Freshdesk has matured like few customer success companies before them. Founded in Chennai, India, they now have offices in London and San Francisco. From 2011 to today, they’ve gone from a team of six to over 800 dedicated employees, from 100 customers to 80,000—and from a zero net worth to a valuation of over $500 million.
It all started with a Hacker News article in 2010. Zendesk had just announced a significant price increase and users were revolting. As Girish Mathrubootham read through the comments, he had an idea.
“It was like a slap in the face. It woke up my inner entrepreneur.”
From concept to launch
For two sleepless weeks, Girish researched every company in the customer support space. Filled with equal parts excitement and fear (school loans and a mortgage), it took Girish and his newly-minted cofounder, Shan Krishnasamy, just nine months to launch a public beta in May 2011.
Then just one month after launching, Freshdesk nabbed their first customer from Australia. And in the same month, they won the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge for the Cloud Category, garnering attention from VCs and a $40,000 prize.
One hundred days later, Freshdesk celebrated their first 100 customers. Here’s Girish with a tip from Freshdesk’s early days:
“Customers want core problems solved. Not features like Facebook support or turning tweets into support tickets.”
So Freshdesk began by focusing on their customers’ jobs-to-be-done. They reprioritized must-have features and retargeted market segments that were priced out of higher-end solutions, allowing them to nail that elusive product-market fit.
And the rest is history.
Creating a customer support glossary
“The formula is simple: build a strong product for the right market, and educate the masses.”
Great customer support is crucial to every business. Without strong support backing your product, your business will leak customers like a sieve. This forces attention on acquisition, which comes at a much greater cost.
So bring on more support.
Last year, Freshdesk developed the Ultimate Customer Support Glossary to educate both users and non-users. Because every business should succeed at supporting their customers. The glossary is pretty straightforward. Click on a word and you’re taken to its definition.
But they had to go further. According to Prashanthini Mande, product marketer at Freshdesk:
“We needed a way for people to test themselves and see their progression. Everybody loves a good quiz, and this was a nice way for us to find out what kind of people were taking the quiz.”
Enter Typeform. To create a customer support quiz, the team added Logic Jumps (just in case someone wanted to end their quiz early) and designed it to match the branding of their glossary. They also used the Calculator feature to show people their quiz score at the end.
“To make things interesting, we played around with the questions and added some images to help people have fun with it.”
Smart. By implementing the testing effect, learners deepen learnings through quizzes and develop stronger memory retention around those topics.
And what about results? More from Prashanthini:
“It worked like a charm. We have hundreds of responses already.”
But they didn’t stop there. The team at Freshdesk also found other uses for Typeform:
“We also use Typeform for other things like recruitment forms, event surveys, customer feedback, giveaways and more. We’ve collected over 5,000 responses across all of them.”
That’s versatility. Now it’s your turn. How could you use Typeform in your next project?
How Freshdesk did it
1) Logic Jump
Logic Jump allows respondents to only answer questions that are relevant to them. Along with Recall information, this makes every typeform a truly unique experience. See what else Logic Jump can do.
2) Video and images
Any interaction that involves images and video is a more engaging interaction. Learning doesn’t have to be boring. Follow Freshdesk’s example and spruce up your next typeform.
3) Calculator
Calculator is a great tool for making quizzes, shopping baskets, and more. You can keep scores for answers, or total up prices on an order form.
4) Custom Thank You screen
Use your Thank You screen to talk about next steps or send people to a page on your website. Keep the conversation going.
5) Custom design + remove Typeform branding
Splash your brand colors on your typeform and remove branding to make it unique.
And of course, let us know if you have any questions! Our team is always here to help.