Indian SaaS unicorn pushes ‘smart customer service’ as it expands in Southeast Asia

Good customer service is always a challenge. Aside from having the right solutions to the right problems, businesses also need the right tools to keep the whole operation together. It’s an even bigger challenge, however, when these tools are too difficult to use – assuming they work at all.

That’s why companies like Freshworks exist.

Freshworks founders Girish Mathrubootham (left) and Shan Krishnasamy / Photo credit: Freshworks

Founded in October 2010, the California-based Indian startup offers a suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that make it easy for support, sales, and marketing professionals to communicate with customers and each other.

Tech in Asia caught up with Sidharth Malik, Freshworks’ chief revenue officer, to find out what the Indian company is about, what its plans are for Southeast Asia, and how it became a SaaS unicorn.

A living nightmare

Poor customer service is probably an experience most people have in common.

We’ve all been put on hold for ages, trapped in one-sided conversations with inept chatbots or left with customer service officers who keep recommending ineffective “solutions” to our problems.

Even Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and co-founder of Freshworks, has his own tale to tell. In 2010, he hired a shipping company to move his belongings from the US back home to India. Everything survived the trip unscathed save for his television, which was cracked upon arrival. He sent email after email to the company’s customer support, only to receive silence in return.

Mathrubootham then turned to an online community to air his grievances. It worked. Within 24 hours, the shipping firm’s CEO got in touch, gave his most sincere apologies, and offered a full refund.

The experience also got Mathrubootham to look deeper, observing that help desk software was often clunky and difficult to use. And because such systems didn’t pay enough attention to user interface, they made people feel frustrated.

Support staff “were getting different silos of information and four or five ways to reply to customers. That’s not a good experience for anybody,” adds Vinod Chandramouli, Freshworks’ global head of pre-sales. “We wanted to bring all the channels – social, email, phone, etc. – together under a single umbrella.”

Malik agrees, adding that UI was not necessarily the top priority for help desk software developers: “We believe that any beautiful help desk software should provide users on both sides with contextual information. It should enable collaboration, and it should be productive.”

With these concerns in mind, Freshdesk was launched in 2011.

The company streamlined all customer conversations in one place, automated repetitive tasks to save time, and allowed businesses to create a knowledge base for their end users filled with tutorials, guides, and answers to various issues.

Smart customer service

Expansion plans