This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for CS talent. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. We’re now looking into one of the largest providers of sales, support and employee management CRM SaaS, grown out of Chennai, India – Freshworks.
Freshworks – ridiculously easy-to-use marketing, sales, support and IT solutions
While the company was only founded in 2010, it’s grown to one of the bigger players in the CRM space. It counts its competitors as Monday.com and Hubspot.
It’s history is as follows:
- 2010 – its founders start right from first principles: building a cloud-based software that helps companies manage customer service tickets, with an emphasis on positive UX.
- 2015 – launches social services that help service desk people deliver support on the go.
- 2016 – launches its sales CRM, Freshsales,
- 2017 – officially rebrands to Freshworks (from Freshdesk)
- 2019 – is included in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Software,
- 2021 – has an IPO and gets listed on the NASDAQ (during COVID!)
It’s a real success story as far as they come. Will you be a success story at this company too?
The Software Itself
Let’s look at their core offerings here:
Freshdesk
It’s one of their core products and what put them on the map in the first place. Includes ticket resolution, live chat and CX modules.
Freshservice
This tool is all about getting an ROI from service delivery. Stop wasting time on repetitive tasks, get more software working and talking to each other in the same language and deploy fast.
Freshsales
Taking learnings from their earlier offerings and applying it to the sales environment, Freshsales was born. It enables sales people to close deals faster, improve seller effectiveness and reduce bottlenecks that are caused by miscommunications in systems used by IT teams and sales people.
Job Description Example
The following screenshot was taken from a Freshworks role based out of California. There should be considerable overlap with roles all over the world.
Job Description Analysis
Let’s go through each of the dot points:
- While a lot of roles are remote, it’s important for this one that the CSM is actually based in California.
- owning the customer means being the custodian of the customer relationship. When people from other departments want to speak with your customer, they have to go through you.
- Take an approach of educating and teaching customers about the Freshworks platform.
- Always be influencing and demonstrating your expertise to build trust in customers.
- Really believe in what the product does and how it helps solve the customers’ problems.
- Teach, teach, teach!
- Manage risk and mitigate it before it becomes a big problem.
- When you nurture customers into champions, turn that into an opportunity for the customer to become a public reference.
- Talk to the product team and get them to listen to what you have to suggest about improvements to the product,
- Be best buds with sales and account management. Find opportunities to grow your accounts,
- Own the renewal process so the business can keep getting money,
- Be the customer’s voice and speak on their behalf so that when other departments each voice their needs, you ensure that the customers’ needs are always heard.
What They Provide
Larger, public companies like Freshworks have decent benefits, such as:
- health/medical
- dental
- life insurance
- flexible working arrangements
If you’ve worked in a service environment (i.e. hospitality, IT), a company like Freshworks could be a great choice to launch your career in Customer Success. If you’re curious, visit their website, Google them or even reach out to some current employees for a chat. Best of luck!