aheadCRM

The News On November 11, 2021 Freshworks held its annual Freshworks Refresh event. This year, the event had a hybrid format with around 250 customers, partners and analysts participating on site while around 17k people have registered for online participation. There was a social pre-event and an after-event for entertainment and networking purposes.  The event itself was themed around “delight made easy”. Naturally, it had different agendas for customers and partners on one side and analysts on the other side. The morning was dedicated to a 4-hour sequence of keynote sessions for everyone. The event was kicked off with a keynote by Neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author David Eagleman , who spoke about the “Science of Delight”. The closing keynote was delivered by Amy Purdy , who shared her inspiring story of how she used creativity, a positive outlook and a never-give-up attitude to turn her life from nearly dying, finding herself with a double lower leg amputation and failing...

Ecosystems are a big topic. What makes an ecosystem successful? What hurts? Are there any key elements to ecosystems to make them succeed? Does it differ from communities? Can a vendor survive without one? Or even better: Can customers succeed without? There are lots of questions to be answered in the times of platform play. The CRMKonvos team had a vivid conversation with Alan Berkson , Global Director of Community Outreach and Analyst Relations at Freshworks , who, as part of is job works with, and builds ecosystems - pretty well, in fact. He has a lot of interesting things to say, also about the current rage, which is Clubhouse - will it succeed? Is there any good to it? Enjoy the conversation!

Freshworks has is now officially a fresh (sorry, I really couldn't resist this pun) member of the club of platform players. The company introduced its own flavour of CRM and a platform that they build upon. What is next? Lot's of ground to cover. A CRKKonvo with Prakash Ramamurthy, Chief Product Officer, Peter Stadlinger, Head of Products CRM and David Krauss, Senior Director Product Marketing at Freshworks. Together with Marshall Lager, Ralf Korb and Thomas Wieberneit they discuss market perspectives, what the value for customers actually is and how the innovations that the team has recently introduced fit in there. Prakash, Peter, and David bring a wealth of knowledge to the conversation, including a pretty interesting dive into how to train an AI based upon the idea that the human who is in front of the machine is still one of the most important trainers, due to tacit knowledge and wisdom that cannot be codified. Which also explains the trifecta of priorities that Freshwork...

A few days ago, together with a group of fellow analysts, I was invited to attend the 2020 Freshworks analyst days that covered a lot of ground from corporate vision through strategy and of course, some announcements for the Freshworks Refresh 2020 Global Virtual Conference . These announcements came shortly after the company appeared in the fourth Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2020 and after being ranked #16 in the 2020 Forbes Cloud 100 list. All this clearly shows some ambition – and success. As you may be aware by now, these announcements included Neo, the new Freshworks platform and the new Freshworks CRM product. These two topics created the most discussion points between the Freshworks executives and the analysts. Of course, these two announcements were supported by statements on the corporate vision, mission and current standing as well as product vision. Impressive customer testimonials were not missing, too. My Take This I need to divide into three sections, one about the event...

Platform Play, photo by Gabriel Jimenez A lot has evolved since my Clash of the Titans post that looked into how the big 4.5 (Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe) and others are positioning themselves in the greater CRM arena. First, the commoditization of the business application has accelerated and the vendors’ focus on the underlying platform has increased. CRM, and enterprise software in general, has always been a platform play although this has not always been recognized and sometimes even negated. The obvious reason for it being a platform play is that the creation of positive customer and user experiences need a consistent technical platform. Or else we are ending up in engagements that are fragmented across interactions. This results in inconsistent and poor experiences. So far, so well known. A bit less obvious is the fact that there will be only few dominant platforms. Vendors, who want to become and stay successful on a grand scale need to ...