Freshworks Freshsuccess: a software tool for the ‘customer-for-life’ vision
Customer engagement software company Freshworks Inc. has used its Refresh 19 conference and exhibition in Las Vegas this month to announce Freshsuccess.
That was Freshworks Freshsuccess at Refresh, just in case you missed the emphasis on upbeat branding the company is trying to get across, right?
So what kind of software tool is this?
This is ‘Customer Success Management’ (you could say CSM, if you wish) software that aims to provide a more integrated customer view for marketing, sales and support workers.
It is also meant to be used by (wait for it, brace yourself) what the Freshworks likes to call ‘success professionals’… a perhaps comparatively new term for a new breed of workers.
It’s a term that has been defined here by thriveglobal as people who are open-minded about their drive for [business and personal] success, but yet, at the same time, they know their limits and know when to push back strategically [in an essentially mindful way] as they focus on long-term goals and values.
So deeper into the software then. This is a functional package designed to allow all market-facing employees to use a unified, holistic data of both accounts [details] and contact information.
A measure of business health
The idea is that all employees get the most up-to-date account activity and ‘health’ information [health as in business health i.e. potential for business] to pinpoint customer accounts that are either at risk or, conversely, ready to buy more goods and services.
Freshworks says that Freshsuccess gives customer support professionals detailed analysis of past [customer or user] behaviour to create and configure customer health scores, allowing companies to grow an established customer base, identify any red flags and increase customer retention rates.
Freshsuccess is said to help teams ‘operationalise’ customer success by keeping teams organised, allowing everyone to centrally manage all of their customer-related activities such as alerts, workflows and tasks; it streamlines business intelligence to identify behavioral trends. It also automates alerts and notifies team members when important events occur that are indicative of changes in account health.
The software also uses AI/ML to help predict when opportunities are present.
Employees get notifications that suggest precise actions to specific contacts who may be frustrated, in need of help, or open to new product suggestions.
“Our ‘customer for life’ vision revolutionizes customer,” said Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshworks. “Meaningful customer insight doesn’t end at market, sell and support. You need to engage continuously to get a customer for life. With Freshsuccess integration, businesses will be able to leverage actionable data across the entire suite of products, including Freshmarketer, Freshsales, Freshdesk, for predictive analytics, customer intelligence and workflow management.”
The mantra here is… proactively court, close, keep and grow customers… and do it for life.
Deeper relationships
Also here we find Freshsuccess’ Master Customer Record functionality. Customer support teams can use this tool to get critical account-level information and insight to serve and deepen every customer relationship.
“All teams across the enterprise move beyond simple contact information to align behind key account strategies that maintain the highest satisfaction levels possible while increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities that may exist across departments, geographies and business units,” said the company, in a press statement.
Master Customer Record is a part of Freshsuccess designed to provide greater alignment on the account level for customer health and alerting that can be used across the business to drive consistent, contextual engagement across all functions:
- Marketers can identify advocates, build case studies & identify strongest industries.
- Sales can use data for cross-selling and upselling opportunities while determining account health.
- Support professionals gain increased context for ticket triage and escalation.
- Finance teams yield additional insight into future revenue risk by reporting on revenue by health.
- The product organisation gains greater understanding of customer engagement by lifecycle stage, tier, or other account-level characteristics.
“The real value of having a 360 view of customers is not in unifying the data, but using that comprehensive view to inform all customer interactions across marketing, sales, and service,” said L. Nicole France, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.
What developers should think
The takeaway here for software application developers is the suggestion that if this type of software layer becomes a more prevalent part of all business operations (and the growth in the User eXperience market would suggest that it is), then we should perhaps brace ourselves for software development projects designed to deliver more granular and responsive customer-tuned functions in the applications being built. Freshworks is saying that 360 customer connections mean that all departments will be in some part responsible for the customer care function… so, therefore, we could argue that developers will need to build applications that have more customer-centricity about them and be able to connect to and integrate with the support function more directly.