Freshdesk, a novel helpdesk startup announced it has landed a $1 Million investment from Accel partners.
Freshdesk is a SaaS based helpdesk platform that integrates messages on your social media with your other helpdesk tickets. It also converts emails into tickets. This is a mighty feature where you can now see all your customer comments on the social media and act on it.
Dare caught up with Sreelesh and Sairam to get an insight into the startup.
The service has a free one month trial after which a subscription fee of $9, $19 and $29 per agent per month kicks in.
First Impressions
I signed up for a free registration. It was a breeze. I raised my first ticket which was a breeze too. They could simplify at one place, though. While logging a ticket  you should be able to type the requestor name and move on. Instead it brings up a drop-down list of email addresses from which you need to select again. This should happen only if there are name conflicts.
I was most impressed by the welcome mail I received. It was personalized and signed by a gentleman with a real name. There were quick links to read the various documentations. The first one I clicked on was "Converting your Support Email into Freshdesk tickets."
Emails and social media postings convert to tickets
The coolest feature is the conversion of an email to your support helpdesk account into a ticket. Your help desk staff can be free from filling up forms, which most hate anyway. An email sent shows up as a ticket.
The cutting edge of Freshdesk is where it allows you to connect to your Twitter and Facebook accounts and import direct messages and mentions into tickets. This is handy since most customer postings these days -- good or bad -- tends to happen over the social media.
In short Freshdesk promises to convert all your customer interaction, email, chat, social network into one centralized ticketing system. Your helpdesk staff can quickly assign the tasks to various departments and quickly get to resolutions.
How did this come about
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| Top Row (L-R): Sairam, Shanmugam, Girish, Shihab and Jayanth Bottom (L-R):Niranjan, Kiran, Vijay, Parsuram, Navaneethan, Sreelesh |
Freshdesk was the brain-child of Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy. The duo were working at Zoho in its ManageEngine division. In 2010, the two left their jobs to start Freshdesk. From October 2010 to June 2011 they banged out the product through its design, development and testing phases and rolled out to customers. Till September 2011, Freshdesk was a 6-member team.
No sooner did they launch, they started getting customers. In about 100 days since they launched they landed 100 customers -- at an average a-customer-a-day runrate.
In between they also won the Microsoft BizSpark Contest.
Today, Freshdesk is a 12-member company and has a million dollars in its bank account with Accel's investment.
Dare will try and catch up with Girish shortly and bring you a first-person account of the experience of the startup.
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