Customer Engagement, AI, and the 360 Collaboration – A Refreshing Overview
It’s been a good year for us at Freshworks. Looking back, we held our first global user conference Refresh 18, achieved the coveted Unicorn status with our $100 million funding, clocked $100 million in ARR. We do feel good!
In his keynote address, our CEO Girish Mathrubootham (G) took the audience at Refresh 18 through this journey.
[slideshare id=124253376&doc=girish-userconferencekeynote-181128115843]
Speaking of milestones, there’s a pleasant and humbling epiphany that struck us. We hit the $1million-$100 million run rate in five years and two months, which places us in the same league as some of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world. We don’t always need a reason to celebrate, but this definitely calls for one!
Before breaking open the champagne though, we have the bigger responsibility of pushing boundaries in the customer engagement space and taking on further challenges.
The future of customer engagement
In the SaaS game, the ‘Customer 360’ element has been elusive. Many have attempted to find it, but none have been outrightly successful.
Redefining the contours of customer engagement are three crucial themes – Customer 360, Collaboration, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
What exactly is Customer 360? It is Customer Engagement’s ‘iPhone’ moment, which G previously spoke about during the launch of the Freshworks 360 bundle.
To make this 360 vision a reality, we’ve created our own ‘Master Customer Record’ which captures all the events and conversations that our customers have with their customers – providing relevant context, at the appropriate time, and according to the situation.
Put this in context with the frustrating problem of broken collaboration, and the vitality of this tool is non-negotiable.
Take an example of Agent Mike, who wants Agent Joe’s help with a ticket. For Mike and Joe to collaborate seamlessly without wasting time or effort, they need a record of all relevant and updated context pertaining to the ticket.
This is where the Customer 360 purview comes into play.
Bring AI into this mix and you’ve added a cherry on top of this experience, with a flourish! We are now closer to finding the SaaS puzzle’s elusive piece than ever before—making customer engagement stand out in the picture.
The AI wave and Freddy – The Freshworks Omnibot
It goes without saying that AI will have a deep and profound impact on the evolving customer experience. To leverage this impact, we have worked long and hard on Freddy – our AI powered canine omnibot. Freddy brings a lot to the playing field but in a nutshell, he offers channel agnostic contextual self-service to customers. He makes life a lot easier for both agents and the customers.
This AI engine also enables agent assist to help new agents onboard a team with relative ease by proactively and systematically troubleshooting customer queries.
On the sales front, executives using Freshworks’ CRM product, powered by Freddy, will be able to stay on top of their sales pipeline by auto calibrating the available leads.
Our vision with Freddy is to remove the mundane and make work more interesting for agents. Freddy allows them to optimize their potential, challenge themselves, and work on complex, high-value inquiries, instead of dealing with routine operational tasks.
There is no replacement for human interaction, and we know this. If the problem is beyond Freddy’s scope, he passes the query on to a human agent with all the required context.
With Freddy coming in, the missing piece to the jigsaw has finally been unearthed. The picture of customer engagement is now a seamless integration of Customer 360, Collaboration, and AI coming together.
We are on the brink of creating a never-before-achieved customer experience journey, and with Freddy leading our way, there’s no looking behind.
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More stories from our user conference coming your way – so keep hitting refresh!
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