1-grid Enhances Customer Service Experience with Freshdesk and Freshchat

1-grid is a South African based web hosting company that specializes in providing online tools required for a small business to succeed. It was first founded in 1997. Since its origins as a web hosting platform, 1-grid has expanded its services to include end-to-end online solutions such as website building, website hosting, website development and a business email solution. With 35,000 customers and counting, 1-grid is at the forefront of delivering reliable and secure web solutions to SMEs. The company is planning to expand to Nigeria and Namibia.

1-grid, a South African web hosting company, was facing challenges with its existing helpdesk software, Kayako. As the company expanded, the limitations of their software became more apparent. Incoming customer queries were grouped into a single queue and were not directly assigned to agents. This resulted in bottlenecks and affected customer response times. At its peak, 1-grid was receiving about 12,000 customer queries each month. These queries would come in through the website and remain in a single queue. The existing software did not offer any segmentation or automatic routing features, so managers would have to manually sift through the queries and assign the most appropriate agents for each. 1-grid needed a new platform that would help their team manage incoming queries in a faster and more efficient way.

After a careful review of their requirements, 1-grid selected Freshworks. They quickly onboarded all customer support agents to Freshdesk and Freshchat. The simple interface of both products made the transition smooth and quick. Freshdesk and Freshchat worked in tandem to deliver a unified experience to 1-grid’s customers. When an agent is responding to a customer query on Freshchat, the query automatically gets stored as a ticket on Freshdesk. In the future, if the customer has further issues or has any updates on the current query, the ticket will get reopened on Freshdesk. This system provides all agents with a comprehensive view of each customer’s history, which improves their ability to deliver superior, personalized support. 1-grid also leveraged automation tools for quicker response times. Freshdesk identifies the most relevant agent to route the ticket to based on specific keywords in the query. This feature has resulted in significant time-saving for managers.

• Through the seamless interface and advanced features of Freshdesk and Freshchat, 1-grid has noticed major improvements in three key areas: volume of incoming queries, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. The company has also integrated WhatsApp chat support, which is already receiving around 50 chat queries per day without any marketing. The company plans to expand its self-service capabilities to reduce agent workload. They are in the process of expanding their Knowledge Base so that customers can refer to self-help articles to find solutions for common concerns. They are also implementing new tools in the customer portal that will help customers carry out more tasks - such as enabling or disabling domain renewal - by themselves.

• 40% decrease in queries: Before Freshworks, 1-grid averaged around 12,000 customer queries each month. Since recurrent queries are now resolved automatically, the total monthly queries has dropped to 7,000.

• 81% CSAT score: Customer satisfaction has increased from 60% to 80% due in large part to the faster resolution times made possible by Freshchat.

• Response time improvement: One of 1-grid’s main objectives was to improve resolution times for their customers. Through the combination of Freshdesk and Freshchat, they have managed to improve response time by 80%.