When you are a startup or a small business, the number of employees you have to handle different verticals is limited. But the amount of work is no different – be it handling vendors or customers. There are queries that need to be answered, accounts have to be settled and other intricate details to be handled in every transaction. Providing best-in-class customer support is one of the most important things to retain customer loyalty. But most startups and small businesses do not have enough resources to handle something as important as customer care.
That’s where Freshdesk came in. It made customer support easy to quite an extent, as a platform that helped companies chat with customers and reach them anywhere at all times and help resolve tickets quickly and easily.
Now here is a startup that extend's Freshdesk's functionality, leveraging the Freshdesk platform. What if you could manage calls, texts and queries on Freshdesk directly from your phone’s dialer?
Here’s a situation: a customer or vendor is calling you and even before receiving the call, you can get a gist of every interaction you’ve had with this person earlier. You can log all calls, messages in one window and set reminders for the resolution of the tickets. Every call and text is automatically updated in this window. All information in one place.
This is what Rolodesk does. Founded by Srinath Rajaram and his team, Rolodesk is the second app created by their company Netmine Mobile Innovations. Ever since Netmine launched their first product Rolo a few months ago, Rajaram and his team envisioned making a front-end app that would make it easier for small businesses to handle customer support. Rolo is an app that helps people manage contacts.
And when Rajaram met an old friend from their days at ISB, Rajiv Ramanan - a product manager at Freshdesk, at a Facebook Developers meet, he presented the idea of Rolodesk to him. The idea instantly clicked with Ramaman, and soon a partnership was cemented between Freshdesk and Netmine.
“Simply put, Rolodesk is a dialer front-end for a Freshdesk back-end. You use Rolodesk to make calls and send text messages to your customers and it automatically updates your Freshdesk tickets in the background. With Rolodesk, updating your tickets is not a separate activity. You send an SMS to your customer and it gets automatically logged to your Helpdesk tickets. When you have an already busy SMB owner who handles customer support herself, this can be a huge time-saver,” says Rajaram, CEO, Rolodesk.
Rolodesk has three features that make lives of small businesses easier - the EZ Menu, the Roloscope and the Quick Response.
The EZ Menu slides out from every item in the call log. It lets you add information to a ticket from your call log itself. Quick Response helps you respond to customer messages from the notification itself. This also gets logged to the ticket automatically.
And finally, the Roloscope – which the company says is its most important feature – is a floating bubble that appears on the screen with a customer calls. All you have to do is tap on the bubble to get a complete history of the customer – what the ticket is about and what previous conversations you have had with them.
Rolodesk is currently accessible to all Freshdesk users on the Google Playstore. The app runs on a model similar to that of Netflix. There is a free one week trial period, after which, if the company decides to stay on, there will be a subscription charge of Rs 299 per company per month. And each company can have any number of users under that one account.
The focus for the company is currently on bringing companies on to Rolodesk’s platform. The aim is to garner 500 companies by the end of this year.
And while its current backend association is only with Freshdesk, Rolodesk is eventually looking at extending it to customer relationship managements (CRM) and field service applications. The idea is that when a sales person calls for an opportunity or receives a response or feedback on that, it can all be updated under one window as an opportunity, making lives of salesmen a lot easier.