5 Steps to Creating Customers for Life with Freshworks Solution Engineers

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're joining from. So happy to be speaking to y'all and so happy to be presenting this short webinar on how you can create customers for life. We're gonna quickly introduce ourselves. My name is Mukesh and I am part of the Freshworks team here. I've been with Freshworks a couple of years. I've spent about 20 in the industry and I oversee our solution engineering function here at Freshworks North America. Payal, can you quickly introduce yourself as well, please?

Sure. Hi everybody, my name is Payal Patel. I manage the solution engineering team here at Freshworks. I've been at Freshworks for about a little over 2 years, and I have 15 years of experience varying from software and SaaS to hardware as well. So looking forward to the conversation today.

Awesome, thank you, Payal. So without any further delays, let's get into the topic of discussion today, which is How can you create customers for life? And you know, it's very interesting that the last decade has been really interesting for customer service, but I think the last 9 months have taught us a lot of lessons as well, right? COVID has been interesting. We've all been sheltering at home, hopefully, and staying safe, but there's a lot of lessons to be learned around how customer engagement works today and how it's going to work in the future. And so what we want to do is we want to just walk you through 5 simple steps that you can think about as you think about either building your customer service organization or reimagining what customer service looks like in your organization. 3 easy concepts to think about before we get into the meat of the presentation. First, customer service has always been a team sport. It's about the entire company coming together to service your customers, right? And I know a CEO who famously says that everybody in my company is part of the customer service team. And this is absolutely true because I think a lot of our audience today, you're either in the SaaS space or you're building really cool products or technologies. And so you've got your product teams that need to help with customer service. You may have engineering teams that need to help with customer service. So it's not just your tech support or your customer support organization that has to worry about your customers. So that's one thing. The second thing is this has been a problem with every industry from the beginning of time. Your data typically lives in multiple places. And the burden of finding the right information is on you, right? And this is a huge problem that a lot of emerging companies, emerging organizations are thinking about. The earlier you think about this, the better off you're going to be. Be. And then finally, the race for CS excellence. This is such a key topic because the most successful companies in the world today aren't successful because they have an incredible product, or they aren't successful only because they have an incredible product. They are successful because they've got an incredible product, an incredible service that they've coupled with amazing customer support, amazing customer service. And so there's lots of examples in the industry. I'm not going to be pedantic and sort of give you those examples, but you know who those companies are and you know how effective they are. So these are 3 trends that we are seeing in the market all the time. But it's OK to talk about these trends, but what is the reality today? And these 5 images that we're showing you are the reality today. So let's start at the top left and go clockwise. If you are in the SaaS business, if you are an emerging company, if you let your customers try your products, the sales between— the line between sales and service has blurred. There is no difference between sales and service. If your customers are spinning up a trial of your product, they are probably going to get support from you even before they've made this— even before you've made the sale, right? So that's one one thing that's happening today, and most organizations don't think about customer service before the sale, before the contract. So this is an important thing for you to consider as you're building your business. The second thing on the right, top right, is historically customer engagement has been reactive. Think about when you yourself call customer service organizations of the brands that you do business with. Right? Let's say I have a cable company that I'm doing business with. I'm using their cable services. I am calling them when there is a problem, right? So if you think about how customer service has evolved, it has been purely reactive. Reactive equals high volume. High volume equals low productivity. The math is very simple. And so that's the second reality of customer service. The third reality at the bottom, at the bottom left, I lied actually, we're not going clockwise clearly. But at the bottom left, you've got extremely matrixed cross-functional organizations today. Let's say you're an organization that has 500 employees in your company. I bet you, you've got a sales team that uses a separate set of applications. You've got a customer service team that probably uses a separate set of applications. You've got marketing that lives in its own silo. And oftentimes, When customers engage with so many stakeholders, there's a lot of context that gets lost. The fourth thing, a lot of our customer conversations tend to be transactional. And this is how call centers have worked over the last 3 or 4 decades. Even if you think about how call center agents are measured, agents are measured based on how many calls you take in a day, which is a very unfortunate reality of the world that we live in, because it becomes a very transactional model that you don't really pause to think about, how do I create this customer for life? How do I make this a lifelong customer? And then finally, sales teams are lacking the insights. You know, you've got a whole bunch of customers, let's say, that have these tickets open with you. They've got problems. And then the sales team is going and pitching them new products and services. And sales doesn't have the right insights to have these meaningful conversations with them. So unfortunately, this is the reality of customer service today. And so what Payal and I are going to do over the next 8 or 9 minutes is we're going to walk you through 5 simple steps that you can think about to solve some of these problems. And Payal, why don't you walk us through the first step, please?

Thanks, Mukesh. So in order to become a customer-centric organization, the number one problem that you have to solve for is unifying the data across the entire customer lifecycle or journey. This is the most important thing that you need to do to become a customer-centric organization, is to unify that customer data. But on top of that, you need to consistently meet your customers wherever they are. You know, customers today, they have high expectations and they must be met. If you think about a millennial who's always on, always connected customers of today, they demand help on modern channels like social media or chat, while other customers who prefer to speak to a live person immediately, they leverage the phone channel and they'll call into support. Now, in addition, I think COVID has taught us a lot of learnings from it. Many CX leaders were faced with doing more with less and had to move towards these low-cost channel strategies. What they did was they turned to technology and made investments in modern omnichannel approach, moving towards things like social, live chat, and chatbots. And Mukesh, for example, one of our customers, the world's largest ticketing marketplace who enables fans to buy and sell tickets, sporting events, for concerts, and so forth, they leveraged this exact omnichannel approach. The support centers were burdened with overwhelming high call volumes during the pandemic, and they needed a strategy to do more with less agents. So what they did was they met their customers by leveraging chatbots to provide faster responses and deflect those simple questions. And what this did is that not only did it allow them to get through the pandemic, but they have continued to leverage this low-cost solution to continue to deflect those simple questions So those call center agents that can go ahead and now focus on those really, really complex issues and keep making customers happy.

Thank you, Payal. If you had said to me 3 months ago that there's a ticketing platform that is selling tickets for sporting events, I would have asked you, what is a sporting event? But luckily, those sporting events are back, and so it's good to be heading towards a little bit of normalcy. But so for the audience, You're probably thinking, okay, that's great. I want to meet my customers where they are, but how do I get there? And I think the way you get there is analyze your customer service strategy today, analyze your channel strategy today. And as part of that analysis, do about a quarter or so worth of data collection. Which channels are effective? Which channels are costing you more? Which channels are costing you less? right? Do a little bit of data collection, try to figure out what your volume is, and then as part of that exercise, create a blueprint of how you want the next 12 or next 18 months to look like. That is a simple tactic that you can do today in order to create a plan for the next 12 months or so. Okay, let's go to the second step, and let's talk about this idea of reactive versus proactive, right? And we've got a little GIF that's kind of showing you what happens in, in reality. You're trying to add something to cart, you're trying to shop, and you're having a frustrating experience. How can you insert customer service into the buying workflow? How can you basically provide support to your customers where they are in their buying process? This is a very important concept. Customer service during sales is a very important concept. Also, again, if you're in the SaaS business and if you're gonna have things like downtime, be proactive about it. Create a strategy. If you don't have a role already for this, Create a new role in your organization that helps you manage this downtime and this kind of communication more proactively, right? And analyze how your customers are engaging with your website. This is a very important part of what you can do. Track your customer frustration on your website. If you've got a shopping cart experience, see if there's a bunch of rage clicks that are going on. I do this all the time when, you know, websites don't behave the right way. So these are small little things that can help you shift the tone of your customer service from reactive to proactive. So that's the, that's the second simple step that you can take. Back to Payal for the third step.

Yeah, thanks Mukesh. So customer service organizations and CX leaders, they know that every second saved represents dollars saved. So collaborating to solve your customers' problems is important for customer service, And customer service truly needs to be everyone's responsibility within the company. I think Mukesh spoke about this in the opening slides. You know, even at our company, we're a similar SaaS to many of the folks that are here at Zaster, and we are scaling and growing. And for us to be able to do that, we realized we needed to be successful and include the support organization needed to closely work with engineering, product, sales, pre-sales. To solve those customer issues efficiently and quickly. Just like most here today, we've already made investments in collaboration platforms like Slack or MS Teams, and we didn't want to force those teams to have to go into another system. Instead, what we did was we decided, why not bring the context of those issues to the tools they already use today? And the customer service platform should really empower your teams to work smarter. Not harder. One of our customers, who's a leading SaaS software hardware company servicing a wide range of industries from agriculture to construction, they actually use this exact same method. They took collaboration to solve complex problems, and they met all of their customers' SLAs. And they did this by really bringing in the ecosystem and everybody within the organization to help solve these crucial issues. So this is one of the biggest and most important ones also, really bring the entire company to be responsible for solving problems.

Yeah, that's absolutely right, Payal. So tactically, again, how do we break this down for the audience, right? And so what you can do today from a very tactical perspective is you can do some analysis on your customer support workflows. It's surprising, it always surprises me when I speak to our customers and they don't really have a good handle on what their support resolution workflows look like. What are the different teams that get involved in different types of issues? If it's a billing issue, how do you get it to the right person? If it's a product issue, how do you get product involved? So tactically, do this simple thing. Do some analysis of your support resolution workflows and see which type of issue involves which part of your cross-functional organization. This will again reap very rich dividends as you think about your overall CX strategy. Alright, step number 4, you have to take into account the voice of your customers. This is the most important asset that you have. And I'm not gonna actually, I'm gonna tell you a simple story. I was on a phone call with a support rep about some issues that I was trying to get resolved. The call went great and then As I was about to hang up, the IVR prompted me, would you like to take a quick survey on how your experience was? Now I'm a CX junkie, I love that stuff. So I said, of course I'm gonna take that survey. And so I expected the IVR to say, how would you rate the call? Or how would you rate your experience? Instead, the IVR asked me a simple question. If you were running a customer support organization, would you hire the agent that you just spoke to? I want you to think about that for a moment, because this is not a— this is a very provocative question, right? Because you're basically commenting on the effectiveness of one individual. But if you had to put your money where your mouth is, if I was running a CX organization, I would have to think hard about what that experience was like. Did the agent know what they were trying to help me with? Did they have all the data in the right place, right? So this is the kind of feedback that you need your customers to give you. Take that feedback and route it directly to the right teams. Don't massage it, don't filter it, don't sugarcoat it. If it doesn't look good, tell your product teams it doesn't look good. If it doesn't look good, tell your finance teams it doesn't look good. Don't create layers and don't diffuse the voice of the customers. And most importantly, measure adoption. Again, I think there's a lot of folks from the SaaS space. So if you're in the SaaS space, Make sure you're measuring adoption, not just the sales, not just the pipeline, but also how are your customers adopting your products. So that's the fourth step. Payal, take us to the final step of this process.

Mukesh, you just touched on something that's going to lead perfectly into this. You talked about data being really important. So customers, as you just said, demand experiences that are personalized, And accomplished leaders like the folks here, you want to be able to consolidate multiple data points into that one single cohesive view so that you can truly engage with your customers in an effective and hyper-personalized way. In order to solve this problem, CX leaders, they require a CDP, a unified customer record that unifies data across sales, marketing, customer service, even order management systems. So that you can put all of these elements into that one record. You'll be able to enrich that record and enriching that data via third party as well. And then what you can do is you can provide that data to your sales teams so they can go segment and, and, and analyze and take action from that. I'm sure there's many leaders on this call that are part of SaaS companies. And if you're a multi-product SaaS company like us, You probably have customers that have purchased only one core product. How do you engage with them so that those customers, you can understand their intent and understand how they're doing and then be able to get them to go ahead and purchase that next product and so forth? Now, and for example, let's say you had product A and you're researching and you know your customer's researching product B. How do you give that insight and hand that off to the right rep? I think in your last section, Mukesh, making sure that a customer is already a happy customer is important too before you reach out to them, to that, to that next piece. And then finally, I think you need the technology to show things like product usage and so that the net dollar retention of your SaaS spend continues to increase year over year and you can prevent that customer from churning. And this is why it's so crucial. Have those sales teams access all of that data holistically. I'll give an example, Mukesh, a customer of ours who's a major online jewelry store had this exact same dilemma. For the business, it's important for their sales teams to be able to cross-sell and upsell effectively. And what they did was they managed to merge sales and service into one unified CDP to identify that customer intent that we've been talking about and then empower that sales team to go reach out to the customer base and get more customers within the organization.

Perfect. Thank you, Payal. So let's recap. I want to be very respectful of everybody's time. Let's quickly recap the 5 steps. These are things that you can do today. These are things that are easy to deploy. I don't want anybody in the audience thinking this seems like a very, very complex task. It's not. Start with figuring out how you're going to unify your siloed data. Shift your workflows from reactive to proactive. Figure out for your business what that's going to look like. Ensure that customer service is everybody's responsibility. Ensure that you're focusing on the voice of your customers. And then empower your sales teams with the intent data, not just the customer data, but the intent data so that they can go sell effectively. That brings us to the end of our presentation. I think we can take a couple of questions. I know we've got just a minute left, but Payal and I are happy to stick around for a couple more minutes or 5 more minutes, whatever your appetite is for questions. So let's go to the Q&A. I'm gonna pop open the Q&A here. The first question is from From one of our attendees, how do you document and share these learnings as the company scales? This is a, this is a very, very good question, because I think as companies are scaling, people aren't really thinking about writing things down. They're not thinking about documenting the right process, not just the process, but documenting the success rates of your strategies. And so what I would recommend is that it depends on the stage of company that you are at, the stage that of your evolution that you're at. If you're a smaller organization, you probably want to move fast and you want to try things quickly, experiment. Then if you fail, you try a different strategy, right? And for something like a CDP strategy, this is actually a fun thing to try out. But my recommendation would be that as you continue to scale and as you build a larger organization, build those functions of documentation into your workflows, right? The simplest things I can say is, uh, I, I recommend to our customers all the time, track your monthly ticket volumes and see how that's trending. That's not hard to do if you have a good modern customer support platform. That's not a hard thing to do. You can build the right reports, right dashboards. So use data to guide those, those type of decision making. Another question is, where do you draw the line between automated conversational bots and human agents? Where to use what and where to definitely not use a bot? Oh my God, that's a— this is a, this is a 30-minute discussion in itself. And I think, I think, look, bots have a place. In customer service. There's no doubt about that. Bots should be used as a strategy to augment human intelligence, not replace human intelligence. Where bots fail is when you, you try to replace a human being with a bot and try to make the bot— try to make the bot so intelligent that it can resolve all issues. So our recommendation with bots— and you know, we do offer bot technology— our recommendation is start small. Start with a few use cases. Um, it's not with bots, it's not the AI or ML algorithm that's not working, it's your dataset. It's the training dataset that's not working for you. So make sure your bot strategy is grounded in a strong training dataset, and that's going to make your bots more successful. Again, I think, I think our information is available to all the attendees, so please connect with us if you'd like more details around designing a bot strategy. I'll take one more question and then we'll wrap it up. What are the best lagging and leading KPIs to measure success? Look, I'll say this, it really depends on the industry that you're in and the business model that you have. Different industries are gonna focus on different APIs, uh, KPIs, but I would say Try to have a blend of the traditional KPIs, you know, and when I say the traditional KPIs, I'm thinking about average handle time, issue resolution time. Those are traditional KPIs, right? Like those are things that every CX organization, unfortunately or fortunately, has to worry about. But also think about some good modern KPIs, right? And when I think about modern KPIs, I'm thinking about your success with cross-sell and upsell, right? I love to think about how many of our Freshworks customers have more than one product, and that is my measurement of success. It doesn't matter if it's sales, it doesn't matter if it's service, but if your customers are using your products and they are loving your products, that to me is the best KPI. So hopefully that helps. Again, hard to dissect the KPI discussion in a short, short amount of time, but we're happy to connect offline if that's helpful. I think that is— there is a question to me, Mukesh, have you always been this confident? So we'll table that question. I think that's not very relevant to the CX discussion here, but I think that's the end of the questions. So Payal, I think you're going to talk about some exciting raffles and giveaways that we're going to have.

Yeah, engage with us during FASTR. Please enter our survey raffle, which is either to win a Mirror Home Gym or Apple Watch, as well as a $500 Amazon Google Cloud gift card. So it's located in our booth to enter, and instructions have been also put into the chat if you missed it. But just come into our booth, come visit us, go ahead and enter the raffles, and we hope that you guys enjoyed our conversation today.

Wonderful. Thank you. I think there's a question, Lindsay, where is the Fresh Lounge? So maybe you or Valerie can take that question.

Yes. Yes. In the chat box, there is a link directly to it. So if you could just pop into the chat, you can click there and you'll head over right away. Wonderful. Well, thank you everyone for joining, and Freshworks, thank you so much for this session. We enjoyed it, and we'll see you all soon. Take care.