Freshworks Crosses $100 Mn In ARR, Unveils Cloud Bundle – Freshworks 360

SaaS-based business software provider Freshworks claims to have crossed $100 Mn in Annual Recurring Revenue. With this, the company has also introduced a fully integrated cloud bundle – Freshworks 360.

As per the company, the $100 Mn ARR mark has been led by its flagship support product Freshdesk (Customer Support Software) and continued rapid growth with its Freshservice (IT Service Management Software) and Freshsales (CRM Software) products over the last several quarters.

This is also being accredited to its growing user-base of more than 150K businesses and organisations worldwide, including both larger enterprises such as Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss, University of Pennsylvania, Toshiba, Cisco, Veeva, OfficeMax, M&C Saatchi and thousands of global SMB customers.

Arvind Parthiban, Director Marketing for Freshworks, explained some of the reasons for this growth to Inc42 highlighting,

“Beautiful products which are easy to use and affordable pricing along with the customer experience and the support we provide to our customers, free of cost. Being able to emulate the Freshdesk support model across different SaaS segments and expanding our product line to CRM, ITSM, Caller, Chat etc. has been our biggest driver.”

In the past year, the company has also expanded its portfolio of products to include Freshchat, Freshcaller, Freshmarketer and Freshteam, a set of products designed to work together to help marketers, human resources and support professionals engage with customers and work together more effectively.

Freshworks 360: Integrated Cloud Portfolio Services

With the growing bundle of products, the Chennai-based company has launched Freshworks 360, a fully integrated cloud bundle that brings together sales, marketing, and support applications to provide users with a full, easy-to-use customer engagement experience.

The Freshworks 360 bundle service includes Freshdesk, Freshsales, Freshmarketer, Freshcaller (call centre software) and Freshchat (customer messaging software), providing an easy way for users to access the entire history of customer conversations, data and marketing touchpoints such as chats and social media mentions.

Girish Mathrubootham, co-founder and CEO of Freshworks said, “Sales, marketing and customer support professionals have been forced to use bloated, siloed CRM and support systems, while HR and IT have been beholden to bulky products with unnecessary features and exorbitant price tags.”

The company has ensured that the current users of any Freshworks application can now access free trials of all the platform’s offerings from their existing Freshworks login using the Freshworks Switcher.

However, the product bundle doesn’t include FreshTeam – a recruitment management software.

Arvind Parthiban explained that while both – Freshteam and FreshService – help internal stakeholders of a business, Freshworks 360 is their customer engagement platform to help businesses give a 360-degree view of their customers’ journey.

“Freshteam and Freshservice don’t directly impact the end user’s journey, even though IT and recruitment teams are crucial to delivering customer experience, albeit indirectly. We decided to roll out the customer engagement suite – Freshworks 360 only with products that have a direct impact on customer journey,” he added.

Writing Success Story For Freshworks With Rebranding And New Solutions

Freshdesk was launched in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy as a helpdesk software for customer support and was rebranded to Freshworks in June 2017.

The plan to dive into a suite of services with individual products helped the company amplify its focus on the separate portfolio services while adding several new. Here are the services the company offers:

Freshdesk: A multi-channel customer support helpdesk which allows organisations to collaborate and support their customers through email, phone, websites, forums, and social media.

Freshservice: A cloud-based service desk and IT Service Management solution to address the growing complexity of teams’ IT support needs through a simple but powerful interface.

Freshsales: A full-featured CRM solution for sales teams handling high-velocity leads.

Freshcaller: A fully functional call centre on the cloud.

Freshdesk Marketplace: A marketplace that allows customers to discover and install apps to help maximise their helpdesk capabilities.

The company has been on an acquisition spree to bolster its services packages. Earlier in July 2017, Freshworks acquired Joe Hukum, a platform that enables businesses to build their chatbots based on logical workflows.

Talking about Joe Hukum, Arvind explained that Joe Hukum bot capability has helped the company build Freddy (Freshworks buddy), the Freshworks bot used across its products. “We will be talking about this AI and ML feature soon,” he added.

Another acquisition was Zarget–a software developer that provides marketers and designers with Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) tools, was acquired for an undisclosed amount.

On Zarget’s integration into Freshworks, Arvind Parthiban explained that Zarget is now Freshmarketer and is part of the Freshworks 360.

“Freshmarketer helps marketing teams figure out the customer engagement and behaviour on their website. The solution to these problems can be created using Freshworks 360. For example, a drop off at the shopping cart due to price sensitivity can be identified using Freshmarketer and can be resolved through Freshchat by sending a discount code automatically,” he added.

In November 2016, the Chennai-based SaaS startup also raised a $55 Mn Series F funding round led by Sequoia Capital India along with Accel Partners to fuel the company’s aggressive expansion strategy across the entire product line.

Its main rivals include American firms Zendesk and Salesforce. Other players specialising in business optimisation services include Optimizely, Wingify’s Visual Website Optimizer, Five Second Test, and Convert.

Talking about future plans, Arvind Parthiban said, “We are pioneering a new Saas segment – Customer engagement which gives a 360-degree view of the consumer journey. Freshworks 360 will act as one platform for all GTM teams.”

With Freshworks 360 in place, the new additions and its innovating portfolio continue to make Freshworks a promising bet.