With CRM and Neo, Freshworks brings the iPhone moment in business software closer to reality
A CRM is a CRM is a CRM…right?
Wrong.
With due apologies to Gertrude Stein and William Shakespeare, a Customer Relationship Management software bought from just about any vendor wouldn’t “smell as sweet.”
At our just-concluded Refresh 2020 virtual global conference, we took great pains and absolute delight to explain why not.
“Our journey at Freshworks has always been about staying relevant in the world of customer experience,” said Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham in his inaugural keynote.
In recent years, AI and ML have become increasingly relevant and disruptive which, in turn, are causing disruption in the CX space. “Businesses want to integrate all of their different systems—whether it is marketing, sales, support or success—to truly build a 360-degree profile of the customer,” he noted.
But have companies been able to really do that thus far?
Of course not. Which is why in the seemingly crowded CRM market, Freshworks has announced our own Freddy AI-driven, next-generation product—the Freshworks CRM.
So here is a ‘rose’ that does away with the traditional thorns of disintegrated, siloed data and presents—arguably for the first time in the SaaS industry—what Girish passionately calls “the iPhone moment in business software.”
How so?
Prakash Ramamurthy, the Chief Product Officer of Freshworks, and Peter Stadlinger, the Head of Product for Freshworks CRM, did some of the explaining.
The Freshworks CRM, according to Prakash, answers the key question: How do we create a single platform for businesses to nurture their 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.”
Peter further elaborated that the Freshworks CRM allows an organization to track the customer journey—regardless of whether it is the marketing department or the sales unit that does the tracking. “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 CRM,” he said.
Now, breaking down these data silos using the latest advances in AI/ML (through our own Freddy AI engine) and a unified platform (more on this shortly) is what changes the game in CRM—possibly making Freshworks CRM your best bet yet in SaaS.
To cite but one example, with AI, the traditional way of looking at sales pipelines can be transformed with data-driven analytics. Prakash revealed that such AI-powered analytics 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 and the availability of a rich harvest of customer and prospect data hitherto lying unutilized or under-utilized somewhere in your systems.
In G’s iPhone analogy, there’s no reason why in today’s hyper-connected, AI-driven world, companies should be forced to use multiple tools to address customer issues, prospect for new customers, or keep them happy. Just as the iPhone freed users from the hassles of carrying a separate camera and music player, the Freshworks CRM aims to deliver them from the tyranny of a plethora of clunky IT tools. And our theme for Refresh 2020 symbolized that: Experience matters.
Do the Neo
To enable our vision of a modern, agile and well-integrated CRM solution on the cloud, Freshworks also announced the launch of Neo, our ‘new’ unified platform.
How we define Neo indeed reveals its true power and full spectrum of capabilities to our customers and prospects alike. Freshworks Neo is a flexible, end-to-end, AI-powered enterprise platform to unify customer experiences, enhance employee productivity and empower an ecosystem of developers and partners.
Not only does Neo power the Freshworks CRM to meet our customers’ present and future needs (read scalability), its capabilities are confined only by the imagination of those using it. At the Refresh 2020 launch, G summed up Neo nicely: “Our platform, your vision.” Neo also powers the Freshworks Marketplace, which features over 1,200 easy-to-use apps for anything ranging from agent productivity and workflows to accounting and governance.
To talk about it, we also had the virtual presence at Refresh 2020 of the City and County of San Francisco as a customer. With close to 36,000 employees serving various public needs across 55 departments, the organization is among the largest employers in the city. Mark Perlite, Organizational Change and Service Desk Manager, shared how Freshworks Neo, among other technologies, was instrumental in quickly shifting the organization’s old, paper-based processes to remote, digital work so that the service requests could be managed smoothly during the pandemic.
According to Preethy Padmanabhan, who heads product marketing for Freshworks Neo and Freshcaller, the Neo platform is different from legacy systems in four important ways: it offers enterprise-grade services to businesses of all sizes; comes with out-of-the-box components “designed to help businesses get started right away”; replaces complex, multi-stack legacy platforms with modern, intelligent architecture; and finally, it provides companies and developers with powerful building blocks to easily customize their environment.
Talking about what Freshworks Neo brings to the table for a forward-thinking organization, Tejas Bhandarkar, Head of Product (Platform), Freshworks, said that from a platform perspective, Freshworks Neo delivers “a unified architecture and a set of building blocks that can be repurposed to help customers as well as employees.”
Tejas also spoke about how, using cutting-edge tools such as AWS Lambda (the serverless compute service from Amazon Web Services), Freshworks is able to handle “hundreds of millions of near real-time events occurring on our platform.” Furthermore, he said that using SageMaker and other tools in the AWS portfolio, we are able to generate new ML models in 40 minutes or less. “Today we have over 30,000 machine learning models.”
Technical capabilities such as these and our passion for enabling ‘customers for life’ for our customers give us the confidence to enter two key SaaS segments simultaneously: CRM and platform.
In a nutshell, Freshworks CRM and Neo can help organizations leverage the modern capabilities of AI, data integration and personalization to catapult their digital transformation journey into an entirely new orbit.
(Want to check out what Refresh 2020 is all about? While the event may be over, the excitement will continue to live virtually for a few more months! Click here to register and receive a login link through which you can access the keynotes, breakout sessions, and more topnotch content.)
