Freshworks has announced an integration between its IT Service Desk platform Freshservice and Workplace by Facebook.
Workplace is an enterprise collaboration platform that has a growing number of integrations including Servicenow, Jira and Salesforce Quip. As of writing this article the Facebook integrations page indicates that the integration is available soon.
The integration was not develop by Freshworks for purely strategic reasons but for practical ones. The Freshworks team also use Facebook Workplace for collaboration. Employees using Workplace can now create and update tickets by engaging with the Freshservice smart bot. The bot will create a ticket within Freshservice as part of the conversation. Subsequent updates by the Service desk in Freshservice will automatically update the conversation with an update and if the call is resolved the resolution message can be sent when the job incident is closed.
The adoption of a collaboration tool such as Workplace solved an internal problem for Freshworks but will also help those customers who use the tool. It will also simplify the process for many users who previously phoned or completed an online form for the task. What isn’t clear is how complex the instructions to the smart bot is. However, once the service desk team sees the new incident they are able to start a conversation and move toward a resolution.
Prakash Koshy, Director of IT at Freshworks, commented “The key benefit of this integration is the automation offered to users, via the Freshservice bot. The bot automatically captures all issues raised in Workplace without having to open another window and leaving Workplace: this prevents them from going unnoticed and getting buried by other messages. Also, giving users the flexibility of reporting issues during the course of conversations helps increase awareness of the issues at ground zero, so IT agents can proactively investigate and nip issues in the bud. This helps the Freshservice team deliver better experiences to employees. The integration, frees both parties up to be more productive and carry on with their work.”
What does this mean
The integration itself is free but users need to have implemented Freshservice and each business user of Workplace pays $3 per month. For Facebook this is a welcome bit of good news after several weeks of damage limitation. It demonstrates that companies continue to use its software and it will hope that usage widens over times as the current news blows over.
