Unified records, custom objects, AI ‘superpowers’…Freshworks Platform was on a roll in 2020. By Aishwarya Hariharan
When they told us we would be working from home in March, we all thought it would be for a few days or maybe a few weeks. Tops. 2020 marked the end of a decade, and we had high hopes for how the year would fare. We know how that turned out.
Despite adversity, it is amazing how we found ways to cope and strive forward. Above everything, that calls for a celebration—in a socially distanced manner, please! So when we went around the Zoom room and said thanks for what we do have, we decided to share our recap with you. Behold the rollercoaster ride that the Freshworks Platform has experienced in 2020.
Meet Freshworks Neo
As we are set to enter a new decade of accelerated digital transformation, we’ve refreshed the identity of the Freshworks Platform to Freshworks Neo. Neo is a modern, flexible, and intelligent platform that powers our entire suite of products with revolutionary new features and unifies customer, partner, and developer experiences.
You can find out more about Freshworks Neo through our website, from a sales consultant or Refresh2020! Make sure to check out the “Your experience matters” keynote and the “The Reimagine Platform Experiences with Freshworks and AWS” session for an overview.
Unifying customer records
As businesses grow, so do the number of software they use to manage and support their processes. This means that customer data is often spread across multiple tools or stuck in siloes. We envisioned a Unified Customer Record (UCR) to rectify this situation and democratize data.
A UCR captures customer data from all interactions and touchpoints, so your business can leverage customer insights to deliver the best customer experiences. All customer attributes are connected to identities, and customer profiles are consolidated intoUCRs, further enriched by third-party data sources. This way, salespeople and marketers can create data-driven engagement strategies that delight customers across the journey. Find out more information here.
The Neo Admin Center
With the Neo Platform launch, we got the opportunity to rebrand our security, identity and access management capabilities to Freshworks Neo Admin Center. Through the NAC, admins can define authentication and authorization policies and easily manage their accounts, subscriptions, and organizational information from one central location.
We took things one step further and redesigned the security settings UI. We added new features, and made it more intuitive, making it easy for customers to configure and manage security policies for their organizations. We added support for RelayState, Encrypted Assertions, and Single Logout as part of the SAML open-standard implementation. We also launched one Freshworks domain, centralized user and role management capabilities, and unified billing for Freshworks CRM.
Unified analytics, performance improvements, and other updates
Freshworks Analytics powers the reporting suite across Freshworks products. You can use Freshworks Analytics to pull up data through curated reports or by creating reports to track your performance indicators. 2020 was a fantastic year for Freshworks Analytics and its users—we crossed the 100,000 custom reports mark this year! Some other key updates include:
- Zoom out for the big picture, using Unified Analytics. One small, well, step for our engineering team, but one giant leap for our customer experience. We integrated data models and did lots of under-the-hood tinkering to enable our customers to create reports using data from multiple products. Now, you can create reports in Freshdesk Omnichannel using data from Freshcaller and Freshchat. Similarly, in Freshworks CRM, you can utilize data relevant to marketing campaigns and deals to create reports!
- Make data consumption fun and relevant using our new customization options. You can customize the report’s style by adding background and borders and add comments and context using text widgets. We also added more layout options, display modes and made our underlying data smart. Coming really soon: chart customization!
To stay abreast of updates, keep an eye on this link here.
A ‘Neo’ approach to team collaboration
The good old makes way for a better new: we launched the Neo Collaboration Platform with the vision to enable all Freshworks products to build context-driven, channel-agnostic, and native-to-workflow collaboration experiences for their users, as well as develop smarter integrations with external collaboration software such as Slack, MS Teams, Dropbox, and counting.
Integrations launched through the Neo Collaboration Platform:
Need to customize? There is an app for that!
You already know the Freshworks Marketplace as the go-to app marketplace for your customization needs. But did you know that it:
- Helps you build great user experiences in an easy-peasy manner*? Crayons is an Open Source design library for developers who build apps for the Freshworks Platform. Through pre-built components, Crayons offers control and flexibility to create consistent, stunning interfaces with the Freshworks product design in mind. Check out our sample apps to get started.
- Enables you to create a serverless app with all the functions necessary for Freshcaller’s routing automation feature through custom actions? Check out our detailed documentation and sample app to get started.
- Has learning resources? Check out some of our Code Recipes for inspiration.
- Lets you build apps that can work in multiple products? Omni Apps is available to developers looking to develop apps for Freshsales and Freshworks CRM.
* we’ve assumed a definition of easy-peasy that’s slightly above “My five year old could do it” and below “piece of cake”.
Build your custom objects
You asked us to enable adding custom objects into your workflows, and we listened.
What are custom objects, you ask? Freshworks provides businesses with a large set of native objects out-of-the-box to store, manage, process, and use information. However, it is impossible to give an all-encompassing object collection that meets all businesses’ wall-to-wall data needs. Custom Objects, our solution to this problem, presents our developers and customers with the much-needed bridge between native objects IN Freshdesk and their data needs.
Watch our Refresh session on custom objects.
See Freddy run!
What all can Freddy do? If you’ve asked yourself this question any time recently, well, we have the answer for you! We have a single destination for all things Freddy AI – the new Freddy AI microsite.
We also decided to give Freddy some clarity by organizing his skills.
Freddy AI Skills is a neat, new way to understand the various superpowers of Freddy:
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- Actions boost your team productivity by simplifying workflows through automation and customizable rules.
- Insights help separate the signal from the noise through deep-data predictions, suggestions, and corrective actions.
- Conversations skills elevate your business’ self-service experience using intent-based NLP (natural language processing) that focuses on customer delight.
Go truly omnichannel!
We know your customers live in communication apps such as WhatsApp and Slack. But what about your software? The Freshworks Neo platform offers great experience for your end consumers and seamless collaboration between teams across channels of choice—WhatsApp, Slack, Apple Business Chat, Line, and MS Teams. With all these channels, your end consumers can interact with support teams on the go, agnostic of the devices or apps they use. Not just that, using these channels, your agents can easily coordinate amongst themselves to efficiently resolve issues.
Now with Neo, optimize your workflows with custom omnichannel experiences, enable your teams with easy context-driven collaboration, and drive end-customer delight by giving them the option to engage through channels of choice.
In a nutshell, Freshworks Neo can help businesses leverage AI, data integration, and personalization—and catapult their digital transformation journey to the next level. You can find out more about Freshworks Neo through our website, from a sales consultant or Refresh2020!
A huge shout-out to the entire Freshworks Neo team for their help and contribution!
Cover image: Vignesh Rajan
Tell us how we did in 2020 here or through the comments section!