This ‘Hotline’ calms angry customers without forcing them to leave your app

For businesses running on mobile apps, it’s a pain to force users to go outside the app for customer support on email or phone. Cloud-based customer support software maker Freshdesk has a new painkiller for it, called Hotline.

This latest product from Freshdesk provides real-time in-app messaging for customer engagement within mobile apps. It enables support staff to resolve issues then and there without having to go out of the app and lose the context of the query. Most queries relate to the last transaction of a user, so a quick resolution means a happy customer instead of a frustrated one.

“Phone and email are not ideal channels for mobile app users. Mobile-first businesses face a unique set of challenges that need specific solutions,” explains Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshdesk. “Support needs to be in-app, engagement should be real-time, context must be readily available, and the solution has to be massively scalable. We built Hotline with these in mind.”

Almost a year ago, Girish had told Tech in Asia that a transformation is under way in how businesses think of customer support. He said it’s going to be more “proactive” – in the sense that businesses will connect with customers through multiple channels without waiting for them to reach out with a problem.

Freshdesk’s first acquisition – Bangalore-based 1Click, which made software that enables live video chat and co-browsing – was to enhance Freshdesk’s capacity for customer interactivity. Its fourth acquisition, Framebench, announced just a couple of days ago, adds collaboration to its list of weapons. Framebench allows teams to share feedback on videos, images, and presentations.

Now for customer delight in apps

There’s been a mushrooming of mobile-first on-demand businesses in the last couple of years, a la Uber. These have been facing challenges in providing support because users expect instant resolution without leaving the app. Uber does have a support feature within the app, but it presents static preloaded text and not a dynamic interaction with support staff. To give such synchronous in-app support in a scalable way has been a problem waiting to be solved.

“I think the future of improving customer delight lies in real-time, proactive engagement,” says Kritymoy Boroowa, senior manager of restaurant discovery and food delivery app Zomato, one of the early adopters of Hotine. “Once we moved to Hotline, there were quicker responses, much quicker resolution, and a drop in people moving to social media for them to be heard.”

The launch of Hotline comes two months after Freshdesk’s acquisition of Konotor, which provided a two-way chat interface for mobile apps to engage better with users. Freshdesk integrated Konotor with its own Mobihelp helpdesk plugin to provide in-app customer support.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, as the saying goes. The integration of Konotor and Mobihelp provides a holistic customer engagement product. Apart from real-time support, Hotline enables in-app announcements, status updates, and targeted messaging for engaging and retaining app users.

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Image by TIA