Mid-sized firms fresh target of Freshdesk tools

CHENNAI: Chennai-based enterprise software maker Freshdesk, which competes with several global technology companies, is expanding its portfolio of products aimed at medium sized businesses. The three-year- old company that offers customer management software as a service will now alsoprovideatooltohelpmanage information technology systems within large enterprises.

“If we offer products focusing on customer engagement and management and execute well, we have a good chance of winning a substantial market share,” said Girish Mathrubootham, co-founder of Freshdesk who expects the new tool, launched in January and already used by over 100 clients , to bring in revenue of over 6 crore in the first year.

The38-year-old engineer and his co-founder Shan Krishnasamy were both employed at Chennai’s Zoho Corp, a business software maker,when they spotted a gap in the enterprise software market. The two discovered an abrupt increase of nearly 60%, in the price of customer management software sold by US-based Zendesk in 2010. The two Indian entrepreneurs were quick to realise the need for an affordable product and decided to quit and launch their own venture. They also did one better by offering customer care support for social media, a feature that most other service providers have now added on. This quick-witted thinking from Freshdesk’s founding team has paid off.

In three years the company has won over 18,000 clients including publishing major Pearson, UNICEF and Swedish phone directory venture Truecaller. “Freshdesk has a good core team and have identified a good pain point. They spend time understanding their customers,” said Dorai Thodla, a senior technology entrepreneur in Chennai who runs business intelligence tool-maker iMorph. Investors too have zeroed in on the potential of this fast-growi ng c ompa ny F r e shde sk h a s raised over 80 crore of venture fundingfrominvestorsAccelPartners and Tiger Global Management.

Mathrubootham and his team have kept up the tempo of innovation by adding features like chat and cloud telephony while keeping priceslow. Freshdesk’ssoftwareas-a-service product is priced at up to 2,400 per agent in comparison industry leader Zendesk’s solution is priced up to $195 (over 11,800) per agent per month. The Chennai-based company’s products also compete with Salesforce’s Desk.com.

“The way to grow your business is to use same features for differentmarketsorbuildnewfeatures for same market. We are doing both,” said Mathrubootham, who was earlier a vice president at Zoho and was involved in the development of its enterprise IT management solution.