Freshworks has revamped its customer experience platform to help agents reap the rewards of AI without the complications.
Announced at the vendor’s flagship Refresh event, the updated platform includes the following three fresh capabilities:
- Vertical AI Agents
- Freshdesk Command Center
- Freddy AI Insights
Together, the three tools are designed to enable CX teams to lower response times, boost resolution rates, and gain real-time visibility into the issues slowing growth and efficiency.
The updated solutions are partly in response to Freshworks’ Cost of Complexity Report, which outlined ‘uncustomizable workflows’ and ‘too many tools to toggle between’ as two of the biggest software-related challenges currently impacting customer service agents.
These findings speak to the wider issues of over-complication and solution fatigue that have been prominent in recent times, and can prevent agents from truly maximizing the benefits of AI.
This point was raised by Srini Raghavan, Chief Product Officer of Freshworks, when discussing his company’s latest releases.
“CX leaders want to scale instant, empathetic service without sacrificing quality or time. Yet fragmented systems, outdated tools, and redundant processes waste hours of their teams’ time,” he said.
“Freshworks is breaking that cycle of complexity by uniting how teams work and helping them reclaim hours of lost productivity, enabling teams to meet customer needs with greater speed, and giving leaders an easy way to uncover growth drivers and detractors proactively.”
So, let’s take a closer look at whether the revamped capabilities can deliver on Raghavan’s promise.
Vertical AI Agents
Freshworks has introduced new Vertical AI Agents for eCommerce, fintech, travel, and logistics within the Freddy AI Agent Studio, a workspace for building, testing, and monitoring AI agents.
The agents come with more than 50 prebuilt workflows, reducing the setup effort typically required when deploying industry-specific automation.
Designed to handle tasks as well as respond to inquiries, they integrate with systems such as FedEx, Shopify, and Stripe.
Users can also create custom agentic workflows, enabling the agents to deliver end-to-end resolutions aligned with sector-specific processes.
The latest move from Freshworks is another example of a major customer service and experience vendor choosing to move into the industry-specific agent arena.
Indeed, at the beginning of the year, Salesforce released Agentforce for Retail, a skills library for industry-specific AI agents. This was followed by the launch of Agentforce for Public Sector and Agentforce for Manufacturing back in August.
Talkdesk is another vendor that has targeted specific verticals in the past, havign released AI agents for Healthcare and Finance earlier this year.
In doing so, all of these vendors are looking to differentiate themselves in a crowded space and leverage AI to make their tools more effective.
Freshdesk Command Center
The enhanced Freshdesk Command Center consolidates multiple customer service channels – email, chat, WhatsApp, and social media – into a single workspace, reducing the need for agents to switch between applications.
It combines AI assistance with process automation to streamline operations, helping teams retrieve relevant customer data and respond more efficiently.
AI capabilities within the platform also provide real-time insights, including conversation sentiment, SLA deadlines, and access to customer information such as purchase history, subscription details, FedEx tracking updates, Stripe payments, and Shopify product data.
In addition, agents are able to access Freddy AI Copilot, the platform’s AI assistant, from directly within the command center.
They can use the copilot to summarize email threads, suggest responses, and recommend actions.
Single-click operations can trigger end-to-end processes, including refunds, replacement orders, and activity logging, enabling faster resolution of customer requests without leaving the command center.
Freddy AI Insights
Freddy AI Insights offers real-time visibility into support operations, helping leaders monitor performance trends and detect anomalies before they affect the customer experience.
The platform provides alerts for spikes in support volume, SLA breaches, and workflow bottlenecks, alongside built-in root cause analysis that highlights why changes occur.
Visual dashboards present performance shifts clearly, enabling teams to identify critical patterns, assess which groups are impacted, and take timely action.
Designed as a continuous analytics tool, Freddy AI Insights also translates operational data into actionable intelligence to support proactive decision-making.
Breaking the Cycle of Complexity
While each of the three capabilities addresses different aspects of the customer service and experience tech sector, the overall trend is clearly to make these tools more user friendly.
With the incredible advances that AI has brought to the customer service and experience sector in recent times, some vendors can sometimes be guilty of being blinded by their own shiny new toys.
It doesn’t matter how impressive a vendor’s new feature is; if it isn’t easily accessible and navigable, agents will offer resistance.
As more and more frontline agents struggle with tool fatigue, vendors must prioritize usability.
