Cloud-based customer service software provider Freshdesk announced the acquisition of Airwoot ,Marking its fifth acquisition in the past 12 months.
Airwoot uses machine learning to help brands deliver high-speed customer service on social media.It was founded in 2012 by by a team of PhD dropouts lead by Saurabh Arora. The startup raised investment from Kae Capital in 2013.
It will continue to support their existing customers, and function as a standalone product. The Airwoot team will focus on enhancing Freshdesk’s social offering.
“With the social integrations within Freshdesk, we were able to allow businesses to monitor posts that were relevant to them. We focused on building a ticketing system which would help support teams keep track of customer issues reported on social media.
What we soon realized was that most brands found it difficult to set up these filters and rules. Since the social media space is continually evolving, the language on it does too. These filters and rules needed constant manual updates, which was not easy for most teams. Airwoot’s Artificial Intelligence technology has been instrumental in helping brands do this effortlessly. Harnessing the power of machine learning, Airwoot filters out the noise and marketing chatter from your social handles and allows you to respond to customer queries, then and there, ” said the company in its blog.
Airwoot is used by firms such as Snapdeal (Jasper Infotech Pvt. Ltd), Xiaomi Corp., Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd), Grofers , Paytm (One97 Communications Ltd), Jet Airways (India) Ltd, MakeMyTrip and Cleartrip.com.As per Sushant Kumar, Associate Director, Marketing at Snapdeal, Airwoot has enabled Snapdeal to become one of the most responsive brands in India with a response rate of over 98% and a response time of under 2 minutes.
Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO of Freshdesk, stated,
“Delivering customer support via social media continues to be a challenge for many companies given the high volume of noise in the medium. Airwoot’s AI technology provides us a powerful platform to power the social engagement centers of the future.”
The firm also appointed two sales executives, former Cisco veteran Bobby Jaffari as vice-president of sales, North America, and former sales director at AppNexus Arun Mani as managing director, Freshdesk Continental Europe, as it looks to expand its footprint in mid-market enterprises and in Europe.
The company has been successfully integrating start-ups it bought, into its own product portfolio. In February, Freshdesk rolled out a new product, Hotline.io, its third since its launch in 2011. Hotline.io was built on the back of its December acquisition of Konotor, which helps businesses chat with their consumers inside apps.
For Freshdesk, Airwoot’s acquisition comes four months after it acquired Pune-based Framebench, an online collaboration platform that enables teams to share, review and comment on videos, images, presentations and documents.
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