Requiring customer service teams to juggle multiple channels, products and technology has made a once simple idea — delivering a great customer experience — inevitably more complex. With the advent of artificial intelligence, AI in customer support carries the promise of streamlining the use of multiple applications and knowledge bases, while helping to meet increasingly personalized expectations. 

However, for AI for customer support to be successful, organizations must overcome the inertia and blind acceptance of things as they are and acknowledge that they have a complexity problem in the first place, according to Mika Yamamoto (pictured), chief customer and marketing officer of Freshworks Inc.

“Inertia is a massive force and acceptance is a massive force. I think a lot of us in industry have accepted the fact and think, ‘Well, this is just normal that we should have to operate this way,’” she told theCUBE. “First is recognizing that you don’t, right? Recognize that there is a problem and there is actually a way out.”

Yamamoto spoke with theCUBE’s Bob Laliberte at the Refresh North America 2025 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed recent moves from Freshworks to cut complexity in the workplace, as well as the significant results Yamamoto has achieved by applying their AI tools in customer support tools internally. (* Disclosure below.) 

Uncomplicating the complicated: The real goal of AI in customer support

According to a recent Freshworks survey, complexity comes with some very specific costs in wasted software spend, missed growth opportunities and high employee turnover, Yamamoto explained. Even more pressing in that same survey was the suggestion that 60% of employees in the customer service field considering quitting.

“They’re having to use and go through way too many steps to get things done,” Yamamoto said. “They’ve got to go into one system to find out what a customer has said in email, and then a different system to go in to see … what they may have said in chat. Then they’ve got to take and cut and paste sometimes all of that information to figure out the whole picture of the customer, to be able to really address the customer’s need. Meanwhile, the customer’s like, ‘Hello, I’m sitting here with the issue. You’re one company. Can you not have one picture of what my challenge is, so you can help solve this?’”

Yamamoto serves as a Freshworks’ “customer zero,” running the company’s own support organization on Freshdesk with Freddy AI Copilot and Freddy AI agents. By applying these AI capabilities in customer support internally, her team has achieved a 45% deflection in level-one tickets and cut agent ramp time in half, from six months to three, Yamamoto explained. Those wins free up budget to upskill employees and give her a concrete, data-backed story to share with customers about how simplifying with Freshworks can turn support into a growth engine.

“What we want people to take away, including our partners, is that this doesn’t need to be the case,” Yamamoto explained. “Uncomplicating is possible. There’s simplicity and joy in simplicity — and there are real results in simplicity, too.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Refresh North America 2025 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Refresh North America 2025 event. Neither Freshworks, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE