Freshworks Facilitates Fast Telemedicine, Builds Public Sector Engagement Using AWS

Freshworks drove revenue and secured public sector engagements by quickly and reliably scaling to support a large-scale telemedicine initiative using AWS support and services. The company provides software for customer experience and information technology service management to a global user base. And as a participant in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program and using AWS services, such as, Amazon RDS and Amazon SageMaker, Freshworks was able to support its global reach, deliver critical services during the COVID-19 pandemic, and build new collaborations.

Freshworks aims to deliver software for customer and employee engagement that is intuitive, simple to adopt and use, and responsive to business needs. The company is a long-standing customer of AWS. To share its solutions more widely and promote revenue growth, the company participated in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, a co-sell program that helps drive new business and accelerate sales cycles by connecting participating AWS Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and the AWS sales organization.

As an AWS ISV Accelerate Partner, Freshworks collaborated with StepOne, a telemedicine initiative created to support India’s healthcare system during the COVID-19 pandemic. Freshworks used AWS and its managed services to deploy its omnichannel helpdesk, Freshdesk, to deliver a reliable, scalable software solution in the public sector. Now, Freshworks is developing projects across the sector with multiple stakeholders in the Indian state and local governments.

Freshworks launched in 2010 in India and is now headquartered in the United States, serving more than 52,000 customers across 120 countries. Freshworks’ helpdesk, Freshdesk, incorporates artificial intelligence and microservices, and functions as an omnichannel customer experience solution. In addition to providing tools for customer relationship management, Freshworks also offers information technology service management and human resources software. “Our mission is to help companies delight their customers and employees with intuitive, unified, easy-to-use software that helps information technology, customer service, sales, and marketing teams do their jobs,” says Hervé Danzelaud, Global Vice President of Channels and Alliances at Freshworks.

Freshworks' presence has grown in the public sector due to its involvement in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program. One example is through its collaboration with StepOne, a collective of doctors, volunteers, and technology startups working to mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Around March 2020, StepOne reached out to Freshworks to help create a helpline that could screen and monitor COVID-19 patients. The solution needed to deliver scalability, reliability, and facilitate rapid implementation.

Freshworks offered its Freshdesk software as a key piece of the solution and, through its participation in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, worked alongside the AWS team managing the StepOne project. The AWS Public Sector team also played a role in promoting the solution to government stakeholders and helping the teams scale the helpdesk solution. Freshworks began by developing a solution for two states in India, which took 3 days to implement and was later scaled across additional states. Using AWS, Freshworks was able to handle over 7,000 API calls per minute and meet the uptime requirements, which was essential for providing reliable critical services. Freshdesk served as the solution’s backbone, integrating three cloud telephony providers with the common 104 helplines across multiple states. StepOne’s solutions have now been implemented across 21 states and have facilitated more than 8.5 million teleconsultations.

To enter new markets and launch new products, Freshworks uses AWS managed services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS offers Multi-AZ failover, read replicas, and point-in-time recovery features, which help Freshworks deliver highly available, fault-tolerant data stores. Data visualization models predict that Freshdesk can use Amazon RDS to scale to over five million database reads per minute, giving the headroom that Freshworks needs to serve its over 52,000 customers across the globe. Another crucial service that Freshworks uses for the StepOne solution is Application Load Balancer, which provides advanced request routing targeted at delivery of modern application architectures. Using Application Load Balancer helps Freshworks scale flexibly and handle large numbers of queries while maintaining service availability to users of StepOne, including 25,000 doctors and volunteers.

For its StepOne solution, Freshworks also uses Amazon SageMaker, which helps data scientists and developers prepare, build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly by bringing together a broad set of capabilities purposely built for machine learning. Freshworks created hundreds of groups of assignments, based on state, language, and complexity. Using Amazon SageMaker helped Freshworks build data models to automate telemedicine ticket assignment and support multiple languages.

By demonstrating success and sharing information about its efforts in the public sector, Freshworks also gained new joint public sector relationships and prospective partnerships with state governments. Freshworks is now working with other customers and creating a technology-driven approach to spread awareness about the COVID-19 pandemic and alleviate pressure on healthcare workers.

Freshworks plans to continue building on its work in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program.