Supercharging App Development — ResponseTap at Freshhuddle
In September, I was invited to Berlin to attend Freshworks’ Freshhuddle, an event for developers and partners to understand more about app development and integration with their product suite.
I arrived in Berlin on Sunday evening, found a pizza place, and had an early night in preparation for the next two days. As it was my first meeting with the Freshworks team, I had little knowledge of their products and was not sure what to expect.
The event venue was a very cool (and tucked away) place, ‘Old Smithy’s Dizzle’, in the East-side neighbourhood of Freidrichshain. The venue was really unique and had a great environment, complete with plenty of coffee in the cupboard and beers in the fridge.
Day 1
I had the chance to meet the Freshworks team and other developers and we had breakfast together.
The opening presentation began with an overview of the Freshworks suite of products and the events scheduled for the day. There were two tracks: fundamentals and advanced. I took part in the Fundamentals course, which covered the process of building front-end and serverless apps for the Freshworks suite.
For the rest of the day, I had one-to-one tuition with Hemchander from the Freshworks team. He walked me through the basics of the developer environment in Freshworks and then set challenges for me to complete. These challenges involved using all the different features available in the Freshworks Development Kit (FDK).
In one challenge, we built a Freshdesk app to display the complete details of a contact who submitted a support ticket. This helped me understand the lifecycle of an app and how it listens for events in Freshdesk. In another challenge, we pulled/posted data to/from a third-party API, utilizing the Serverless options available in FDK.
In the evening, the whole group gathered at a Thai restaurant, where we enjoyed a few drinks and had a merry meal with equal parts of laughter and spicy broth.
Day 2
The next day, we went through the next phase which was about app building and development.
We had initially explored a couple of ideas on how ResponseTap could provide additional functionality to Freshdesk and Freshcaller, and Velmurugan provided support throughout the day whilst we built two proof-of-concepts (POC).
- For Freshcaller, when an agent answers an inbound phone call, the ResponseTap app presents information from the caller’s online web journey, such as which product they are viewing, when they call, or the contents of their online basket.
- For Freshdesk, when an agent answers an inbound call, any open or recently closed tickets from the caller are displayed. Once the case is resolved, this information is captured by the ResponseTap app to provide an ‘outcome’ of the call data.
Both apps used secure installation parameters and HTTPS requests via the Freshworks proxy server. Given the nature of data that ResponseTap collects, it is important that this data is secure in terms of access and transport. The ResponseTap account’s API details are captured once at installation and are then stored securely in Freshworks. The installation parameters also allow for customization of the app allowing customers to choose important data points.
What’s Next?
We submitted the first version of the Freshcaller app to the Freshworks Marketplace. With the online data from ResponseTap, sales and service agents can use this call Intelligence for insights into every individual’s behaviour and actions.
Overall, I had an amazing experience at the Freshhuddle event. The Freshworks team were exceptionally helpful and I was impressed by the Freshworks products and developer experience. I will be thinking of more ways by which we can integrate and add value to both ResponseTap and Freshworks.
Thanks to the Freshworks team and looking forward to the next FreshHuddle!
