Playing the right kind of music for delight
“Customers need to be treated like friends,” said acclaimed neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur David Eagleman. “That is where neuroscience meets customer relationships.”
And to be a true friend of the customer, they need to hear a different kind of music other than the ‘hold music’ when they get in touch with your brand.
Girish Mathrubootham, the founder and CEO of Freshworks, laid it out letter by letter: M for modern, U for unified, S for scalable, I for intuitive, and C for cost-effective.
M-U-S-I-C—music. Of the kind that’s not jarring but endearing.
Yes, you guessed it right: these characters symbolize “the core principles” on which Freshworks products are built—be it our flagship Freshdesk omnichannel customer support solution, the Freshsales unified sales intelligence tool, or the Freshservice IT service management software. (Click here for the complete product list.)
In our just concluded global live+virtual event of the year, Refresh 2021, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, David and Girish presented their keynotes on certain aspects of ‘making delight easy’ for customers and employees of various businesses: the science of delight and the art of easy.
The symphony of ideas and insights the duo presented was music to the ears of the live attendees as well as around 20,000 people from all over the world who tuned in from the comfort of their homes, offices, cafes, or wherever they were happily ensconced.
David explained the decision-making process of the human brain along three intricately intertwined phenomena: evaluation, emotion, and the social context.
For people to be delighted with a product, they need to feel they are getting the value out of it. According to David, the experience that customers have after they buy a product matters just as much.
“In the context of customer relations, if a person starts off angry and you are able to steer them back on the road and make them delighted by the end of the phone call, it makes a big difference,” he said.
Taking his cue from Plato’s Chariot Allegory, David likened the human mind to a two-horse chariot, with one horse representing reason and the other, passion. One needs to keep a balance between the two in order to stay on the road throughout the journey, he reckoned.
“Emotion so lavishly colors our lives and it is such an important part of how we all make decisions,” said David. “We are not just information-processing machines.”
But there’s a third, equally important element that defines the trajectory of human behavior and decisions, especially in our increasingly connected and social-influenced lives.
“Almost the entirety of neuroscience has been about what’s going on in the individual brain—vision, touch, or whatever. But a huge part of the brain circuitry has to do with other brains: we are extremely social animals,” said David. “We care about integrity, reputation, how somebody treats you, and all that stuff.”
The interesting new finding of neuroscience, according to David, is that exactly the same circuitry that is used in understanding other people is what is used in understanding companies.
Making things effortless translates into delight
Concurring with the ideas of neuroscience David presented, Girish offered to bring in the realm of art: the art of making delight easy.
Girish started off by sharing his own story of a not-so-easy experience of dealing with customer support of a shipping company that inspired him to build a product and an organization with customer delight at its core.
Despite advancements in technology and companies investing so much in it, the legacy SaaS vendors or the first generation of cloud software providers have failed to deliver on the promise of their solutions being fast and easy for customers, Girish emphasized. “These legacy SaaS vendors are not building products with the users in mind: the software is massively expensive and siloed, often taking months or years to go live.”
What makes delight easy for customers and businesses are some key things essentially. In Girish’s words, in the context of business software: “Easy is when customers can reach out to you through any channel they want (phone, email, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.); easy is when your customer support agents don’t have to switch between five different screens when they are trying to help the customer; easy is when your sales and marketing folks know what customers want without even having to ask; and easy for a business is when you can actually start using the software that you bought instead of waiting eighteen months to go live.”
Girish elaborated: “That is what we call the art of easy: focusing on the experience, solving problems. And as we accomplished this ‘art of easy’ for our users, we were excited to see that making something effortless actually translates into delight. Over the last 11 years, we built Freshworks with a single goal: how can we help customers grow their business by making it easy and fast for them to delight their customers and their employees. Of course there is a bit of science behind the art of easy.”
Besides sharing some success stories of customers such as TaylorMade and Paper Transport, Girish also unveiled Freshstack—a customer relationship management (CRM) suite built for the unique needs of startups that unifies customer support, and sales and marketing teams.
“Around 20% of the world’s unicorns use Freshworks,” he revealed.
Recalling the early days of Freshworks operating out of a garage setup a decade back, Girish said, “I remember all the pressures of building a new startup—from getting funding to hiring talent to acquiring new customers. While doing all of that, you have to make sure that you are putting in place the right technology that can scale with the business. So I wanted to solve some of these challenges not only for Freshworks but also for other startups.”
After all, at Freshworks we tend to take a lot of delight, and a little bit of pride, in everything we do.
The above is but just a small glimpse of what all happened at Refresh 2021. There were other inspiring guest speakers, customer and breakout sessions, awards, and much more.
To revisit the Refresh 2021 sessions and get to know more about the speakers/topics, please head over to https://www.freshworksrefresh2021.com/
For new product and feature announcements, go here: https://www.freshworks.com/whats-new/
For more blog posts on Refresh and interesting happenings at Freshworks, watch this space!
