A fresh look at customer engagement

Enterprise IT News has a list of questions for Vinod Chandramouli, Head, ASEAN Business, from Freshworks, an intelligent customer engagement company.

EITN: Please explain what Freshworks does.

Vinod: Freshworks is building an intelligent customer engagement software company that reaches across the globe. Our product and platform cover everything from marketing and CRM to employee engagement. We like to take a complex problem and find the simplest way to solve it, and this new angle led to the name Freshworks.   

The customer journey can get complicated quickly, so we have broken our offering into three primary pillars. Firstly, the EX-solution, which is employee experience, covers inward-facing functions such as IT assets, HRM solutions, and internal collaboration tools. Then, there’s the CX, customer experience, which is conversely outward-looking. This comprises ticket solutions, workforce management, field service management, chatbot models etc. Lastly, there’s the CRM solution, which overlaps with CX. Existing customers can also grow quickly, which is why both the CX and CRM functions are interchanged accordingly under our unified customer view.

Freshworks has been around for about ten years and we have recently passed $300 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue). We have also experienced a 200% growth in customers from 2019 to 2021 in the ASEAN region.

The customer journey can get complicated quickly, so we have broken our offering into three primary pillars. Firstly, the EX-solution, which is employee experience, covers inward-facing functions such as IT assets, HRM solutions, and internal collaboration tools. Then, there’s the CX, customer experience, which is conversely outward-looking.

EITN: What does it do for companies like Red Mart and Zalora? What are your ideal customers and industries?

Vinod: Zalora is a great example because they use the majority of our bread-and-butter product, Freshdesk. When you think about a retail company, where a brand must constantly reinvent itself, they should look at approaching customers where they are talking. As a brand, you have to listen and approach customers where they are, not just post-sale, but also pre-sale.

 Zalora uses our omnichannel solution, which means anyone landing on their website can immediately see conversational starters easily (returns, brand locations, availability etc.). Many are pre-purchase queries where an agent or bot is required to answer quickly so the buyer can make decisions instantly. On their website, Freshchats is available to run campaigns, bring customers in, and ensure all their needs are taken care of.

When you think about a retail company, where a brand must constantly reinvent itself, they should look at approaching customers where they are talking. As a brand, you have to listen and approach customers where they are, not just post-sale, but also pre-sale.

Then, we move on to the post-sales support such as returns, order status, product queries etc. which are standard queries in the e-commerce world. These might feel monotonous for the support agents answering the questions, but the customer needs their questions addressed or else they would go to another brand. We emphasize a collaborative and omnichannel view, where a customer gets the exact same experience on Zalora’s website as on their app, Facebook or Twitter.

In short, we enable a single agent to answer multiple queries at the same time, right on the platform the customer is at. Zalora is then able to drive these insights to determine where they should spend more time, whether it’s website resources or social media presence.

EITN: What are the top customer experience challenges that you help your customers overcome, and how? Especially during the pandemic, how did you do so?

Vinod: Especially with the pandemic, the process of adopting digital transformation is difficult. This is true across all sectors and business sizes. Some of them wonder if they should spend more time on executing versus genuinely talking to customers. They feel like they have a product that already works well for them, which is a challenge. However, we have seen many evolve and realise over the past year that investment in customer experience should be a priority given the current circumstances.

Another challenge is businesses debating whether they actually need an omnichannel solution when they believe their customers is only sending them emails. The misinterpretation there lies in the fact that you’re making the customer only send an email — your customer might very well want to talk about you on a Facebook post if you were available on that platform. If these customers had the ability to voice their feedback on a public forum, you might get other customers chiming in and providing more positive feedback as well. So, I believe one of the biggest mistakes organisations make is assume that their customers are satisfied and happy enough. They might feel a solution like ours is unnecessary at that point, but the risk for them is that their competition will be overtaking them behind the scenes.

The misinterpretation there lies in the fact that you’re making the customer only send an email — your customer might very well want to talk about you on a Facebook post if you were available on that platform.

The other challenge is the misconception that CRM solutions are too complex, or only for large Fortune 200 companies. However, our solutions are diverse and can be tailored to each specific department, which massively saves costs.

EITN: What are the top industry trends for 2021 and how do you help companies address these trends?

Vinod: I believe that brands are going to be laser-focused on customer experience in 2021, especially in Southeast Asia. Our customers are reinventing the way they think about customer experience. When you think about a culture, we have had strong pushbacks from legacy verticals such as banking, shipping and logistics, where they claim their customers are not ready for chatbots but have seen them change their mind and change course. We have had customers from industries such as fintech and e-commerce as well, drinking from the firehose and implementing more chatbots to their platforms.

From that point, I see legacy organisations will continue to play catch-up this year. The pandemic has been a big driver for them to adopt digital transformation and cloud ecosystems. We’re seeing them increasingly wake up and knock on our door so that they can stay ahead of the competition.

When you think about a culture, we have had strong pushbacks from legacy verticals such as banking, shipping and logistics, where they claim their customers are not ready for chatbots but have seen them change their mind and change course.

EITN: With the pandemic more or less settling down, can you share your outlook for 2022, or at least give indicator if it will be vastly different from 2021?

Vinod: The most important thing companies can do in 2022 is set up self-service on their platforms. It’s an easy set up that does not require complexity, and we see many customers adopting the Freshworks AI platform for this.

In 2022, I can also see a collaborative boom happening, enabling customers and employees of a brand to work together, as well as between employees in the same organisation as well. This is because enterprises oftentimes rely on multiple people across teams to solve a single customer query.

 Another outlook in 2022 is the focus on looking at an entire customer journey as a holistic piece. it is not just one product, one person or one solution. So, the journey itself has to be broken down into multiple levels — marketing, pre-purchasing, during purchase, post-purchasing and revenue-driven. When they’re broken down, a brand needs to focus on their different priorities at different times, and what progressions they need because it all varies in different stages.

In 2022, I can also see a collaborative boom happening, enabling customers and employees of a brand to work together, as well as between employees in the same organisation as well.

Overall, we see 2022 not being vastly different from 2021, and the adaption to digitalisation will continue moving full steam ahead.

EITN: What are you mid to long-term plans?

Vinod: We will continue to be laser-focused on enhancing customer and employee engagement solutions to increase productivity and efficiency.  At Freshworks, we have been continuously improving our hybrid AI platform. It complements a human’s job while at the same time humans enable the platform to do a better job as well. The constant learning and increase in knowledge database within organisations also help Freshworks to customise and upgrade our platform services. There are various initiatives we are working on behind the scenes, but our key focus and the end goal is to provide seamless employee engagement which eventually helps provide supreme customer services.

With the recent appointment of our new Chief Marketing Officer, we also plan to invest more in our marketing and brand-building efforts, in addition to our product-led growth and online acquisitions. So, we have big plans at Freshworks, and I think Southeast Asia will be seeing a lot of our growth initiatives come to life.

There are various initiatives we are working on behind the scenes, but our key focus and the end goal is to provide seamless employee engagement which eventually helps provide supreme customer services.