Delight customers with customized, right-sized cloud-based solutions

Good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining this session with us. I'm Samir, I'm the Director for Freshworks Marketing globally. And along with me is Nick from SoftwareONE.

Nick: Hi, everyone. Nick Richards. I'm the General Manager of Customer Experience and Contact Centers at SoftwareONE. SoftwareONE is a global AWS partner and integrator.

Yeah, and the beauty about the topic for today is right size software, right? And I think, proudly speaking, both of us are - Freshworks was named as the Partner of the Year last year, 2022, and we were the finalists as well this year. So obviously one of the top leading providers of software and software application, which is SoftwareONE, and Nick represents that and I represent Freshworks as well.

Right before I get into the session, it's 20 minutes before I get into what Freshworks offers and how SoftwareONE has been able to leverage Freshworks, I have a quick question. I saw Ruble already started distributing the hydration bag, but you know, it's about F1. I'm not sure if all of you actually are an F1 enthusiast or if you watch F1. I mean, I heard that Vegas had the F1 racing a few days back, like a week back or so. Does anybody know what is the record, world record, for the shortest pit stop? Anybody knows, any guesses?

Audience: 8 seconds.

Samir: Alright, that's a good guess. Anyone else?

Audience: 4 seconds pit stop. Usually they change one or two tires and they refill.

Audience: 10 seconds.

Audience: 19, less than 10, less than one.

Samir: Okay less than one. That's like less than one second is like...so you know let me just give the answer because we have just got like 20 minutes. So the answer is 1.8 seconds. That's the world record for the shortest pit stop. And the world record was created this year in Qatar by the McLaren team basically. And Vegas, which had the F1 race last week, the shortest pit stop was 1.99 seconds or 1.98 seconds. That, that was the shortest pit stop.

Now obviously, why, why am I referring about pit stop? The whole idea about talking about pit stop is to increase or to create excellence. And that is exactly what we talk about right now.

Quickly, I'm, you know, if you know about Freshworks great. Otherwise I'm just going to talk a quick, um, you know, a quick moment about Freshworks. We were created in, you know, we, we are, we were founded in 2010. So we are into our 13th year of existence. We, we went public in 2021. You know, about $580 million of revenue. We are closing into about 600 million and we will be trading a journey of about billion dollars in, in a couple of years. We've got about 5000 employees and we have won multiple recognitions to our credit, right? I just spoke about like we were the Partner of the Year in one of the categories for AWS last year. Alright. So we are deeply entrenched with AWS. And I would request Nick to kind of, you know, talk about how Freshworks and SoftwareONE are basically entrenched in AWS.

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. So this is an interesting alignment between Freshworks and Amazon Connect in particular, right? So you have Freshworks as the platform, Amazon Connect is a contact center. As you look at the benefits with each of these, you get to grow when you need to. If you have a seasonal event, if you have a major influx, then you can grow and scale similarly in slow seasons, you can scale back, right? But the key there is that you can do it very rapidly as you need to.

Secondly, you're able to work with deep integration. So you're able to get collective intelligence from multiple systems, bring that in to help with the contextual experience, to help a more personalized experience for your customer and to improve the overall efficiency of your folks as well.

Alright, and then we're able to deliver all this through simplified procurement, right? We're able to procure software and services through the AWS Marketplace, which minimizes many of the procurement hurdles, the bids, those sorts of things and helps you to, to procure through an established channel more quickly and easily.

Samir: Yeah, thanks Nick. Alright. Today's expectation, basically, right? I mean, you know, when we talk about right size software, right, the expectation of the software is basically you can look at if you are a customer, for example, right? You need the software to be fast. You know, you need the software to be easily, easy to integrate as well. Obviously, low TCO, cost effectiveness, operational efficiency are important as well. And of course, the software has to be reliable, right?

So we had Freshworks and obviously with, with SoftwareONE believe in software that works for you. Right, now when I say that works for you, what, what do I mean? Right. You could be a customer and or you could, you could potentially be a B2C company who really cares about reaching out to the customers or how do you delight your customers? Right. And if you care about delighting your customers, you need to really talk to us at Freshworks or even if you don't care, I mean, obviously you will care about customers. But even if you, even if you come to me and say, hey, my, my, you know, the targeting for my customers, the way I am reaching out to the customers is sorted. You know, we talk, we have softwares that help delight your own employees as well.

So if you all are from the IT department, I think you need to be even more if you are from development or IT, I mean, you should hear the softwares that we actually create.

Yeah, I mean, this is in short, basically what we really, you know, the bundle of softwares essentially that we have now starting from here, right? Customer service and Nick will also talk a little bit about how, you know how the overall expansion of customer service is, but we have Freshdesk. We have, you will also hear if you go to our webpage Customer Service Suite. Basically.

Now if you stay at customer service, right? And quickly speaking, you know, there is a journey, there has been an evolution, right? At one point in time, we had brick and mortar companies, right? When in which one relationship manager or one person would talk to you from sales to marketing to servicing and then the internet age came and then obviously, you know, the whole boundaries of operation or as we call a SCAM right? For most of the companies actually broke. I can sit in, you know, in, in Chennai, I can sit in Bangalore, I can sit in San Mateo, I can sit in London and I can basically sell to prospects in South Africa. Like the whole boundary actually broke.

Now, what happened as a result of it was marketing, started having its own software, right? Your marketing needs marketing automation software, XYZ, right. Sales started having its own software, right? Because you need to have CRM hygiene operations, started having its own software and servicing was as you call it support, support, started having its own software. So the complexity increased now if this wasn't enough personalization came in right now, everybody has mobile these days, all of us actually have mobiles in our hands, right? So you know, you need personalized content, you need content when you actually want to consume it. So the complexity has actually increased.

We have Freshdesk essentially that is a AI enabled low TCO. You know, we we you will hear a lot about if you talk to anyone from Freshworks, you will hear a lot about Freddy. You know, that's our patented AI application, Freddy AI, we talk about how to we basically, you know, how do we automate the reach or journey towards your customers, right? How do we make it easy for you and create a better experience for the customers? And how do you do that one is making itself.

So, you know, so the customers can basically interact with you without you having to allocate anybody that's self. So, right, number two is you need to help your agents. So if you are a company who is servicing clients or customers, you would also have remote agents right now, you want to create an operational efficiency without actually involving humans or remote agents every time, right? So that is the second part and third part is for the leaderships as leadership, you want to create insights and reports for better decision making, right? So basically Freshdesk essentially talks about that.

We also have on the extreme right hand side, on the extreme left hand side, sorry, Freshservice. And that is exactly what I talk about, spoke about, right? You're creating a delight for customers that is Freshdesk. You want to create delight for employees that is Freshservice, especially if you're in the IT department and you get tickets, right? I mean, you get incident raising, you get tickets, etc, you have problems of your own, right? But this is a software which is basically accumulates asset management, service management, operations management, all of it together. And that's actually Freshservice in the middle.

We also have our CRM which is Freshsales and Freshmarketer built on the new platform. So if you are a developer here, New Platform is a platform where a lot of our developers, partner developers and individual developers have been developing their applications and hosting their applications in our Freshworks Marketplace.

Okay. Alright. And some of the customers that we have, a lot of them have actually stalled the booths here. So, and yeah, Nick, why don't you take it forward?

Nick: Yeah, thank you. So, we're, we're seeing a number of big trends in the contact centers today, right? And things that used to be kind of longer term strategic targets and becoming table stakes for a modern contact center, right?

So contact centers can be applied as we know in sales, customer service, internal help desk, whatever capacity. Some of those capabilities that are really important are first integrations. So integrating with data repositories with CRMs with ITSMs, if you're not doing this as part of your contact center upgrade or migration, you're missing a significant opportunity for improvement.

Second. I don't know if you all have heard about this new technology called AI, I've I've heard that term a couple of times this week already. Everywhere you turn, that's being leveraged in call centers. Everywhere you look, right? It's a common use case where everything we do is infused with AI and ML. That as well has become table stakes.

Third with that and as you're doing those two things, right? You get that real time assistance for your agent's employees, right? And then beyond that, we're starting to get a lot of insights. And what you see is that there's kind of multiple phases of the evolution of integration, particularly with your ITSMs.

That first phase you'll get a screen pop. So as a call comes in or a chat or email, whatever it is, you can pop with some information about the customer or their case. Well, this immediately this is a relatively low lift but immediately gives you improved handle times, decreased, handle times. Because the agent is not spending as much time looking for the information. They have a better contextual awareness of where that person is and they're able to resolve their query more quickly.

The second phase. And the one really where you get the most bang for your buck is where you start providing the API integrations at within that IVR right up front within your web page, within your mobile apps. You start doing data dips for self-service and then we start recording, transcribing our calls, analyzing them for insights. And then we push that data into our ITSM platform and an interesting flywheel starts to happen.

So we, we've captured, we've, we've introduce that integration right up front. We're allowing some people to self serve, resolve their queries themselves. Second, as that contact goes to an agent, we're providing the agent with more information, more helpful information they're not only getting resolving that issue more quickly, but they're also providing more comprehensive, more effective and accurate information that prevents a subsequent call and improves our true first call resolution rates.

And then because we're recording and transcribing those calls, we're pushing that into our systems of record, we're analyzing those for trends. So we're finding new opportunities for automation. We see that, okay, we contain a certain number of our interactions using bots, using IVR or whatever else. Here are some other common use cases. Let's go very strategically targeted. Let's go automate those. Through that, then we can start changing the, the scripts or the behavior of our agents and employees, we get new insights flywheel continues. Here is the remaining formatted transcript:

And so the what we've seen with a few customers is that, looking at that, that kind of the, the ITSM the the help desks are often kind of the tip of the spear for the organization. It's usually the first place that we can start introducing these modern contact center technologies and it's perceived as lower risk, but everyone's benefiting from it within the organization.

Okay. With one of our customers, they were able to within the first month, they didn't with Connect and their ITSM and what they found within the first month was a 40% decrease. They had no clue what to expect. This was a very simple effort and they found a 40% decrease in the handle times from offering screen pops and identifying that customer while they're in the IVR instead of making the agent capture all that information.

They also found that they with just five use cases, very simple ones, they had a 30% decrease in call volume. So it's 30% containment just kind of blindly without any curation of this which reduced the total call volumes into the call center. It reduced the wait times for that. And what they then found was that they're getting the insights of the prevalence of certain issues, error codes and user groups that are having common challenges.

They went back and started adding more information in the form of bots, more FAQs, more automations and they started that flywheel.

Alright. So that organization then took those technologies and capabilities and expanded it within the broader organization and everyone was able to benefit the service lines were able to benefit the product lines were.

Okay. So what we're seeing is that as a result, you're able to really have your cake and eat it too. You're able to deliver a better experience for your customers, a better experience for your agents and you're able to do that at a decreased, a lower operational cost.

Okay. Do we have any questions from the team on any specific use cases or any, any opportunities? And we have the booth as well, in the AWS Marketplace area. So you're more than welcome to come and visit us as well. You know, have a chat. You're more than welcome.

Excellent. Thank you. All. Alright. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Alright, thanks, Nick and Samir.