A few days ago Freshworks announced the acquisition of startup Joe Hukum, making it its eighth acquisition. Joe Hukum builds a chatbot platform that enables companies to quickly build their own chatbots for sales-, service-, or marketing purposes. In contrast to the technologies built by Frilp (acquired October, 2015) and Chatimity (acquired October, 2016) that rely on NLP (Natural Language Processing, as opposed to Neuro-Linguistic Programming) technologies, these bots are built using a Decision Tree technology. In order to be able to provide more advanced speech recognition they can connect to services of the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group, wit.ai, or api.ai. The created bots can be connected to websites, apps, or Facebook. The press release got published on July 20, 2017, but you can read it right here, before moving on to My Take.   Freshworks acquires chatbot platform startup, Joe HukumCompany enhances capabilities to help businesses build and deploy bots     San Bruno,  July 2017 — Freshworks, the leading provider of cloud-based business software, today announced the acquisition of Joe Hukum, a platform that enables businesses to build their own chatbots based on logical workflows. This acquisition marks Freshworks’ eighth in just under two years, as it further bolsters capabilities to strengthen its business software suite. Freshworks had earlier acquired Chatimity and Frilp, key acquisitions that are enhancing neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) based Artificial Intelligence capabilities, while Joe Hukum’s decision tree based frameworks complete key capabilities to launch chatbot-powered solutions. Joe Hukum was founded in July 2015 by Arihant Jain, Ajeet Kushwaha, and Rahul Agarwal, who were the founding team behind two of India’s most prominent healthcare startups, HealthKart and 1mg. Joe Hukum’s technology is powered by a robust decision tree framework that automates sales, service, and support workflows, across various channels and user interfaces. The Joe Hukum team will be responsible for building bots on top of existing Freshworks products, enabling workflow automations for demand generation, knowledge management, and dynamic in-app self service. “We are seeing strong interest from our customers on how they want to leverage chatbots as they are looking for new ways to engage with customers on their web and mobile channels,” said Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO of Freshworks. “As customer preferences shift from traditional phone tree based call center support, chatbots offer a new support experience, while essentially solving the age old challenge of triaging customer inquiries and routing that to the right support agent. These are still early days for chatbots, but Joe Hukum’s innovative team and technology will help our clients better engage and support their customers.” Consumers today spend the most amount of their time messaging, even more than what they do on social media. According to a Gartner report, by 2019, 40% of enterprises will be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using natural-language interactions. “Consumer behaviour is drastically changing, perhaps faster than technology can keep up. Having helped build a successful e-commerce company in India, I realized customers are constantly looking for simpler ways to engage with businesses and chatbots offered a simple, yet powerful way to address this need,” said Arihant Jain, Co-founder of Joe Hukum. “As a founder, I could not have asked for a better outcome for Joe Hukum. Being a part of Freshworks is super exciting for all of us as it gives us a platform that provides us scale and reach and impact hundreds of thousands of customers." Recently dubbed one of Forbes’ next billion-dollar startups, Freshworks has experienced an incredible year of growth. Each acquisition it makes not only brings new capabilities to the Freshworks suite of products but also brings intelligent and creative talent to the ever growing team. To learn more about Freshworks, please visit http://www.freshworks.com.   About Freshworks Freshworks Inc. is the parent company behind the suite of products which includes Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales and Freshcaller. The company’s suite of products is designed to work tightly together to increase collaboration and help teams better connect and communicate with their customers and co-workers. Founded in October 2010, Freshworks Inc. is backed by Accel, Tiger Global Management, CapitalG, and Sequoia Capital India. Freshworks has its HQ in San Bruno, California and global offices in India, UK, Australia, and Germany. The company's cloud-based suite of SaaS products is widely used by over 100,000 customers around the world including Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss, University of Pennsylvania, Toshiba and Cisco.

My Take

Bots are here to stay (and improve). This acquisition is in my eyes an interesting move that focuses on the near term gain that bots can provide through automation of narrowly focusing on specific topics. The decision tree technology that Joe Hukum provides gives exactly that. The customer provides a workflow chart or decision matrix, which then gets converted into a bot. This makes for easy configuration and likely also configurability. Decision tree technology is also more mature than other, AI based, technologies, but it takes a lot of the machine learning out of the picture. This is not necessarily a bad thing for adoption, but also have a look at the concerns below. Acquiring Joe Hukum describes a natural evolution after having acquired chat- and collaboration platforms and technologies in the past. Now Freshworks has gained the ability to improve process automation on their backs – along with another chat platform to consolidate. However, it ties neatly into Freshdesk as well as Freshsales, more importantly also on the channels that humans use. I do see some immediate use cases in lead capturing to conversion processes due to engaging into conversations and in the support area by using bots as the first level of engagement by making them the front end to FAQs. On the concerns side this acquisition is focusing rather on automation and optimization than on customer experience since, judging by the presented flows, there is an IVR-like guidance of the customer, instead of following the user’s flow. On the other hand even companies focusing on speech recognition for long times like Nuance Technology have a hard time with intent detection and the proper reaction to this intent. But then Nuance is focusing on (dynamic) decision trees, too. Another concern could be the reliance on third party speech recognition that Joe Hukum has. While this is inevitable when starting a solution fast speech recognition, and increasingly –generation, will become a core technology that will permeate business- and other applications in a world that moves to ambient computing. But here the technologies acquired earlier should be of help in this area.

On June 6, 2017 Freshdesk announced its rebranding to Freshworks. Freshworks is a new umbrella brand for the suite of applications that Freshdesk built and acquired since its founding in 2010. The core statement by Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and founder of Freshworks is: ”Today, I’m happy to announce that we are rebranding the company as Freshworks. We’re not in this just to change the way businesses do customer support, but to refresh the way they do business.” Let’s have a look at select paragraphs of the press release. Following breakout growth of the company’s customer support software, and the introduction of new products for IT Service Management (“ITSM”), customer relationship management (“CRM”) and cloud-based call centers, Freshworks products are designed to help companies better engage and communicate with their customers and employees. The company surely had a significant impact on parts of the CRM market, also as evidenced by being named a CRM Watchlist Winner 2017 by industry luminary Paul Greenberg. They, in my eyes, however, do not yet have a CRM. A CRM encompasses marketing, sales, and service, supporting multiple channels/being channel agnostic and based upon analytics. Freshsales, what is referred to as their CRM, is a sales tool. “Today, the Freshworks suite of products includes:

• Freshdesk: a multichannel customer support helpdesk which allows organizations 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 center on the cloud”

  While this is a good listing of the products that are now under the umbrella of Freshworks the missing of hotline is notable. I can only surmise that it moved under the umbrella of Freshdesk. It surely didn’t get abandoned. “Until now, businesses have had few options for business software, turning to all-in-one, cumbersome legacy solutions across the organization. These solutions are not only expensive, but also require long implementation cycles and are extremely difficult to use without expert training, neither of which are afforded by growing companies. At the same time, enterprises are also tired of wasting time and resources on trying to make everything work together. Freshworks offers a product portfolio that is easily implemented and affordable for companies of all sizes.” It is true that there haven’t been that many options for businesses, especially in the SME arena. Still there are a bunch of vendors around that make the same claim, including heavyweights like Salesforce or Netsuite. Then there is, very noteably, Zoho. “Adopted by over 100,000 companies in 145 countries, Freshworks’ mission is to help companies better engage and communicate with their customers and employees with refreshing business software. For companies looking to share customer data and insights across sales and support teams or quickly onboard and set-up new employees, Freshworks’ integrated software products ensure all teams are working together in sync.” This statement, along with Girish’s quote, very nicely summarizes the renewed vision. It also shows the current lack of marketing clout by not naming this part of CRM functionality.

My Take

This rebranding was an inevitable move that reflects the reality of what the company formerly known as Freshdesk is actually doing. The company’s original vision of providing a ‘fresh helpdesk that makes a dent into the world of customer support’ has changed considerably. Meanwhile, as a company, Freshworks is providing customer service, IT service, cloud call center, sales, and bot functionality – the latter as part of their customer service and the sales functionality. The main functionality that is currently missing is a decent (fresh) marketing based upon a more generic analytics component than they currently have. But looking at how the company developed so far this is probably not too far down the road. As is different functionality, as the new name, and the header of the press release suggest. “ New umbrella brand provides product clarity, enables future growth of feature-rich, easy-to-use and affordable business software suite” Both put Freshworks squarely in competition with Zoho and ultimately with bigger players up to and until Salesforce . Although Freshworks seemed to see their main clientele in the SME market they have with Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss, Toshiba and Cisco some big referencable names in their client base. The challenges Freshworks has become more obvious, too. The two main ones that I see, are:

1. The company moved from being a best-of-breed specialty vendor to becoming a suite vendor. This is a strong shift of focus that needs to be carefully managed and executed upon. The alternative is confusing the customers by an apparent lack of strategy – even if there is one. And I would think that there is one. Freshworks has had far too much impact in the past years.
2. Although they claim to have a “CRM” they in my eyes don’t yet have one. The reason is that there is no significant marketing functionality. While there is some phone and email support I do not see enough of a campaign management functionality or enough of an analytics component to support next best actions, product recommendations, or even enough segmentation. The claim of being able of doing “AI based lead scoring” is not enough – what does “AI-based” mean?

In spite of above two concerns Freshworks is certainly a vendor to keep in mind when it comes to looking at a suite of CRM software that initially does not focus on marketing.

In a mobile world, where the smartphone has become the command center of our lives support needs to be offered from directly inside the app, using in-app messaging. This way the advantages of being able to send relevant contextual information about the state of the app to the service agent and the ability to engage in a service conversation via a conversational UI can get brought to full advantage. The user is identified, relevant information has been gathered, which the service agent can use right away. This leads to capabilities that a genuine mobile in-app support system needs to have on top of generic help center functionality:

1. In-App FAQ that gets pushed out to the phone and is available in an offline scenario
2. Collation of meta data about the phone, user and the incident that created the support call, along with the ability to send that to the customer service center
3. In-App messaging/conversational UI in combination with push notifications
4. Automation to properly route incoming issues and to increase the issue resolution efficiency
5. An ability to integrate into CRM- or other systems
6. An ability to selectively and proactively engage with users, to e.g. support onboarding or push notifications about special situations to relevant parts of the user community.

It is possible to find vendors that deliver parts or all of this in order to deliver a mobile service experience. Platforms like G2Crowd, but also traditional analyst companies like Forrester and Gartner give some leads. Gartner lists Salesforce, Pegasystems, Oracle, Microsoft, Zendesk as leaders in customer engagement centers, with SAP being the only Challenger and Lithium the only Visionary. None of these companies gets high marks for in-app support, though. So, we are apparently looking for specialist vendors. Concentrating on the bigger medium and enterprise end of the market I’ll briefly look over the following companies, which offer parts or all of the desired solution.

• Apptentive
• Freshdesk/Hotline
• Helpshift
• Intercom
• LivePerson
• Salesforce Service Cloud and com
• Zendesk

Salesforce and Zendesk are part of this list as in-app service specialists see them in sales opportunities as competitors.

Vendors

Apptentive

Apptentive focuses on mobile customer engagement to foster a better way to communicate. The solution offers in-app messaging, rating prompts, notifications and surveys. There are no FAQ’s, though. The company got founded in 2011. The solution integrates into Zendesk, Uservoice, and Desk.com, which can be used to build a more complete in-app customer service solution in combination with Apptentive. Further integrations should be possible using the company’s API. Apptentive gathers meta-data from the mobile apps and presents it via its reporting solution. This data then can be exported as CSV and imported into a CRM system to enrich it and to provide for segmentation. However, there does not seem to be a campaigning functionality inside Apptentive itself.

Freshdesk/Hotline

Hotline.io, the former Konotor, is the mobile in-app support platform of Freshdesk. Konotor got founded in 2012 and was acquired by Freshdesk in November 2015. It is a native in-app support platform that fully caters for the criteria mentioned above. Hotline positions itself more like an engagement platform than a customer service platform. Being a part of the Freshdesk group their focus is more on the upper end of the SMB arena. Their clients mainly consist of startups and bigger corporations (as the smaller ones often do not have mobile apps, according to Srikrishnan Ganesan who heads up Hotline). Freshdesk itself seems to be sales-driven (which is not a bad thing). The company recently won the 2017 CRM Watchlist award, which is an impact award given by Paul Greenberg, which gives high visibility. Hotline has built-in integrations e.g. with Zendesk, and Slack and, of course, with Freshdesk itself. Using APIs it is possible to integrate with other CRM- and customer service systems. With the help of the Freshdesk platform it turns into a multi channel support system. The campaign module that is built into the back end allows segmenting customers based upon meta-data, app usage, and other criteria and allows for simple campaign automation.

Helpshift

Helpshift seems to be the leading mobile in-app support platform with a base of about 1.3 billion installations. The company got founded in 2011 and pioneered the idea of in-app support, providing a native platform that fully caters for the criteria above. The company positions itself as revolutionizing the customer support experience on mobile – with a strong focus on customer service. The target of Helpshift is enterprises and bigger call centers, and their number of installations proves that they are up to it. In 2014 Helpshift won the CRM Idol competition and the company is probably a bit of a hidden gem, which may partly be attributed to their enterprise focus. Helpshift has a deep integration into the Salesforce Service Cloud and I personally expect integration into MS Dynamics looming, as Microsoft Outlook Mobile is a key customer and Microsoft itself a leading investor into the company. Being API-driven integrations into other CRM systems are easily possible. The backend itself is multi-channel capable. The Helpshift campaign module is geared for service rather than marketing and leverages meta-data for segmentation, easily allowing for the facilitation of onboarding or recovering abandoned baskets, and getting over the early retention barrier.

Intercom

Intercom positions itself as a platform with support for live chat, marketing and support, with all part solutions being seamlessly integrated via their platform. The company has a strong mobile focus. A lot of their customer base seems to deploy the solution as a customer service solution. As Helpshift, the company was founded in 2011. Their solutions cover the criteria above, with the exception seeming to be the in-app FAQ. FAQ’s seem to be published through the web, instead. Their analytics offer the nice feature of identifying candidates for improved or new knowledge base articles, based upon searches. The solution offers multi-channel support and integrates into a good number of communications channels, and into Salesforce, to have a strong support system. They have deliberate support for onboarding processes, helping customers to get over the early retention barrier. Using data collected from the devices a segmentation and hence a targeted communication with users is possible, for example the onboarding support.

LivePerson

LivePerson offers a mobile in-app support solution through its LiveEngage platform. The company sets out to drive conversations and loyalty through the platform, and does not position it as a support- but an engagement system. LiveEngage is an ‘upgrade’ from the company’s earlier LivePerson solution, which seems to have caused some grief for customers. This ‘upgrade’ seems to resemble a pivot into the mobile in-app business. They are targeting enterprises although they also have startup customers. LivePerson is in the chat business for around 20 years. Focusing on messaging they do offer a chat platform that can be integrated into apps and web sites. They do not offer knowledge base support of customers but rely on custom integrations into CRM systems. Their key asset is their long standing history along with a platform that can turn chat into action, albeit more with a focus on cross-selling. Their current challenge is their need to manage their pivot and some customers that lost functionality that was important for them.

Salesforce

Salesforce offers two customer service solutions, the Salesforce Service Cloud and Desk.com, addressing different customer sizes. Desk.com is geared towards smaller organizations where the Service Cloud is enterprise scale. Both solutions offer multi channel support capabilities. Gartner Group, in their 2016 Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Centers states that “mobile chat” (their term for in-app messaging) is best handled by partner solutions that are available via the AppExchange market place.

Desk.com

Desk.com is Salesforces “Out-of-the-Box helpdesk for small businesses”. Being a member of the Salesforce family the solution has considerable grunt and exposure behind it. Desk.com is not a native mobile in-app support platform but a general support platform that allows for embedding support functionality inside mobile apps via an SDK. The SDK allows for the creation of tickets from within the mobile app and for knowledge base search with the knowledge base not being inside the app itself. In contrast to other providers Desk.com does not cater for conversational in-app support. The main support experience is provided outside the app. Being a member of the Salesforce family integration into other family members is a given, since they share the same platform. This includes a connection to the Sales Cloud that facilitates the conversion of support cases to sales opportunities. But at its root Desk.com is a helpdesk solution that got extended to cover mobile apps.

Service Cloud

The Service Cloud is the Salesforce customer service offering for enterprises. As such it offers a full fledged service solution that also extends into mobile devices via e.g. ticketing live chat, knowledge bases and support of communities. All this takes advantage of the powerful Salesforce platform. There, however, is no direct in-app support, which makes a good case for the integration of Helpshift.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a leading cloud based customer service platform, offering multi channel support. Zendesk features as a leader in the Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Centers. Zendesk is not a mobile native. Their chat widget integrates into web pages and the company does not offer in-app chat. Instead the company offers solutions that hook into existing messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. They offer knowledge bases, support of communities, and portals. Zendesk has integrations into many other systems, including MS Dynamics and Salesforce. The support for messaging apps, besides Zendesk being competitively met by mobile in-app vendors, is the main reason for them appearing here.

What It Means

The in-app service market is a specialist market. If a strong support for mobile apps using a conversational interface and an in-app experience are required, not many players with the strength to support larger enterprises are left. This can be seen in the table below, which covers above solutions and is enriched by some generic help center functionality. Mobile In-App Support Provider Overview Zendesk and Salesforce both offer partner solutions to fulfill in-app service requirements. By themselves they are not in-app support players. Apptentive focuses on rating systems and surveys and is not a full-fledged player as well.. Intercom positions itself more as an engagement platform although customers seem to deploy it as a support platform, too. Without an own knowledge base capability it, however, misses an important capability. This leaves us with three vendors: Freshdesk, Helpshift, and LivePerson, with LviePerson currently pivoting from being a web based chat provider to an in-app service solution provider, which seems to cause existing customers some grief. The solution is also missing an in-app FAQ. Helpshift and Freshdesk as the front-runners are running very different strategies. For Freshdesk in-app support is one of their capabilities that they acquired over time and made part of their solution set. Helpshift totally focuses on in-app support, believing that mobile will be, if not already is, the dominant channel, which needs specialized support functionality to offer maximum service and experience.

Last week Freshdesk announced the acquisition of Bengaluru based SaaS data integration company Pipemonk, the seventh acquisition since mid of 2015. Pipemonk has been launched in 2014 and since has implemented integrations between many leading e-commerce-, accounting-, CRM-, Marketing-, and Billing applications, including Amazon, Shopify, Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Stripe. So far Freshdesk was not on their list. Pipemonk’s promise and objective is to deliver easy-to-setup, pre-built bi-directional integrations between SaaS applications. On their web site they reported to have more than 2,000 customers acquired in the short life span, with a seed capital of only 2 million dollar. So one can say that they delivered successfully. Freshdesk itself has its roots in customer service and since increased its portfolio to include help desk (hotline), a sales application (Freshsales), chat (Freshchat) and social testimonials using acquisitions and own developments.

My Take

I think that this was an important step for Freshdesk. It enables Freshdesk to easily expand its reach to integrate with a raft of SaaS applications in different business domains, prebuilt or custom. Further, I was wondering for a while whether and how Freshdesk would go on integrating their own application stack, which as per my understanding so far consists of different, only lightly (if at all) integrated applications – although my understanding may be wrong. Assuming that Freshdesk intends to continue their aggressive growth trajectory with this acquisition the team also has the foundation to integrate new and newly acquired functionality fast, based upon an established architecture. Overall, congratulations to both teams!