Amazon Web Services Inc.’s customer obsession fits like a glove for companies looking to deliver solutions that significantly impact end users. Freshworks Inc., an Indian company that sells business software tools, counts on AWS to scale its service and better serve its customers.

“The big focus that we have always had is to deliver the right experiences that really impact end users for those particular functional use cases around marketing, sales, support and customer success,” said Tejas Bhandarkar (pictured, left), head of product at Freshworks. “The synergy that we’ve found between us and AWS is that we’re able to rely on all of the right things for AWS to deliver upon.”

Founded back in 2010, Freshworks expanded fast and has now more than 150,000 customers worldwide, including the U.K.’s National Health Service, Honda Motor Co. Ltd. and Cisco Systems Inc. The company, which had already achieved unicorn status, announced in November its biggest funding to date and is now valued at $3.5 billion.

Bhandarkar and Bratin Saha (pictured, right), vice president and general manager at AWS, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. They discussed Freshworks’s partnership with AWS, its development, and its market approach. (* Disclosure below.)

Machine learning to create functional use cases

Focusing on extremely cost-effective solutions and continuous innovation are features of AWS that also drive Freshworks, according to Bhandarkar.

“Customer obsession is our key leadership principle, and everything we do at AWS is really working back from the customer and making sure that we are really addressing all of the pinpoints and making them successful,” Saha added.

Freshworks was born in the AWS cloud as a customer support application and has grown to now offer a set of customer-engagement applications. The company’s partnership with AWS intensified further in 2017, when Amazon launched cloud machine-learning platform SageMaker, which enables developers to create, train and deploy machine-learning models in the cloud.

“Freshworks saw that they could reduce that time to getting the models out by order of magnitude,” Saha stated. “Because of the productivity performance and cost benefits that SageMaker provides … many other customers move over to AWS for the machine learning.”

Freshworks applications are built around functional use cases that require machine-learning assistance and then scale across the entire customer set.

“We have now thousands and thousands of these ML models that we have built geared to addressing specific pinpoints of that particular customer,” Bhandarkar highlighted. “And then it’s not only just about building it; it’s also about maintaining it over time, making sure that it stays relevant and fresh and so on.”

Freshworks helps companies monitor and use information related to its customers’ journeys on their websites, for example. It collects customer experience data within a company, learns from it, and makes it visible to the salesperson or technical support that is actually working with that customer.

“They can actually see the journey of that customer that visited the pricing page a couple of times and maybe is interested to make a purchase,” Bhandarkar explained. “Or they visited the cancellation policy page, and maybe you need to do something about that.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE