Freshworks and Joe Hukum |
A few days ago Freshworks announced the
acquisition of startup Joe Hukum, making
it its eighth acquisition. Joe Hukum builds a chatbot platform that enables
companies to quickly build their own chatbots for sales-, service-, or
marketing purposes. In contrast to the technologies built by Frilp (acquired
October, 2015) and Chatimity (acquired October, 2016) that rely on NLP (Natural
Language Processing, as opposed to Neuro-Linguistic Programming) technologies,
these bots are built using a Decision Tree technology. In order to be able to
provide more advanced speech recognition they can connect to services of the
Stanford Natural Language Processing Group, wit.ai,
or api.ai. The created bots can be connected to websites, apps, or Facebook.
The press release
got published on July 20, 2017, but you can read it right here, before moving
on to My Take.
Freshworks acquires chatbot platform
startup, Joe Hukum
Company enhances capabilities to help
businesses build and deploy bots
San
Bruno, July 2017 ā Freshworks,
the leading provider of cloud-based business software, today announced the
acquisition of Joe Hukum, a platform that
enables businesses to build their own chatbots based on logical workflows. This
acquisition marks Freshworksā eighth in just under two years, as it further
bolsters capabilities to strengthen its business software suite. Freshworks had
earlier acquired Chatimity and Frilp, key acquisitions that are enhancing
neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) based Artificial Intelligence capabilities,
while Joe Hukumās decision tree based frameworks complete key capabilities to
launch chatbot-powered solutions.
Joe Hukum was
founded in July 2015 by Arihant Jain, Ajeet Kushwaha, and Rahul Agarwal, who
were the founding team behind two of Indiaās most prominent healthcare
startups, HealthKart and 1mg. Joe Hukumās technology is powered by a robust
decision tree framework that automates sales, service, and support workflows,
across various channels and user interfaces. The Joe Hukum team will be responsible
for building bots on top of existing Freshworks products, enabling workflow
automations for demand generation, knowledge management, and dynamic in-app
self service.
āWe are seeing
strong interest from our customers on how they want to leverage chatbots as
they are looking for new ways to engage with customers on their web and mobile
channels,ā said Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO of Freshworks. āAs
customer preferences shift from traditional phone tree based call center
support, chatbots offer a new support experience, while essentially solving the
age old challenge of triaging customer inquiries and routing that to the right
support agent. These are still early days for chatbots, but Joe Hukumās
innovative team and technology will help our clients better engage and support
their customers.ā
Consumers today
spend the most amount of their time messaging, even more than what they do on
social media. According to a Gartner report, by 2019, 40% of enterprises will
be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using
natural-language interactions.
āConsumer
behaviour is drastically changing, perhaps faster than technology can keep up.
Having helped build a successful e-commerce company in India, I realized
customers are constantly looking for simpler ways to engage with businesses and
chatbots offered a simple, yet powerful way to address this need,ā said Arihant
Jain, Co-founder of Joe Hukum. āAs a founder, I could not have asked for a
better outcome for Joe Hukum. Being a part of Freshworks is super exciting for
all of us as it gives us a platform that provides us scale and reach and impact
hundreds of thousands of customers."
Recently dubbed
one of Forbesā next billion-dollar startups, Freshworks has experienced an
incredible year of growth. Each acquisition it makes not only brings new
capabilities to the Freshworks suite of products but also brings intelligent
and creative talent to the ever growing team.
To learn more about Freshworks, please visit
http://www.freshworks.com.
About
Freshworks
Freshworks Inc. is the parent company behind the suite
of products which includes Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales and Freshcaller.
The companyās suite of products is designed to work tightly together to
increase collaboration and help teams better connect and communicate with their
customers and co-workers. Founded in October 2010, Freshworks Inc. is backed by
Accel, Tiger Global Management, CapitalG, and Sequoia Capital India. Freshworks
has its HQ in San Bruno, California and global offices in India, UK, Australia,
and Germany. The company's cloud-based suite of SaaS products is widely used by
over 100,000 customers around the world including Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo
Boss, University of Pennsylvania, Toshiba and Cisco.
My Take
Bots are here to stay (and improve).
This acquisition is in my eyes an
interesting move that focuses on the near term gain that bots can provide
through automation of narrowly focusing on specific topics.
The decision tree technology that Joe Hukum
provides gives exactly that. The customer provides a workflow chart or decision
matrix, which then gets converted into a bot. This makes for easy configuration
and likely also configurability. Decision tree technology is also more mature
than other, AI based, technologies, but it takes a lot of the machine learning
out of the picture. This is not necessarily a bad thing for adoption, but also
have a look at the concerns below.
Acquiring Joe Hukum describes a natural
evolution after having acquired chat- and collaboration platforms and
technologies in the past. Now Freshworks has gained the ability to improve
process automation on their backs ā along with another chat platform to
consolidate.
However, it ties neatly into Freshdesk as
well as Freshsales, more importantly also on the channels that humans use. I do
see some immediate use cases in lead capturing to conversion processes due to
engaging into conversations and in the support area by using bots as the first
level of engagement by making them the front end to FAQs.
On the concerns side this acquisition is
focusing rather on automation and optimization than on customer experience
since, judging by the presented flows, there is an IVR-like guidance of the
customer, instead of following the userās flow. On the other hand even
companies focusing on speech recognition for long times like Nuance
Technology have a hard time with intent detection and the proper reaction
to this intent. But then Nuance is focusing on (dynamic) decision trees, too.
Another concern could be the reliance on
third party speech recognition that Joe Hukum has. While this is inevitable
when starting a solution fast speech recognition, and increasingly āgeneration,
will become a core technology that will permeate business- and other
applications in a world that moves to ambient computing. But here the
technologies acquired earlier should be of help in this area.
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