Freshworks Is a Vendor of Merit in Customer Experience Management

We are happy to share some insights about Freshworks drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Freshworks and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Customer Experience (CX).

Freshworks is a software provider with a portfolio of related tools originating in service and support and extending outward to products that support marketing, sales and IT. It was categorized as a Vendor of Merit, ranking 17th overall in this Value Index evaluation. Freshworks performed best in Capability, where it ranked 12th.

Freshworks’ combined offering provides organizations a way into customer experience management (CXM or CEM) through an incremental approach. Each module is targeted at solving a specific business problem — predicting revenue in FreshSales, for example, or connecting sales and marketing teams via a CRM application. There are modules and bundles for many of the user personas that inhabit the CX space across organizations.

Freshworks benefits from the diversity of its applications. The company could improve its Product Experience ranking by providing clarity on the combined value proposition of its modules as a coherent suite and making the case for that suite based on ROI and TCO. Freshworks could improve its Reliability ranking by providing information to buyers on its scalability metrics, how adaptable and configurable the combined offering is, and where the company plans to invest going forward.

This assessment was based on Freshworks’ CXM products available in November of 2022. Minor features and enhancements were implemented in December, after this evaluation.

Freshworks, like all vendors in this space, should continue working towards a holistic, integrated CX platform that addresses the needs of users across the enterprise. Connecting workflows from marketing, sales and service teams should be a key priority.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of CXM software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.