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 core statement by Girish Mathrubootham,
CEO and founder of Freshworks is:
”Today, I’m happy to announce that we
are rebranding the company as Freshworks. We’re not in this just to change the
way businesses do customer support, but to refresh the way they do business.”
Let’s have a look at select paragraphs of
the press release.
Following
breakout growth of the company’s customer support software, and the
introduction of new products for IT Service Management (“ITSM”), customer
relationship management (“CRM”) and cloud-based call centers, Freshworks
products are designed to help companies better engage and communicate with
their customers and employees.
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
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, businesses have had few
options for business software, turning to all-in-one, cumbersome legacy
solutions across the organization. These solutions are not only expensive, but
also require long implementation cycles and are extremely difficult to use
without expert training, neither of which are afforded by growing companies. At
the same time, enterprises are also tired of wasting time and resources on
trying to make everything work together. Freshworks offers a product portfolio
that is easily implemented and affordable for companies 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 statement, along
with Girish’s quote, very nicely summarizes the renewed vision. It also shows
the current lack of marketing clout by not naming this part of CRM
functionality.
My Take
This rebranding was an inevitable move that
reflects the reality of what the company formerly known as Freshdesk is
actually doing. The company’s original vision of providing a ‘fresh helpdesk
that makes a dent into the world of customer support’ has changed considerably.
Meanwhile, as a company, Freshworks is providing customer service, IT service,
cloud call center, sales, and bot functionality – the latter as part of their
customer service and the sales 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 put Freshworks squarely in competition
with Zoho and ultimately with bigger players up to and until Salesforce .
Although Freshworks seemed to see their main clientele in the SME market they
have with Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss, Toshiba and Cisco some big
referencable names in their client base.
The challenges Freshworks has become more
obvious, too. The two 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 concerns Freshworks
is certainly a vendor to keep in mind when it comes to looking at a suite of
CRM software that initially does not focus on marketing.
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