Freshdesk, the San Francisco-HQed cloud-based desktop customer service software provider with a development centre in Chennai, is announcing the acquisition of ‘Frilp’, a startup with an app that lets users receive guidance and expert recommendations from their friends.
As a part of this deal, all 19 employees of Frilp will be moving to Freshdesk’s development center in Chennai. The beta Frilp app for Android will shut down soon. Other related terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The possibilities with Frilp’s integration into Freshdesk are endless, and could further better one of world’s most successful and robust customer service platform.
For example, with Frilp’s recommendation engine integrated to Freshdesk’s powerful customer service platform, companies could delegate the responsibility of answering certain specific questions from potential buyers to those who already own a certain product. This way, a newer customer would feel more personalised and connected with the company — which doesn’t really happen to the extent, if that same buyer contacts a customer service executive.
In an interview last week, Freshdesk president Dilawar Syed told VentureBeat,
What we do know is our customers have asked us for this and said, ‘Can we enable some sort of peer-to-peer conversation, because I have very active set of users or customers.
In that same interview, Syed told VB that his company plans to use Frilp’s tech in three different ways.
First, Freshdesk will be using Frilp’s recommendation engine to find the customer service executive with most in-depth knowledge of a particular topic. Once found, any customer question related to that expertise will be re-directed to that specialised agent, using Frilp’s engine.
Second, the company will be going out into millions of communities and forums texts and finding out experts from there. These experts are usually considered more reliable by today consumer, as compared to a company’s official executive.
Third, Freshdesk wants to connect customers with service desk inquiries with their friends on social networks who might be able to solve their problems.
The basic idea is to extract key terms from customer service tickets with natural language processing — technology that was at the core of Frilp — and use that to find the people most well equipped to help.
Frilp’s acquisition would help Freshdesk stay more relevant at times when other competitor software like Salesforce (which has had sharp focus on tech ever since it acquired Relatel IQ), Zendesk and others are aggressively pushing towards increased adoption rates.
Frilp, which was founded in 2012, has raised $500,000 in funding from angel investors, including Freshdesk cofounder and chief executive Girish Mathrubootham and former Groupon executive Deva Kannan.
