer centricity at practice in Freshworks has its genesis in the origins story. After the much-storied broken TV experience of Girish, he set out to build a social helpdesk, because the power balance had already tilted in favor of the consumer of a product, not the producer. From there, Freshworks kicked off its product building with an unblinkered focus on user experience: “Freshdesk was, truly, the first social helpdesk, to integrate social channels such as Twitter and Facebook, in addition to traditional channels of support…”

Girish picked up a consumer trend that was running as a mere undercurrent and turned it into the fulcrum for his start-up. Watching social trends as a Founder for a decade now, he appears to have hit upon another, which, by the looks of it, is the genesis of Freshworks’ big splash into the space of CRM: “What we saw clearly was the emergence of digital channels like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat or Facebook Messenger; the millennial consumer no longer wants to call and wait. They want to engage with business on chat.”

Faced with this consumer trend, businesses have begun to wonder how to ride the wave with a whole lot of automation so that they run successful customer support organizations. That led Freshworks to roll out a series of products in chat, caller, and bots spaces.

With that prelude, Girish addressed the question of why Freshworks was excited about launching a new CRM product—considering the world was filled with such rollouts. What does he consider as the central problem with today’s CRM?

Siloed, incomplete data. 

In a world transformed by data analytics, the differentiator lies in the quality of it. Software products implemented in siloes—sales, marketing, success and so on—will produce only siloed data; expecting end-users to fill up forms for machine learning models to run reports will be devoid of context, so the data is incomplete. Addressing these two critical flaws, Freshworks is making an integration that would knock down the walls dividing the data; secondly, it would leverage its Freddy AI platform to draw “meaningful insights”. To make it better, he reminisced about what Apple did with the iPhone in 2007. It eliminated the need for a separate music player and a camera by making meaningful, workable integrations of them with the cellphone, a fine example of thinking for the customer. In Girish’s words, Freshworks CRM would deliver the iPhone moment in enterprise SaaS.

• Girish followed up the CRM product-thinking with a conversation with John Lee, VP – Agile Sales Enablement at the 275-year-old international auction house Sotheby’s, on how CRM is changing things at the ancient art broker’s office. And, we’re sold!
• Next up, he spoke with Mark Perlite, Organizational change and service desk manager at the city and county of San Francisco. Mark spoke passionately about how Frisco leveraged tech – including Freshworks Neo – to keep things going through the pandemic.
• Thirdly, Girish spoke to Fred Chin, Sr. Director of IT end-user services at RingCentral, about Freshservice, the employee engagement and IT service desk product from Freshworks. Chin revealed how the company, supporting 7,000+ end-users on IT operations, went fully remote!

Girish signed off by recollecting some recognitions that’ve come Freshworks’ way, such as being ranked 16th in the Forbes Cloud100 Awards recognizing top cloud tech companies, and being termed Visionary in the famed Gartner CX Magic Quadrant. All said, Girish laid much store by his own mantra: “Our vision is to help each one of you get customers for life and we aim to do that by having happy employees bring happy customers.”

The product vision

Laying out the product vision of Freshworks, Chief Product Officer Prakash Ramamurthy said the new frontier in SaaS was looking at the efficacy of a product from the angle of customer experience, and perfecting it in a way that companies are not just able to find newer customers every day, but retain their existing ones so that they become customers for life. In short, Experience Matters. “What we mean is how do we create a single platform for you to nurture your customers through their entire life journey, starting with acquiring them, closing deals, and then making them successful so that they become your customers for life.”

Prakash interspersed his presentation with demonstrations of new capabilities and uber-cool features of the Freshworks CRM. In a chat with Peter Stadlinger, Head of Product for Freshworks CRM, Prakash brought out one of the central aspects of the CRM product — integration with meaning. According to Peter, the Freshworks CRM allows the tracking of customer journey irrespective of which department does the tracking: marketing or sales. “The CRM allows building customer experiences end to end, whether they involve sales- or marketing-related aspects. It really doesn’t matter! It just breaks down the silos that exist between departments in legacy CRMs…”

Prakash drew out several instances that underscored the purpose of rethinking the legacy CRM. There was a real need to simplify complexities in customer engagement and nurturing, and, of course, the advent of Artificial Intelligence in what can be done to make the systems better. With AI, the traditional way of looking at sales pipelines needs to be brought down, and replaced with data-driven analytics, analytics that would discount a deal much nearer to closure and tell you to focus on a newly landed prospect, because of the historical context of how things played out before. Freddy AI, Freshworks’ AI engine, has been deeply in play through product evolution of the new CRM software, Prakash showed.

Unveiling a raft of new capabilities for Freshworks’ IT service management software Freshservice, Prakash drove another design philosophy central to the product development at Freshworks: if your own employees won’t use it, don’t sell it elsewhere. The new set of features under Freshservice puts the focus on employee experience. How do employees like their own company software? Do alerts, requests, tickets tire them endlessly? Here is a quick list of the feature announcements for Freshservice:

• Channel of choice: Employees at enterprises want to use their preferred channels to talk to their ticketing solution. No more raising issues on websites.
• Orchestrate manual tasks: In operations management, we enhance your ability to manage alerts effectively. No more alert avalanche that drowns you in needless detail.
•  Asset management: There are a plethora of SaaS solutions made available in an enterprise. Who’s using what, and what are the under-utilised purchases?

Platform Play

Another instance of a customer demand turning out to be the genesis of a new product is Neo, a unified platform for customer and employee experiences. At Refresh 2020, Freshworks unveiled this platform that addresses challenges faced by a host of users: product chiefs, developers, IT administrators, employees, HR heads, and, of course, the CIOs and other C-suite executives looking to transform the way their companies work with tech. For many at the top, tech should be a means to an end. At best, tech should serve as an undercurrent, always there, never visible.

Freshworks’ product thinkers listened, and the outcome was Neo. Girish, in his keynote, came up with a pithy summation of Freshworks’ platform play: “Our platform, your vision.” Preethy Padmanabhan, Head of Product Marketing (Platform) at Freshworks, brought out the differentiation of the Neo platform at the AWS Keynote ‘Reimagine Platform Experiences’, which starred Roland Naidoo, Head of Ops for MultiChoice Pty; Wesley Story, Enterprise Strategist for AWS; and Tejas Bhandarkar, Head of Product (Platform) for Freshworks.

The Neo platform stands out in four ways: It’s enterprise-grade that ticks all the security and resiliency boxes; its architecture is modern, as against multi-stack legacy systems; it offers out-of-the-box components to get you started right away; and lastly, it offers powerful building blocks to customize your environment.

Nathan Latka’s 5-pronged approach to retain customers

Nathan Latka, bestselling author and founder of SaaS database Getlatka.com, in his keynote, drew lessons from his interviews with hundreds of founders to highlight how successful companies are winning and, more importantly, retaining customers.

He’s crystallized them down to five key points: how to build a strong community; unleashing the power of a mini media empire; net dollar retention–“the customer metric everyone cares about”; key ratios for your sales org; and keeping your audience engaged. His keynote, in fact, was a demonstration of that last point on how to keep an audience, especially a virtual one, engaged.

Title-sponsored by AWS, Refresh2020 also had an amazing array of masterclasses curated by the Freshworks Academy.

Spread across customer experience, marketing, communications, sales, and IT service management, the 18-course Masterclass section had honchos and senior executives of several high-growth firms talk about an array of topics from leading a sales team through a crisis to hiring the right set of marketers. For example, Zoom’s sales leader Alyson Baber walked the audience through the art of managing the sales guys through a crisis. A Zoom executive should know! According to this release, Zoom recorded a year-on-year growth of 355% in quarterly revenue during the three months that ended July this year.

If it was a revelation listening to Baber on steering teams through crisis, it was equally educative to get introduced to the thinking of several thought leaders on marketing, communications, customer experience, and much more. Among other prominent speakers were Nicole France, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research Inc.; Richard Pastore, Senior Research Director and IT Advisor at The Hackett Group; Eric Holliday, Head of Data and Systems Management at Springer Nature; and Thibault Guerard, Vice President-Customer Experience and Care, at Sodexo Benefits and Rewards Services.

Refresh 2020 also brought a bunch of innovative ideas, such as taking participants through how to get their jobs done in under three minutes, as well as a host of sessions spanning Customer Experience, ITSM, Sales & Marketing, and Platforms. Also on the table were on-demand and region-specific sessions on topics such as the new CX mandate, humanizing AI with virtual agents, and the Uberization of field service.

The Regional Stories

This year, Freshworks decided to plumb the depths of how differently its products have been used, particularly from a customer expectation and validation standpoint. One of the amazing revelations for us at Freshworks is the diverse application our ITSM product Freshservice is finding: A North America-based algorithm-driven styling service Stitch Fix—which, by the way, wrings its data like a super-cool washing machine to draw sterling insights—was scouting for a strong ITSM product to handle change management, being SOX-compliant, ace their access management, and so on. Initially roped in as a product to assist Stitch Fix before it went public, Freshservice turned out to be a great multi-purpose product.

According to Ravindra Sunku, Director of IT, Stitch Fix, who partook of a session under Regional Sessions, Freshservice is now the go-to platform for “office operations, facilities management, [tasks related to] warehouse locations, corporate IT…so we’ve expanded the use of Freshservice beyond an IT-focussed platform.”

Refresh 2020 has scores of such stories, besides chic product tours that can educate you about our product features in under five minutes flat! The conference had 47 breakout tracks, many of which hosted key executives of the modern corporate world talking about how they managed slumped sales and employee morale through the ongoing pandemic-induced business stress.

Remote worker, do you copy?

Refresh 2020 was planned in the middle of a pandemic that originally threatened to put a spanner in the works of several projects, including the slated rollout of Freshworks CRM. Freshworks had announced as early as mid-March—well over a week before India hunkered down in a lockdown against the virus—that all of its employees would go remote. It took a whole lot of calibrated moves from HR chiefs, product leaders and employees across the board to keep chasing the vision. In the words of Srivatsan Venkatesan, VP – Product Management at Freshworks: “Bringing together SFA, marketing automation, chat, telephony, UCR, UBX and every other platform: it’s been hard. Building it while sustaining a successful CRM has been harder. Getting all this done with a fully remote team was unplanned!”

Over 10,000 people from across the world registered for Refresh 2020, with hundreds of attendees logged in simultaneously to multiple sessions in different regions. The audience itself was a motley mix of existing and prospective customers, partners, CXOs and entrepreneurs, analysts, and others keenly interested in realizing the future vision of great CX unfold before their, ahem, virtual eyes.

Want to check out what Refresh is all about, and access all the top-notch content? Click here. Upon receiving a login link in your e-mail, you’re all set to enter Refresh2020. Watch this space for more insights from Refresh 2020 over the next few days. And see you at our next Refresh in (hopefully) a ‘socially un-distanced’ environment 🙂