Storing and processing of large volumes of transactional data in a real-time application is always a challenge in software development. Choosing the right database is always crucial since decisions taken in that initial phase might look fine but affect the application’s performance as the feature adoption and customer base grows. This blog is about one such problem we faced and how we solved it.

What’s common between the customer service offered by a hotel, a retailer, and a bank these days? Chatbots! Chatbots today are being deployed across industries to assist customers (customer service), or engage with customers (sales and marketing), or do both. However, there are a few chatbot applications that are unique to each industry. In this blog, we explore the different applications of chatbots in six key industries, along with real-life examples.

Perseverance. Adversity. Defeat. Triumph. Freshworks has covered the pitch with an extraordinary decade in SaaS. Ten years strong, we buried the goal into the back of the net with big league wins­­—we were ranked number 16 on 2020 Forbes Cloud 100 list, recognized in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Tools, named a ‘visionary’ in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM customer engagement center, to name a few.

In the world of AI – chatbots, and virtual assistants are two popular words that are used interchangeably too often even though they mean two different things. Sometimes, you might even hear the term ‘virtual assistant chatbot’ being used in place of a chatbot or a virtual assistant. In this blog, we take a look at the differences between a chatbot, a virtual assistant, and a virtual assistant chatbot, and give you some guidelines on which solution to use, and when.

A CRM is a CRM is a CRM…right? Wrong. With due apologies to Gertrude Stein and William Shakespeare, a Customer Relationship Management software bought from just about any vendor wouldn’t “smell as sweet.” At our just-concluded Refresh 2020 virtual global conference, we took great pains and absolute delight to explain why not.

Oftentimes, it starts like a dream—fleeting, chaotic, unsolicited, and without structure. The idea is a strange thing, isn’t it? The way it begins and evolves is like life itself—literally out of nowhere, and then, in a hard act to follow, it branches out and sprouts arms and legs, and lands firmly upon the ground of reason to sustain itself through the years.

Applications deployed on the cloud keep growing in size and complexity every day, bringing the need for DevOps engineers to make sure that their application is running in the most efficient way possible. There are a lot of problems, solutions and best practices to make sure an application is efficient, under various categories. Observability Observability is the measure of how well your application’s state can be understood, and how clearly inferences are drawn from that.

Kubernetes is said to be the platform to build platforms on. In Freshworks’ case, this is very true. Once Kubernetes established itself as the de-facto container orchestration platform, we set out to create a platform around it with certain very specific capabilities in mind. Kubernetes is a complex beast and takes some effort to tame. Once that is done, there are tremendous advantages.

When it comes to customers, experience matters. Customer experience—commonly known as CX—is the impression customers have of a brand depending on every touchpoint in their buyer’s journey. With the rapid digital transformation of companies and the expanding use of technology and cloud computing in the global marketplace, customers now have a glut of interaction options at their fingertips. As the customer has gone nimble, so has CX.

Despite the global pressure of finding ways to solve customer challenges in the new normal, business leaders have found that the right set of tools with a focus on customer experience can be a powerful competitive advantage. But because of the pandemic, offices globally are working at limited capacity, and communication and collaboration with employees, customers and partners has become more difficult.