Freshworks launches a load balancer for handling customer inquiries

Customer engagement service Freshworks, which was valued at about $1.5 billion in its last funding round, today launched Omniroute, the latest product in its portfolio of tools for customer service agents.

Omniroute is essentially a load-balancer for routing multi-channel customer inquiries. Freshworks argues that earlier customer support solutions made it hard for agents to switch between inquiry types and for managers to efficiently route traffic.

“Modern consumers are able to reach out to brands across multiple channels and devices, and simply put, customer service teams are under siege,” Freshworks CEO and co-founder Girish Mathrubootham explained.

The promise of Omniroute is that it can automatically route a query to the right agent who has the bandwidth to handle it, based on what it knows about that agent’s skills and the nature of the inquiry. And if you regularly want to hang up your phone when an agent asks you for your order number right after you typed it into the system, then you’ll be happy to hear that the Omniroute will surface this information right on the agent’s screen.

Omnichannel is one of the biggest buzzwords in the marketing world, of course, but there can be little doubt that customers do expect to be able to reach a company across multiple channels, be that an online chat, phone call, text message or a Twitter DM (or, for those who still go outside, a sales agent in a store). Companies want to give customers a consistent experience across those channels, but they don’t always have the tools to do so.

It’s worth noting that Zendesk recently acquired Base, a CRM solution for salespeople that puts it into direct competition with Freshwork’s sales tools. Unsurprisingly, the Freshwork team is not overly impressed. “What Zendesk has done with Base CRM is too little too late,” Freshwork CMO David Thompson said. “You need your Sales CRM and Support CRM to integrate out of the box in order for customers to get the benefit. Bolt-on acquisitions don’t accomplish that seamless flow of data between marketing, sales and support.”