Freshworks’ Bots Make Customer Interactions Easier

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Chennai, India and San Mateo-based Freshworks (Nasdaq: FRSH) continues to grow rapidly as it expands its CRM offerings. The company is focusing on product innovation and recently added several new bot capabilities to drive growth.

Freshworks’s Financials

For the fourth quarter, Freshworks’ revenues grew 42% to $114.6 million. Net loss was $0.01 per share.

Among key metrics, number of customers contributing more than $5,000 in ARR grew 27% to 15,639. Net dollar retention rate was 115%, compared to 114% in the previous quarter, and 112% a year ago. Some of the new customers added during the year included names like California Credit Union, Kuka, Marymount Manhattan College, Sodexo, Ticket Network, Thermo Fisher, and more.

For the first quarter, Freshworks forecast revenues of $117-$119 million and a loss per share of $0.08-$0.06. It expects revenues of $495.5-$501.5 million and a loss per share of $0.18-$0.16 for the current fiscal year.

Freshworks’s Product Expansion

Freshworks continued to improve its CRM offering, and recently released its first unified CRM solution for eCommerce companies. Freshworks CRM for e-commerce will help companies engage customers on modern messaging channels including WhatsApp and text messaging across marketing, support, and sales, empowering any business. It natively integrates with e-commerce platforms and packages marketing automation, multi-channel campaigns including email, chat, WhatsApp, and SMS, and conversational sales and support such as live-chat and AI chat bots to help businesses segment their audience and automate and personalize messages. Buyers will be able to gain nearly instant answers to their questions and businesses can unify customer support insights across digital channels.

Freshworks also continues to add several new capabilities to its products. For instance, within the conversational engagement product, Freshdesk Messaging offers self-service bots and conversational agent experiences over more digital channels. It added text messaging as a new channel and enhanced capabilities for WhatsApp conversations. These new capabilities enable businesses to provide a conversational experience to their customers and automate support over text messaging and WhatsApp in addition to existing channels like Apple Business Chat and Facebook Messenger.

It continued to improve the capabilities of its bots. It recently added 10 more languages to the capabilities of its bots. Freshworks’ bots can now handle over 50 different languages. It released a WISMO bot. WISMO stands for Where Is My Order, and it allows support agents to perform more complex tasks while the bot handles queries relating to order status.

Its stock is currently trading at $14.54 with a market capitalization of $4.6 billion. It hit a 52-week high of $53.36 in October last year and a 52-week low of $12.91 earlier this month.

Disclosure: All investors should make their own assessments based on their own research, informed interpretations, and risk appetite. This article expresses my own opinions based on my own research of product-market fit, channel execution, and other factors. My primary interest is in product strategy. While this may have bearing on stock movements, my writings tend to focus on long-term implications. The information presented is illustrative and educational, but should not be regarded as a complete analysis nor recommendation to buy or sell the securities mentioned herein. I am not a registered investment adviser and I am not receiving compensation for this article. I am an investor in this company.

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Photo Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay