How Freshworks customers are transforming their business with the art of easy

“Delighting customers should be easy,” said Girish Mathrubootham, the founder and CEO of Freshworks in his keynote address at  Refresh 2021, our just concluded global hybrid event of the year, held at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

To make delight easy for customers, businesses must champion what Girish called ‘the art of easy’: focusing on the customer and employee experience, solving their problems quickly.

The ‘art of easy’ involves delighting customers with quick solutions and quicker resolutions. Customers are delighted when they can reach out for support where they are. They are delighted when they don’t have to wait eighteen months to get a product up and running. Customers are delighted with fast service, ease of use, and the power of simple integrations. They are delighted when you care.

Since our founding, Freshworks has championed business innovations that make delight easy, fast, and smart for customers and their employees. This Refresh 2021, Freshworks CMO Stacey Epstein decoded the art of making delight easy by asking customers how our mantra has transformed their businesses.

Whether it’s offering omnichannel support anywhere anytime, or deploying AI-enabled chatbots for service agents, or empowering internal teams to track their performance, these four companies that participated in the customer panel hosted by Stacey—TaylorMade, GE Digital Aviation, DHL, and Carrefour—made extraordinary strides to keep delight flowing for their customers and employees with our fresh solutions.

Golf made easy with TaylorMade

“Freshservice has been a game changer for us,” said Ali Chitsaz, head of client experience at TaylorMade. “Being able to set up automations, actionable insights, after-hour approvals without getting involved personally has motivated me to play more golf now,” he added.

TaylorMade is one of the largest sellers of golf equipment in the United States. The company was trying to implement a cloud strategy for their operations when Ali’s team chanced upon Freshservice. “One of the biggest selling points for us was that my service desk wasn’t going to have to add a developer to implement the tool,” he explained. They had planned on staging the release but the implementation team helped them get the tool up and running in only 45 days. “Now our biggest problem is that people are trying to add more workflows,” he said.

When the pandemic hit, TaylorMade had to transition really quickly to be able to offer virtual support to their customers, vendors, and partners. “If it wasn’t for the fact that we went cloud-first before the pandemic, it would have been a major struggle,” he said. Ali mentioned that their previous solution was an on-premise software.

“With Freshworks, we were able to focus on the user and give them more tools to do their jobs easily,” Ali said, delighted.

Clearing aviation blues with GE

“I just love how nimble and how creative we can be with Freshdesk,” exclaimed Scott Wolken, senior director of customer support at GE Digital Aviation Software.

When Scott joined the company five years ago, two of their main product lines were using two ‘unique’ instances of Freshdesk. After a recent acquisition, they brought in a third instance of Freshdesk, which proved to be ‘phenomenal’ for his team. In his own words: “I first saw the power of Freshdesk when we were able to appease the product owners of these different lines.”

Scott mentioned that he was initially concerned about the overhead costs of maintaining Freshdesk. After all, the internet was full of horror stories about the massive IT investment needed to pull off support solutions. “But unbelievably, we are currently able to provide support on a quarter of a full-time equivalent (FTE),” he said. Unifying all three instances into one, the teams now had better visibility to support their customers.

When the pandemic hit, the aviation industry suffered a blow greater than many. That’s when Freshdesk’s automation capabilities proved effective for the team. “During the pandemic, we suddenly became very resource-constrained. That was when we really leaned on automation. It allowed us to work with reduced staff and still keep our customers’ CSAT ratings above 90 percent through the pandemic,” he added.

Delivery delight made faster with DHL

“Freshdesk helped us improve our customer response and resolution times greatly,” said Samriti Talwar Pitman, director of product innovation and development at DHL. Samriti narrated that until the middle of 2019, they were using a labor-intensive email management system. “Even before the pandemic started, we were struggling in some of our key command centers across the globe,” she explained.

“Our command centers play a critical role in making sure that these deliveries get to the right person at the right time,” she said. The DHL command centers are responsible for managing and dispatching deliveries of mission-critical items for repair and installation of a whole range of products, from laptops to CT scanners and X-ray machines. Using Freshdesk, Samriti explains that the teams were able to deal with thousands of customer queries about time-sensitive products.

What’s more, the tool’s gamification module enabled DHL teams to run virtual leadership boards, competitions, and quests with personalized badges for recognizing talent. “Now, service agents feel more motivated to track their performance and identify improvement opportunities. Overall, it has really allowed us to bring a lot of visibility and empowerment to our teams,” she said.

That’s not all. Samriti explained, “What we have been able to do with Freshdesk is introduce a lot of positivity into what were once challenging discussions in our customers’ quarterly business reviews (QBRs).” The change has been felt all the way from customers to team leaders to service agents. “We couldn’t be more delighted,” she said.

Making retail nimble and simple with Carrefour

“For people who don’t know, Carrefour is like the Walmart of Europe,” said Stijn Stabel, CTO of Carrefour. “As a grocery retailer, we sell everything from a carton of milk to a TV,” he added.

When Stijn joined Carrefour in 2019, the company was about to set off on their ‘big digital transformation’ with tall binders of prospective processes. “Within IT itself, we had around 8 or 9 helpdesks. A bunch of them were outsourced. A few of them were insourced,” he explained.

Stijn recalled staging an intervention. “Guys, we got to run this nimble and simple,” he remembered telling his predecessors. “We had to make it easy not only for users but also for our service desk agents because we were about to in-source and build our own team.” After a few rounds of back and forth, his team went back to the market and finally decided on Freshservice.

“We implemented Freshservice at warp-speed,” said Stijn. “It really was a success story. We managed to put all our vendors and partners on the same platform, using the same processes. We delighted users with a unified single user experience. Because of the low overhead, we were able to focus on what matters, which is making our customers happy,” he concluded.

Delight ahead

Focusing on the user is key if customers want to keep delight fast and easy. 

“Employees need to feel inspired about the work they do,” said Stacey. Speaking of Freshdesk’s gamification capabilities that allow employees to track their progress in real-time, she added: “We are in the middle of a great resignation and acute labor shortage. You can only inspire your employees if you can show them the impact of their work.”

Stacey asked the panel, “What’s next?”

Samriti said that the key thing for DHL is to take more advantage of Freshdesk’s automation opportunities.

For Scott, their next step would be integrating data, systems, and helpdesk so that the user experience feels seamless. “In my opinion, people shouldn’t know it’s there. If you need it and you can implement it without people knowing, then that’s delight,” he concluded.

Stijn said he wants to keep things simple to get more value out of these tools. Stacey concurred with him. “More is not always better when it comes to technology. It’s speed. It’s customer delight. It’s user delight, and end-user delight,” she said.

Ali agreed with Stijn and Stacey. Companies need to wade through their tall list of requirements and prioritize what really matters for users. “Being efficient and data driven is key for delighting your customers in any industry,” he concluded.

This blog is a quick preview of the Freshworks Customer Panel session at Refresh 2021, which brought together a whole host of inspiring guest speakers, customers, breakout sessions, awards, and much more.

You can revisit the Refresh 2021 sessions and find out more about our line-up of stellar speakers here.

You can read about our new product and feature announcements here.

 For more blog posts on Refresh and delightful happenings at Freshworks, watch this space!