Close to 300 employees work for Freshdesk, and most of our work life is online. This would have been nearly impossible a few years ago, but it’s sort of the norm today for a business like us. We get a lot of our work accomplished from our homes and when we’re on the move—from our phones and our laptops without a hitch.
That’s largely because most of what we’re working on doesn’t reside on anyone’s hard disk—it’s somewhere up there on the cloud, beautifully synced. I don’t remember the last time someone attached a doc to an email and asked me to take a look—we all throw Drive links instead. If this had been 2006, we’d probably have had a dedicated IT department for managing proprietary installations and such, but right now, we just sign up for things that get our jobs done online, and get our colleagues on board, as well.
That’s how tools like Trello, Yesware, and Buffer trickled down to most of us in office.
Here’s a quick list of the tools we use at Freshdesk for everything between managing tasks to talking to customers almost every day:
We eat our own dogfood: Freshdesk
We built Freshdesk to enable businesses of all sizes to deliver exceptional customer support, so it’s only natural we use it ourselves to help our customers. We eat our own dogfood—from emails, calls, chats and tweets—we use Freshdesk to manage all customer communication. But it doesn’t end there—our developers and testers use it internally to track and manage bugs, our marketing team uses it to manage and organize responses from customers for newsletters we send out, and to track Twitter for industry trends.
Chargebee
Chargebee powers billing for Freshdesk users, and we’ve been using it for as long as we can remember.
Google Hangouts
It’s the fastest way to reach co-workers, inside or outside of work hours. We have Gmail pinned to our browsers all day, so we don’t really look beyond Hangouts for reaching someone about anything.
Trello
Trello helps product managers and developers to keep track of ideas and new tasks and work items as they come in, so they can ensure the right deliverables get out the door when they need to. We’ve tried other product management tools, and we really like Trello’s card layout over other apps that try and do the same thing in a very conventional way.
Google+ Private Communities
Yammer is so 2012. We’ve always been using Google Apps at Freshdesk for everything between email, calendar and documents so when Google+ launched private communities for Apps users, it was only natural we started using it as our very own discussion board for ideas, link sharing, internal announcements, planning for team outings and the like.
Buffer
Buffer is the darling of social media tools and we use it to schedule tweets about our blog content, and other interesting finds on the web that cover customer service and related topics. The best part of Buffer is that it integrates really well with a dozen or more apps, and gives us analytics on which of our tweets are generating the most engagement.
Google Analytics
Besides the Freshdesk website, we use Google Analytics to track everything from our blog, traffic to our support portal, independent campaigns, and a lot more. Analytics keeps us on our toes and tells us where we should be investing in terms of content.
GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting helps us deliver demos to potential Freshdesk customers no matter where they are. Leads receive an email with an embedded calendar invite and a link that they can click to begin the demo session. It’s a breeze really—the email has all the instructions laid out clearly on how they can use GoToMeeting’s mobile and tablet apps, and how they can use a dial in case they don’t have immediate access to a computer.
Yesware
When we spend most of our time, day in and day out, pitching Freshdesk tirelessly to executives and support managers across the world, it’s nice to know if our emails are getting the attention we’d like them to get from people who are incredibly busy—Yesware helps us stay on top of that with their exclusive Gmail and Google Apps focus and sends us alerts when our emails are opened and re-read over and over. Couple that with Boomerang running on our inboxes, we have a really powerful analytics+scheduling tool that lives right inside our inboxes.
Google Drive
Some of us in the office virtually live inside Google Drive. Every bit of content that we put out starts out as a little idea in an untitled document somewhere and goes through a crazy number of edits as it morphs from nearly nothing to a web page, blog post or a emailer that gets sent to our customer base—everything happens through Google Drive.
Postman
Our support team finds Postman for Google Chrome indispensable—when someone reports an issue with our official API, we use Postman to test requests right from inside the browser. Postman also keeps track of your history of requests so you can quickly re-test if requests to your API are working, over and over again. You can even bundle API calls together and share them with your support team so they can use it as well.