On June 6, 2017 Freshdesk announced its rebranding to Freshworks. Freshworks is a new umbrella brand for the suite of applications that Freshdesk built and acquired since its founding in 2010.
The center assertion by manner of Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and founding father of Freshworks is:
?Today, I?M glad to announce that we're rebranding the company as Freshworks. We?Re no longer in this just to exchange the manner agencies do customer support, but to refresh the way they do agency.?
Let?S have a observe choose paragraphs of the press launch.
Following breakout growth of the agency?S customer support software application, and the arrival of latest merchandise for IT Service Management (?ITSM?), consumer courting manage (?CRM?) and cloud-primarily based totally name centers, Freshworks products are designed to help agencies higher have interaction and communicate with their clients and personnel.
The company surely had a significant impact on parts of the CRM market, also as evidenced by being named a CRM Watchlist Winner 2017 by industry luminary Paul Greenberg. They, in my eyes, however, do not yet have a CRM. A CRM encompasses marketing, sales, and service, supporting multiple channels/being channel agnostic and based upon analytics. Freshsales, what is referred to as their CRM, is a sales tool.
?Today, the Freshworks suite of products includes:
· Freshdesk : a multichannel customer support helpdesk which allows organizations to collaborate and support their customers through email, phone, websites, forums and social media
· Freshservice : a cloud-based service desk and IT Service Management solution to address the growing complexity of teams’ IT support needs through a simple but powerful interface
· Freshsales : a full-featured CRM solution for sales teams handling high-velocity leads
· Freshcaller: a fully functional call center on the cloud”
While this is a good listing of the products that are now under the umbrella of Freshworks the missing of hotline is notable. I can only surmise that it moved under the umbrella of Freshdesk. It surely didn’t get abandoned.
?Until now, companies have had few options for commercial enterprise software program program, turning to all-in-one, cumbersome legacy answers across the business business enterprise. These answers aren't simplest steeply-priced, however additionally require prolonged implementation cycles and are extraordinarily difficult to use with out professional education, neither of which can be afforded thru developing groups. At the identical time, companies are also uninterested in dropping time and sources on seeking to make the entirety work together. Freshworks offers a product portfolio this is without difficulty applied and less expensive for corporations of all sizes.?
It is true that there haven’t been that many options for businesses, especially in the SME arena. Still there are a bunch of vendors around that make the same claim, including heavyweights like Salesforce or Netsuite. Then there is, very noteably, Zoho.
“Adopted by over 100,000 companies in 145 countries, Freshworks’ mission is to help companies better engage and communicate with their customers and employees with refreshing business software. For companies looking to share customer data and insights across sales and support teams or quickly onboard and set-up new employees, Freshworks’ integrated software products ensure all teams are working together in sync.” [highlighting by me]
This declaration, along side Girish?S quote, very nicely summarizes the renewed imaginative and prescient. It additionally shows the modern-day loss of marketing clout via now not naming this a part of CRM capability.
My Take
This rebranding changed into an inevitable pass that presentations the truth of what the company formerly called Freshdesk is sincerely doing. The organisation?S authentic imaginative and prescient of offering a ?Clean helpdesk that makes a dent into the world of customer support? Has changed substantially. Meanwhile, as a organisation, Freshworks is presenting customer service, IT service, cloud call center, sales, and bot capability ? The latter as part of their customer service and the income functionality.
The main functionality that is currently missing is a decent (fresh) marketing based upon a more generic analytics component than they currently have. But looking at how the company developed so far this is probably not too far down the road. As is different functionality, as the new name, and the header of the press release suggest.
“[The] New umbrella brand provides product clarity, enables future growth of feature-rich, easy-to-use and affordable business software suite”
Both positioned Freshworks squarely in competition with Zoho and in the long run with larger players as a whole lot as and until Salesforce . Although Freshworks appeared to look their fundamental buyers inside the SME market they've with Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss, Toshiba and Cisco some huge referencable names of their purchaser base.
The demanding situations Freshworks has turn out to be extra apparent, too. The main ones that I see, are:
1. The company moved from being a best-of-breed specialty vendor to becoming a suite vendor. This is a strong shift of focus that needs to be carefully managed and executed upon. The alternative is confusing the customers by an apparent lack of strategy – even if there is one. And I would think that there is one. Freshworks has had far too much impact in the past years.
2. Although they claim to have a “CRM” they in my eyes don’t yet have one. The reason is that there is no significant marketing functionality. While there is some phone and email support I do not see enough of a campaign management functionality or enough of an analytics component to support next best actions, product recommendations, or even enough segmentation. The claim of being able of doing “AI based lead scoring” is not enough – what does “AI-based” mean?
In spite of above two problems Freshworks is in reality a supplier to maintain in thoughts with reference to looking at a fixed of CRM software program software that to start with does now not focus on advertising and marketing.
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