» INTERVIEW
SIMPLIFIED BUSINESS SOFTWARE WITH DEMOCRATIC DESIGN Anand Venkatraman, Sr. Vice President and General Manager – APAC (Freshworks) talks to CXO DX on their varied solutions for their growing customers.
What makes Freshworks different from legacy software? Legacy software fails to deliver the agility organisations need in a fast-paced, digital world. These solutions have largely been developed in silos and therefore entail complex integrations and long, cumbersome implementation and upgrade cycles. Freshworks was founded with the mission to simplify business software, designing first and foremost for the front-line user, then for the team, and then for the managers. We have consistently delivered on this commitment with software, business users love to use. Our solutions are fast to onboard, priced affordably, and built to delight, while still being powerful enough to deliver sophisticated business outcomes. That’s why we are trusted by over 56,000 companies in 120 countries. Freshworks' solutions are modern, intuitive, and scalable. They are purpose-built for everyone, so we can empower the people we do business with, from the back office to the front desk. Elaborate on the major enterprise solutions of Freshworks The concept of ‘democratic design’ underpins the way we at Freshworks design and deliver our solutions. We don't design our solution just for the Fortune 500, but rather for the Fortune 5 million. Today, we have customers who pay us $1 million, but they did not start as $1-million customers. They start as a $50,000 or $100,000 customer and then grow over time. In the Middle East, the market momentum has been largely geared towards our range of solutions that drive customer delight. This includes Freshdesk, our cloud-based customer service software which enables businesses to provide help desk support with smart automation and bot capabilities to get things done faster. With the power of Freshworks Neo and the integrations
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CXO DX / MARCH 2022
aim to achieve to elevate employee experience without any drop in business continuity.
Anand Venkatraman
Sr. Vice President and General Manager–APAC (Freshworks) available in our marketplace, customers of all sizes can pick and choose the way they want their products to work. What are the key advantages of the Unified Service Management Solution of Freshworks? The role of the IT Service Desk is rapidly expanding. Competing with other hardware and software investments, IT services teams are under increasing pressure to do more with less. IT executives must rethink their IT strategy spanning service management and incident management to deliver on the promise of uninterrupted IT, support growth at scale and ensure a healthy return on investment (ROI). However, these efforts can be encumbered by legacy IT services Management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) solutions which are siloed and built with heavy custom code that requires specialised skills to implement, maintain, manage, and upgrade. Recognising these challenges, Freshworks delivers a modern, unified service management solution that combines ITSM and ITOM. This approach has clear benefits as it streamlines what service management teams
How does employee productivity increase with Freshservice? Through its incorporation of AI and bots, Freshservice promotes the use of self-service by employees, largely allowing IT engineers to focus on the things that matter to the business. With the level 1 incidents out of the way, agent productivity can skyrocket. Employee experience will also be elevated as bots enable instant response and resolution. Discuss your focus in the Middle East region. The Middle East region has seen a huge wave of digitisation, and with all that comes the need for organisations to better equip their employees to serve their businesses. As a key enabler of this transformation, Freshworks has achieved remarkable growth in the MEA region with some of the marquee customers across the Gulf countries, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and Israel. We have thousands of customers in the region, and these organisations are spread across a broad range of verticals. We have grown phenomenally through a concerted effort to establish our footprint across verticals. Freshworks is now building on this momentum by investing heavily in MEA and the coming year, we have plans in place to establish a regional presence across MEA to place us even closer to our prospects and customers. What did the financial year of 2021 look like and what are your expectations for 2022? As a public company, we can’t make forward-looking statements but we operate in huge red ocean markets. Our growth has been at a healthy clip as we posted an impressive 49% year-over-year growth in 2021, and we expect to continue to build on this momentum and grow in the coming quarters.
